POLITICAL ESSAYS, WITH SKETCHES OF PUBLIC CHARACTERS (continued 3)

PRINCE MAURICE’S PARROT

Or, French Instructions to a British Plenipotentiary

Sept. 18, 1814.

1. That the French people were so deeply implicated in the Slave trade, as not even to know that it had been abolished by this country.

2. That the French press had been so long under the complete despotic control of Bonaparte, that the present government must despair of making any immediate impression on the independence of the political opinions, or the energetic firmness of the individual feelings of the people, lately consigned to their protection.

3. That such were their blind and rooted prejudices against the English, that we could only hope to convince them of our entire sincerity and disinterestedness in abolishing the Slave Trade ourselves, by lending a helping hand to its revival by others.

4. That if we consented to give up our colonial conquests to the French, on conditions dictated only by the general principles of humanity, this would be a proof that we intended to keep them in our hands from the most base and mercenary motives.

5. That the French government simply wished to begin the Slave Trade again as the easiest way of leaving it off, that so they might combine the experiment of its gradual restoration with that of its gradual abolition, and, by giving the people an interest in it, more effectually wean their affections from it.

6. That it is highly honourable in us to have proposed, and in the French to have agreed to, the abolition of the Slave Trade, at the end of five years, though it would have been insulting in us to have proposed, and degrading in them to have submitted to, any stipulation on the subject.

7. That to rob and murder on the coast of Africa is among the internal rights of legislation and domestic privileges of every European and Christian state.

8. That we are not to teach the French people religion and morality at the point of the sword, though this is what we have been professing to teach them for the last two and twenty years.

9. That his most Christian Majesty Louis XVIII. is so fully 102impressed with the humane and benevolent sentiments of Great Britain and the allies in favour of the abolition of the Slave Trade, that he was ready to have plunged all Europe into a war for its continuance.

10. That we could not possibly make the abolition, (though the French government would certainly have made the revival) of the Slave Trade a sine qua non in the treaty of peace, and that they would otherwise have gone to war to recover by force of arms what they can only owe to the credulity or complaisance of our negociators.

Lastly. That by consenting to the re-establishment of the Slave Trade in France, we were most effectually preparing the way for its abolition all over the world.

‘With so little a web as this will I ensnare so great a fly as Cassio!’—Such were the formidable barriers, the intricate lines of circumvallation, drawn by the French round the abolition of the Slave Trade, as strong as those which they threw up to defend their capital: yet we think, that after our political missionary had overleaped the one, he might have broken through the other. Where there is a will, there is a way. But there are some minds to which every flimsy pretext presents an insurmountable obstacle, where only the interests of justice and humanity are at stake. These persons are always impotent to save—powerful only to oppress and to betray. Their torpid faculties and amiable apathy are never roused but by the calculations of self-interest, or the thirst of revenge. The glossy sleekness of the panther’s skin does not blunt the sharpness of his fangs, and his fawning eye dooms his victim while it glitters. But to come to Lord Castlereagh. In the present instance, he appears to have been cajoled into acquiescence from his well-known indifference to the object. His speech contained nothing but a story of a cock and a bull, told by M. Talleyrand with great grace and gravity, assented to by his Lordship with equal affability and address, and repeated to the House of Commons with hesitating volubility and plausible negligence of manner. It is well to sacrifice to the graces; but it is too much to have sacrificed a whole continent to the graces of M. Talleyrand’s person, or the purity of his French accent. We can imagine how the scene took place. This question of Africa, being considered as an idle question, in which neither courts nor ministers were concerned, would be naturally left as a sort of carte-blanche for all the flourishes of national politesse, as a kind of no man’s ground for a trial of diplomatic skill and complaisance. So Lord Castlereagh, drawing on his gloves, hemmed once or twice, while the French minister carelessly took snuff: he then introduced the 103question with a smile, which was answered by a more gracious smile from M. Talleyrand: his Lordship then bowed, as if to bespeak attention; but the Prince of Benevento bowing still lower, prevented what he had to say; and the cries of Africa were lost amidst the nods and smile and shrugs of these demi-puppets. The Ex-bishop of Autun may in future hope to find a successful representative in the English Ambassador from Paris; for the noble secretary mistified the house, as he had himself been mistified by his highness of Benevento.—Count Fathom, after his defeat by the French abbé, practised in this his adopted country with great applause! We may take this opportunity of remarking, that we do not think his Lordship at all improved during his stay in France. He performs the arc of his oscillation from the treasury bench to the table, and from the table back again, in a second less time than he used to do. He commits dulness with greater vivacity, and flounders more briskly in an argument. He has enhanced the loose dangling slip-shod manner which so well accords with his person and understanding, into something positive and dogmatical; and is even grown tenacious of the immaculateness of his maiden treaty, which he will not have so much as suspected: In this alteration of tone we think him wrong. We have always looked upon Lord Castlereagh as an excellent taffeta lining to a court dress; but he should leave the buckram of office to his friend the secretary of the Admiralty.

WHETHER THE FRIENDS OF FREEDOM CAN ENTERTAIN ANY SANGUINE HOPES OF THE FAVOURABLE RESULTS OF THE ENSUING CONGRESS?

Oct. 23, 1814.

An excellent article appeared in the Examiner of last week, giving a general outline of the views and principles which ought to actuate the allied powers at the approaching Congress, and of the leading arrangements with respect to the different subjects to be brought under consideration, which ought to follow from those principles. Cordially as we agree with this respectable writer in the several points which he has stated, we are, we confess, far from feeling any strong assurances that even any one of these points will be amicably adjusted. They are briefly these:—1. That Poland should be restored to her independence. 2. That the other powers of Europe should no longer co-operate with Sweden in the subjugation of 104Norway. 3. That the Slave Trade should be immediately and generally abolished. 4. That Saxony should not share a fate similar to that of Poland. 5. That Austria should relinquish her views of unjust aggrandisement in Italy. 6. and last, That some concessions should probably be made by England as to her exclusive claims to maritime supremacy, as far as those claims are found to be rather galling to the feelings of other nations, than essential to her own security. All of the objects here recommended are, we should imagine, every way practicable as well as desirable, if there were any thing like a hearty good-will to avail themselves of the present favourable situation of the world in those who have the power to decide its fate. Armed with sovereign authority, seconded by public opinion, with every obstacle removed from their dread of the overwhelming power of France, they have all the means at their disposal to rear a splendid, lofty, and lasting monument to justice, liberty, and humanity. Are the views then of the allied sovereigns solely directed to these objects? That is the simple question; and we are afraid it would be great presumption to answer it in the affirmative. It would be supposing that the late events have purified the hearts of princes and nations; that they have been taught wisdom by experience, and the love of justice from the sense of injury; that mutual confidence and good-will have succeeded to narrow prejudices and rankling jealousy; that the race of ambitious and unprincipled monarchs, of crafty politicians, and self-interested speculators is at an end; that the destructive rivalry between states has given way to liberal and enlightened views of general safety and advantage; and that the powers of Europe will in future unite with the same zeal and magnanimity for the common good, as when they were bound in a common cause against the common enemy. All this appears to us quite as Utopian as any other scheme which supposes that the human mind can change. Happy should we be, if instead of those magnificent and beneficial projects in which some persons seem still to indulge their imaginations as the results of this meeting, the whole should not turn out to be no better than a compromise of petty interests, of shallow policy, and flagrant injustice.

We forbore for a long time from saying any thing on this ungrateful subject: but our forbearance has not hitherto, at least, been rewarded. We shall therefore speak out plainly on the subject; as we should be sorry to be thought accomplices in a delusion, which can only end in disappointment. The professions of justice, moderation, and the love of liberty, made by the powers of Europe at the end of the last, and at the beginning of the present year, were certainly admirable: they were called for at the time, and were possibly sincere. But we are all of us apt to forego those good resolutions which are extorted 105from us by circumstances rather than from reason or habit, and to recant ‘vows made in pain as violent and void.’ Without meaning any indirect allusion to the person into whose mouth these words are put, we believe this, that princes are princes, and that men are men; and that to expect any great sacrifices of interest or passion from either in consequence of certain well-timed and well-sounding professions, drawn from them by necessity, when that necessity no longer exists, is to belie all our experience of human nature. We remember what modern courts and ministers were before the dreaded power of Bonaparte arose; and we conceive this to be the best and only ground to argue what they will be, now that that power has ceased. ‘Why so, being gone, they are themselves again.’ It appears to us, that some very romantic and extravagant expectations were entertained from the destruction of the tyranny of Bonaparte. It is true, his violence and ambition for a while suspended all other projects of the same kind. ‘The right divine of kings to govern wrong’ was wrested from the puny hands of its legitimate possessors, and strangely monopolized by one man. The regular professors of the regal art were set aside by the superior skill and prowess of an adventurer. They became in turn the tools, or the victims of the machinations of the maker and puller-down of kings. Instead of their customary employment of annoying their neighbours, or harassing their subjects, they had enough to do to defend their territories and their titles. The aggressions which they had securely meditated against the independence of nations, and their haughty contempt for the liberties of mankind, were retorted on their own heads. The poisoned chalice was returned to their own lips. They then first felt the sting of injustice, and the bitterness of scorn. They saw how weak and little they were in themselves. They were roused from the still life of courts, and forced to assume the rank of men. They appealed to their people to defend their thrones; they called on them to rally round the altar of their country; they invoked the name of liberty, and in that name they conquered. Plans of national aggrandisement or private revenge were forgotten in the intoxication of triumph, as they had been in the agony of despair. This sudden usurpation had so overpowered the imaginations of men, that they began to consider it as the only evil that had ever existed in the world, and that with it, all tyranny and ambition would cease. War was talked of as if it had been an invention of the modern Charlemagne, and the Golden age was to be restored with the Bourbons. But it is hard for the great and mighty to learn in the school of adversity: emperors and kings bow reluctantly to the yoke of necessity. When the panic is over, they will be glad to drink of the cup of oblivion. The false 106idols which had been set up to Liberty and Nature, to Genius and Fortune, are thrown down, and they have once more ‘all power given them upon earth.’ How they are likely to use it, whether for the benefit and happiness of mankind, or to gratify their own prejudices and passions, we have, in one or two instances, seen already. No one will in future look for ‘the milk of human kindness’ in the Crown Prince of Sweden, who is a monarch of the new school; nor for examples of romantic generosity and gratitude in Ferdinand of Spain, who is one of the old. A jackal or baboon, dandled in the paws of a royal Bengal tiger, may not be very formidable; but it would be idle to suppose, if they should providentially escape, that they would become tame, useful, domestic animals.

The King of Prussia has recovered the sword of the Great Frederick, his humane, religious, moral, and unambitious predecessor, only, as it appears, to unsheath it against the King of Saxony, his old companion in arms. The Emperor of Austria seems eager to catch at the iron crown of Italy, which has just fallen from the brows of his son-in-law. The King of France, our King of France, Louis the Desired, and who by the ‘all hail hereafter,’ is to receive the addition of Louis the Wise, has improved his reflections during a twenty years’ exile, into a humane and amiable sanction of the renewal of the Slave Trade for five years only. His Holiness the Pope, happy to have escaped from the clutches of the arch-tyrant and impostor, employs his leisure hours in restoring the order of the Jesuits, and persecuting the Freemasons. Ferdinand, the grateful and the enlightened, who has passed through the same discipline of humanity with the same effect, shuts up the doors of the Cortes, (as it is scandalously asserted, at the instigation of Lord Wellington), and throws open those of the Inquisition. At all this, the romantic admirers of patriot kings, who fondly imagined that the hatred of the oppressor was the same thing as the hatred of oppression, (among these we presume we may reckon the poet-laureat,) hang their heads, and live in hope of better times. To us it is all natural, and in order. From this grand gaol-delivery of princes and potentates, we could expect nothing else than a recurrence to their old habits and favourite principles. These observations have not been hastily or gratuitously obtruded: they have been provoked by a succession of disgusting and profligate acts of inconsistency and treachery, unredeemed by a single effort of heroic virtue or generous enthusiasm. Almost every principle, almost every profession, almost every obligation, has been broken. If any proof is wanting, look at Norway, look at Italy, look at Spain, look at the Inquisition, look at the Slave Trade. The mask of liberty has been taken off by most of the principal 107performers; the whining cant of humanity is no longer heard in The Courier and The Times. What then remains for us to build a hope upon, but the Whig principles of the Prince Regent, inherited from his ancestors, and the good nature of the Emperor of Russia, the merit of which is entirely his own? Of the former of these personages, our opinion is so well known, that we need not repeat it here. Again, of the good intentions of the last-mentioned sovereign, we declare that we have as full a persuasion. We believe him to be docile to instruction, inquisitive after knowledge, and inclined to good. But it has been said by those who have better means of information than ourselves, that he is too open to the suggestions of those about him; that, like other learners, he thinks the newest opinion the best, and that his real good-nature and want of duplicity render him not sufficiently proof against the selfish or sinister designs of others. He has certainly a character for disinterestedness and magnanimity to support in history: but history is a glass in which few minds fashion themselves. If in his late conduct there was any additional impulse given to the natural simplicity of his character, it probably arose from an obvious desire to furnish a contrast to the character of Bonaparte, and also to redeem the Russian character, hitherto almost another name for barbarity and ferociousness, in the eyes of civilized Europe. In this point of view, we should not despair that something may be attempted, at least with respect to Poland, by the present autocrat of all the Russias, to blot out certain stains on the reputation of his grand-mother, the Empress Catherine.

With regard to Norway, the only hope of the suspension of its fate seems to arise out of a very natural, if not laudable jealousy and distaste, which have been conceived by some of the old-standing sovereigns of Europe against the latest occupier and most forward pretender to thrones. An adventurer who has made a fortune by gaining a prize in the lottery, or by laying qui tam informations against his accomplices, cannot expect to be admitted, on an equality, into the company of persons of regular character and family estates. The Emperor of Austria, in particular, may have additional motives of dislike to Bernadotte, connected with late events; and we agree with the Examiner, that he may, in the end, ‘have to regret the length to which he was hurried against a man, who was the key-stone of all the new power which had been built on the ruin of thrones.’

As to any immediate adjustment of the maritime rights of this country, on general principles, satisfactory to all parties, we see no reason to expect it. We think the following paragraph justifies us in this opinion. ‘We are told,’ says the Morning Chronicle, ‘that on the day when the capture of the city of Washington, and the demolition 108of its public buildings reached Paris, the Duke of Wellington had a ball: not one public ambassador of the potentates of Europe, our good allies, presented himself to congratulate his grace on the event.’ We here see, on one side, the most absurd expectations of disinterested sympathy with our national feelings, and as little disposition to enter into them on the other. It is strange that the above paragraph should have found its way into a paper which makes an almost exclusive profession of liberal and comprehensive views.

Nor can we indulge in any serious expectations of ‘the immediate and general abolition of the Slave Trade.’ Africa has little to hope from ‘the prevailing gentle arts’ of Lord Castlereagh. However sturdy he may be in asserting our maritime rights, he will, we imagine, go to sleep over those of humanity, and waking from his doux sommeil, find that the dexterous prince of political jugglers has picked his pocket of his African petitions, if, indeed, he chuses to carry the credentials of his own disgrace about with him. There are two obstacles to the success of this measure. In the first place, France has received such forcible lessons from this country on the old virtues of patriotism and loyalty, that she must feel particularly unwilling to be dictated to on the new doctrines of liberality and humanity. Secondly, the abolition of the Slave Trade, on our part, was itself the act of Mr. Fox’s administration—an administration which we should suppose there is no very strong inclination to relieve from any part of the contempt or obloquy which it has been the fashion to pour upon it, by extending the benefit of its measures, or recommending the adoption of its principles.

There is another point, on which, though our doubts are by no means strong or lasting, we do not at all times feel the same absolute confidence—the continuance of the present order of things in France. The principles adhered to in the determination of some of the preceding arrangements, and the permanent views which shall appear to actuate the other powers of Europe, may have no inconsiderable influence on this great question. Whatever tends to allay the ferment in men’s minds, and to take away just causes of recrimination and complaint, must, of course, lessen the pretexts for change. We should not, however, be more disposed to augur such a change from the remaining attachment of individuals, or of the army, to Bonaparte, than from the general versatility and restlessness of the French character, and their total want of settled opinion, which might oppose a check to military enthusiasm. Even their present unqualified zeal, in the cause of the Bourbons, is ominous. How long this sudden fit of gratitude, for deliverance from evils certainly brought upon them by their slowness to admit the 109remedy, may continue, it is impossible to say. A want of keeping is the distinguishing quality of the French character. A people of this sort cannot be depended on for a moment. They are blown about like a weathercock, with every breath of caprice or accident, and would cry vive l’empereur to-morrow, with as much vivacity and as little feeling, as they do vive le roi to-day. They have no fixed principle of action. They are alike indifferent to every thing: their self-complacency supplies the place of all other advantages—of virtue, liberty, honour, and even of outward appearances. They are the only people who are vain of being cuckolded and being conquered.—A people who, after trampling over the face of Europe so long, fell down before their assailants without striking a blow, and who boast of their submission as a fine thing, are not a nation of men, but of women. The spirit of liberty, at the Revolution, gave them an impulse common to humanity; the genius of Bonaparte gave them the spirit of military ambition. Both of these gave an energy and consistency to their character, by concentrating their natural volatility on one great object. But when both of these causes failed, the Allies found that France consisted of nothing but ladies’ toilettes. The army are the muscular part of the state; mere patriotism is a pasteboard visor, which opposes no resistance to the sword. Whatever they determine will be done; an effeminate public is a non-entity. They will not relish the Bourbons long, if they remain at peace; and if they go to war, they will want a monarch who is also a general.

The Lay of the Laureate, Carmen Nuptiale, by Robert Southey, Esq., Poet-Laureate, Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and of the Royal Spanish Academy of History.—London, Longmans, 1816.

Examiner, July 7, 1816.

The dog which his friend Launce brought as a present to Madam Silvia in lieu of a lap-dog, was something like ‘The Lay of the Laureate,’ which Mr. Southey has here offered to the Princess Charlotte for a Nuptial Song. It is ‘a very currish performance, and deserves none but currish thanks.’ Launce thought his own dog, Crab, better than any other; and Mr. Southey thinks his own praises the fittest compliment for a lady’s ear. His Lay is ten times as long, and he thinks it is therefore ten times better than an Ode of Mr. Pye’s.

Mr. Southey in this poem takes a tone which was never heard 110before in a drawing-room. It is the first time that ever a Reformist was made a Poet-laureate. Mr. Croker was wrong in introducing his old friend, the author of ‘Joan of Arc,’ at Carlton-House. He might have known how it would be. If we had doubted the good old adage before, ‘Once a Jacobin and always a Jacobin,’ since reading ‘The Lay of the Laureate,’ we are sure of it. A Jacobin is one who would have his single opinion govern the world, and overturn every thing in it. Such a one is Mr. Southey. Whether he is a Republican or a Royalist,—whether he hurls up the red cap of liberty, or wears the lily, stained with the blood of all his old acquaintance, at his breast,—whether he glories in Robespierre or the Duke of Wellington—whether he pays a visit to Old Sarum, or makes a pilgrimage to Waterloo,—whether he is praised by The Courier, or parodied by Mr. Canning,—whether he thinks a King the best or the worst man in his dominions,—whether he is a Theophilanthropist or a Methodist of the church of England,—whether he is a friend of Universal Suffrage and Catholic Emancipation, or a Quarterly Reviewer,—whether he insists on an equal division of lands, or of knowledge,—whether he is for converting infidels to Christianity, or Christians to infidelity,—whether he is for pulling down the kings of the East or those of the West,—whether he sharply sets his face against all establishments, or maintains that whatever is, is right,—whether he prefers what is old to what is new, or what is new to what is old,—whether he believes that all human evil is remediable by human means, or makes it out to himself that a Reformer is worse than a housebreaker,—whether he is in the right or the wrong, poet or prose-writer, courtier or patriot,—he is still the same pragmatical person—every sentiment or feeling that he has is nothing but the effervescence of incorrigible overweening self-opinion. He not only thinks whatever opinion he may hold for the time infallible, but that no other is even to be tolerated, and that none but knaves and fools can differ with him. ‘The friendship of the good and wise is his.’ If any one is so unfortunate as to hold the same opinions that he himself formerly did, this but aggravates the offence by irritating the jealousy of his self-love, and he vents upon them a double portion of his spleen. Such is the constitutional slenderness of his understanding, its ‘glassy essence,’ that the slightest collision of sentiment gives an irrecoverable shock to him. He regards a Catholic or a Presbyterian, a Deist or an Atheist, with equal repugnance, and makes no difference between the Pope, the Turk, and the Devil. He thinks a rival poet a bad man, and would suspect the principles, moral, political, and religious, of any one who did not spell the 111word laureate with an e at the end of it.—If Mr. Southey were a bigot, it would be well; but he has only the intolerance of bigotry. His violence is not the effect of attachment to any principles, prejudices, or paradoxes of his own, but of antipathy to those of others. It is an impatience of contradiction, an unwillingness to share his opinions with others, a captious monopoly of wisdom, candour, and common sense. He is not an enthusiast in religion, but he is an enemy to philosophers; he does not respect old establishments, but he hates new ones; he has no objection to regicides, but he is inexorable against usurpers; he will tell you that ‘the re-risen cause of evil’ in France yielded to ‘the Red Cross and Britain’s arm of might,’ and shortly after he denounces this Red Cross as the scarlet whore of Babylon, and warns Britain against her eternal malice and poisoned cup; he calls on the Princess Charlotte in the name of the souls of ten thousand little children, who are without knowledge in this age of light, ‘Save or we perish,’ and yet sooner than they should be saved by Joseph Fox or Joseph Lancaster, he would see them damned; he would go himself into Egypt and pull down ‘the barbarous kings’ of the East, and yet his having gone there on this very errand is not among the least of Bonaparte’s crimes; he would ‘abate the malice’ of the Pope and the Inquisition, and yet he cannot contain the fulness of his satisfaction at the fall of the only person who had both the will and the power to do this. Mr. Southey began with a decent hatred of kings and priests, but it yielded to his greater hatred of the man who trampled them in the dust. He does not feel much affection to those who are born to thrones, but that any one should gain a throne as he has gained the laureate-wreath, by superior merit alone, was the unpardonable sin against Mr. Southey’s levelling Muse!

The poetry of the Lay is beneath criticism; it has all sorts of obvious common-place defects, without any beauties either obvious or recondite. It is the Namby-Pamby of the Tabernacle; a Methodist sermon turned into doggrel verse. It is a gossipping confession of Mr. Southey’s political faith—the ‘Practice of Piety’ or the ‘Whole Duty of Man’ mixed up with the discordant slang of the metaphysical poets of the nineteenth century. Not only do his sentiments every where betray the old Jacobinical leaven, the same unimpaired desperate unprincipled spirit of partisanship, regardless of time, place, and circumstance, and of every thing but its own headstrong will; there is a gipsey jargon in the expression of his sentiments which is equally indecorous. Does our Laureate think it according to court-etiquette that he should be as old-fashioned in his language as in the cut of his clothes?—On the present occasion, when one might expect a truce 112with impertinence, he addresses the Princess neither with the fancy of the poet, the courtier’s grace, nor the manners of a gentleman, but with the air of an inquisitor or father-confessor. Geo. Fox, the Quaker, did not wag his tongue more saucily against the Lord’s Anointed in the person of Charles II., than our Laureate here assures the daughter of his Prince, that so shall she prosper in this world and the next, as she minds what he says to her. Would it be believed (yet so it is) that, in the excess of his unauthorized zeal, Mr. Southey in one place advises the Princess conditionally to rebel against her father? Here is the passage. The Angel of the English church thus addresses the Royal Bride:-

‘Bear thou that great Eliza in thy mind,

Who from a wreck this fabric edified;

And Her who to a nation’s voice resigned,

When Rome in hope its wiliest engines plied,

By her own heart and righteous Heaven approved,

Stood up against the Father whom she loved.’

This is going a good way. Is it meant, that if the Prince Regent, ‘to a nation’s voice resigned,’ should grant Catholic Emancipation in defiance of the ‘Quarterly Review,’ Mr. Southey would encourage the Princess in standing up against her father, in imitation of the pious and patriotic daughter of James II.?

This quaint effusion of poetical fanaticism is divided into four parts, the Proem, the Dream, the Epilogue, and L’Envoy. The Proem opens thus:—

‘There was a time when all my youthful thought

Was of the Muse; and of the Poet’s fame,

How fair it flourisheth and fadeth not, ...

Alone enduring, when the Monarch’s name

Is but an empty sound, the Conqueror’s bust

Moulders and is forgotten in the dust.’

This may be very true, but not so proper to be spoken in this place. Mr. Southey may think himself a greater man than the Prince Regent, but he need not go to Carlton-House to tell him so. He endeavours to prove that the Prince Regent and the Duke of Wellington (put together) are greater than Bonaparte, but then he is by his own rule greater than all three of them. We have here perhaps the true secret of Mr. Southey’s excessive anger at the late Usurper. If all his youthful thought was of his own inborn superiority to conquerors or kings, we can conceive that Bonaparte’s fame must have appeared a very great injustice done to his pretensions; it is not impossible that the uneasiness with which he formerly heard the names of Marengo, of Austerlitz, of Jena, of Wagram, of Friedland, and of 113Borodino, may account for the industrious self-complacency with which he harps upon those of Busaco, Vimiera, Salamanca, Vittoria, Thoulouse, and Waterloo; and that the Iron Crown of Italy must have pressed upon his (Mr. Southey’s) brows, with a weight most happily relieved by the light laureate-wreath! We are justified in supposing Mr. Southey capable of envying others, for he supposes others capable of envying him. Thus he sings of himself and his office:—

‘Yea in this now, while malice frets her hour,

Is foretaste given me of that meed divine;

Here undisturbed in this sequestered bower,

The friendship of the good and wise is mine;

And that green wreath which decks the Bard when dead,

That laureate garland crowns my living head.

That wreath which in Eliza’s golden days

My master dear, divinest Spenser, wore,

That which rewarded Drayton’s learned lays,

Which thoughtful Ben and gentle Daniel^[17] bore ...

Grin, Envy, through thy ragged mask of scorn!

In honour it was given, with honour it is worn!’

Now we do assure Mr. Southey, that we do not envy him this honour. Many people laugh at him, some may blush for him, but nobody envies him. As to Spenser, whom he puts in the list of great men who have preceded him in his office, his laureateship has been bestowed on him by Mr. Southey; it did not ‘crown his living head.’ We all remember his being refused the hundred pounds for his ‘Fairy Queen.’ Poets were not wanted in those days to celebrate the triumphs of princes over the people. But why does he not bring his list down nearer to his own time—to Pye and Whitehead and Colley Cibber? Does Mr. Southey disdain to be considered as the successor even of Dryden? That green wreath which decks our author’s living head, is so far from being, as he would insinuate, an anticipation of immortality, that it is no credit to any body, and least of all to Mr. Southey. He might well have declined the reward of exertions in a cause which throws a stigma of folly or something worse on the best part of his life. Mr. Southey ought not to have received what would not have been offered to the author of ‘Joan of Arc.’

Mr. Southey himself maintains that his song has still been ‘to Truth and Freedom true’; that he has never changed his opinions; that it is the cause of French liberty that has left him, not he the cause. That may be so. But there is one person in the kingdom who has, we take it, been at least as consistent in his conduct 114and sentiments as Mr. Southey, and that person is the King. Thus the Laureate emphatically advises the Princess:—

‘Look to thy Sire, and in his steady way,

As in his Father’s he, learn thou to tread.’

Now the question is, whether Mr. Southey agreed with his Majesty on the subject of the French Revolution when he published ‘Joan of Arc.’ Though Mr. Southey ‘as beseems him well’ congratulates the successes of the son, we do not recollect that he condoled with the disappointments of the father in the same cause. The King has not changed, therefore Mr. Southey has. The sun does not turn to the sun-flower; but the sun-flower follows the sun. Our poet has thoughtlessly committed himself in the above lines. He may be right in applauding that one sole purpose of his Majesty’s reign which he formerly condemned: that he can be consistent in applauding what he formerly condemned, is impossible. That his majesty King George III. should make a convert of Mr. Southey rather than Mr. Southey of George III. is probable for many reasons. The King by siding with the cause of the people could not, like King William, have gained a crown: Mr. Southey, by deserting it, has got a hundred pounds a-year. A certain English ambassador, who had a long time resided at the court of Rome, was on his return introduced at the levee of Queen Caroline. This lady, who was almost as great a prig as Mr. Southey, asked him why in his absence he did not try to make a convert of the Pope to the Protestant religion. He answered, ‘Madam, the reason was that I had nothing better to offer his Holiness than what he already has in his possession.’ The Pope would no doubt have been of the same way of thinking. This is the reason why kings, from sire to son, pursue ‘their steady way,’ and are less changeable than canting cosmopolites.

The Lay of the Laureate, Carmen Nuptiale, by Robert Southey, Esq. Poet-Laureate, Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and of the Royal Spanish Academy of History.—London: Longmans, 1816.

(CONCLUDED.)

‘Queen. Hamlet, thou hast thy Father much offended.

‘Hamlet. Madam, you have my Father much offended.’

July 14, 1816.

Though we do not think Mr. Southey has been quite consistent, we do not think him a hypocrite. This poem proves it. How 115should he maintain the same opinion all his life, when he cannot maintain it for two stanzas together? The weakness of his reasoning shews that he is the dupe of it. He has not the faculty of perceiving contradictions. He is not accountable for his mistakes. There is not a single sentiment advanced in any part of the Lay, which is not flatly denied in some other part of it. Let us see:—

‘Proudly I raised the high thanksgiving strain

Of victory in a rightful cause achieved:

For which I long had looked and not in vain,

As one who with firm faith and undeceived,

In history and the heart of man could find

Sure presage of deliverance for mankind.’

Mr. Southey does not inform us in what year he began to look for this deliverance, but if he had looked for it long, he must have looked for it long in vain. Does our poet then find no presage of deliverance for ‘conquered France’ in the same principles that he found it for ‘injured Germany’? But he has no principles; or he does not himself know what they are. He praises Providence in this particular instance for having conformed to his hopes; and afterwards thus gives us the general results of his reading in history and the human heart. In the Dream he says, speaking of Charissa and Speranza—

‘This lovely pair unrolled before the throne

“Earth’s melancholy map,” whereon to sight

Two broad divisions at a glance were shown,

The empires these of darkness and of light.

Well might the thoughtful bosom sigh to mark

How wide a portion of the map was dark.

Behold, Charissa cried, how large a space

Of earth lies unredeemed! Oh grief to think

That countless myriads of immortal race

In error born, in ignorance must sink,

Trained up in customs which corrupt the heart

And following miserably the evil part!

Regard the expanded Orient from the shores

Of scorched Arabia and the Persian sea,

To where the inhospitable Ocean roars

Against the rocks of frozen Tartary;

Look next at those Australian isles which lie

Thick as the stars which stud the wintry sky.

Then let thy mind contemplative survey

That spacious region where in elder time

Earth’s unremembered conquerors held the sway

And Science trusting in her skill sublime,

116With lore abstruse the sculptured walls o’erspread,

Its import now forgotten with the dead.

From Nile and Congo’s undiscovered springs

To the four seas which gird the unhappy land,

Behold it left a prey to barbarous Kings,

The Robber and the Trader’s ruthless hand;

Sinning and suffering, everywhere unblest,

Behold her wretched sons, oppressing and opprest!’

This is ‘a pretty picture’ to be drawn by one who finds in the past history of the world the sure presage of deliverance for mankind. We grant indeed that Mr. Southey was right in one thing, viz. in expecting from it that sort of ‘deliverance of mankind,’ bound hand and foot, into the power of Kings and Priests, which has actually come to pass, and which he has celebrated with so much becoming pomp, both here and elsewhere. The doctrine of ‘millions made for one’ has to be sure got a tolerable footing in the East. It has attained a very venerable old age there—it is mature even to rottenness, but without decay. ‘Old, old, Master Shallow,’ but eternal. It is transmitted down in unimpaired succession from sire to son. Snug’s the word. Legitimacy is not there militant, but triumphant, as the Editor of The Times would wish. It is long since the people had any thing to do with the laws but to obey them, or any laws to obey but the will of their taskmasters. This is the necessary end of legitimacy. The Princes and Potentates cut one another’s throats as they please, but the people have no hand in it. They have no French Revolutions there, no rights of man to terrify barbarous kings, no republicans or levellers, no weathercock deliverers and re-deliverers of mankind, no Mr. Southeys nor Mr. Wordsworths. In this they are happy. Things there are perfectly settled, in the state in which they should be,—still as death, and likely to remain so. Mr. Southey’s exquisite reason for supposing that a crusade to pull down divine right would succeed in the East, is that a crusade to prop it up has just succeeded in the West. That will never do. Besides, what security can he give, if he goes on improving in wisdom for the next five and twenty years as he has done for the last, that he would not in the end be as glad to see these ‘barbarous kings’ restored to their rightful thrones, as he is now anxious to see them tumbled from them? The doctrine of ‘divine right’ is of longer standing and more firmly established in the East than in the West, because the Eastern world is older than ours. We might say of it,

‘The wars it well remembers of King Nine,

Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine.’

It is fixed on the altar and the throne, safe, quite safe against Mr. 117Southey’s enthusiasm in its second spring, his Missionary Societies, and his Schools for All. It overlays that vast continent, like an ugly incubus, sucking the blood and stopping up the breath of man’s life. That detestable doctrine, which in England first tottered and fell headless to the ground with the martyred Charles; which we kicked out with his son James, and kicked twice back with two Pretenders, to make room for ‘Brunswick’s fated line,’ a line of our own chusing, and for that reason worth all Mr. Southey’s lines put together; that detestable doctrine, which the French, in 1793, ousted from their soil, thenceforward sacred in the eyes of humanity, which they ousted from it again in 1815, making it doubly sacred; and which (oh grief, oh shame) was borne into it once more on English shoulders, and thrust down their throats with English bayonets; this detestable doctrine, which would, of right and with all the sanctions of religion and morality, sacrifice the blood of millions to the least of its prejudices; which would make the rights, the happiness, and liberty of nations, from the beginning to the end of time, dependent on the caprice of some of the lowest and vilest of the species; which rears its bloated hideous form to brave the will of a whole people; that claims mankind as its property, and allows human nature to exist only upon sufferance; that haunts the understanding like a frightful spectre, and oppresses the very air with a weight that is not to be borne; this doctrine meets with no rubs, no reverses, no ups and downs, in the East. It is there fixed, immutable. The Jaggernaut there passes on with its ‘satiate’ scythe over the bleeding bodies of its victims, who are all as loyal, as pious, and as thankful as Mr. Southey. It meets with no opposition from any ‘re-risen cause of evil’ or of good. Mankind have there been delivered once for all!

In the passage above quoted, Mr. Southey founds his hope of the emancipation of the Eastern world from ‘the Robber and the Trader’s ruthless hand’ on our growing empire in India. This is a conclusion which nobody would venture upon but himself. His last appeal is to scripture, and still he is unfortunate:—

‘Speed thou the work, Redeemer of the World!

That the long miseries of mankind may cease!

Where’er the Red Cross banner is unfurled,

There let it carry truth, and light, and peace!

Did not the Angels who announced thy birth,

Proclaim it with the sound of Peace on Earth?’

From the length of time that this prediction has remained unfulfilled, Mr. Southey thinks its accomplishment must be near. His Odes will not hasten the event.

118Again, we do not understand the use which Mr. Southey makes of Red Cross in this poem. For speaking of himself he says,

‘And when that last and most momentous hour

Beheld the re-risen cause of evil yield

To the Red Cross and England’s arm of power,

I sung of Waterloo’s unrivalled field,

Paying the tribute of a soul embued

With deepest joy, devout and awful gratitude.’

This passage occurs in the Proem. In the Dream the Angel of the English Church is made to warn the Princess—

‘Think not that lapse of ages shall abate

The inveterate malice of that Harlot old;

Fallen tho’ thou deemest her from her high estate,

She proffers still the envenomed cup of gold,

And her fierce Beast, whose names are blasphemy,

The same that was, is still, and still must be.’

It is extraordinary that both these passages relate to one and the same thing, namely, Popery, which our author in the first identifies with the Christian religion, thus invoking to his aid every pure feeling or pious prejudice in the minds of his readers, and in the last denounces as that Harlot old, ‘whose names are blasphemy,’ with all the fury of plenary inspiration. This is a great effort of want of logic. Mr. Southey will hardly sing or say that it was to establish Protestantism in France that England’s arm of power was extended on this occasion. Nor was it simply to establish Popery. That existed there already. It was to establish ‘the inveterate malice of that Harlot old,’ her ‘envenomed cup,’ to give her back her daggers and her fires, her mummeries, her holy oil, her power over the bodies and the minds of men, to restore her ‘the same that she was, is still, and still must be,’ that that celebrated fight was fought. The massacres of Nismes followed hard upon the triumph of Mr. Southey’s Red Cross. The blood of French Protestants began to flow almost before the wounds of the dying and the dead in that memorable carnage had done festering. This was the most crying injustice, the most outrageous violation of principle, that ever was submitted to. What! has John Bull nothing better to do now-a-days than to turn bottle-holder to the Pope of Rome, to whet his daggers for him, to light his fires, and fill his poisoned bowl; and yet, out of pure complaisance (a quality John has learnt from his new friends the Bourbons) not venture a syllable to say that we did not mean him to use them? It 119seems Mr. Southey did not think this a fit occasion for the interference of his Red Cross Muse. Could he not trump up a speech either for ‘divine Speranza,’ or ‘Charissa dear,’ to lay at the foot of the throne? Was the Angel of the English Church dumb too—‘quite chopfallen?’ Yet though our Laureate cannot muster resolution enough to advise the Prince to protect Protestants in France, he plucks up spirit enough to urge him to persecute Catholics in this country, and pretty broadly threatens him with the consequences, if he does not. “’Tis much,” as Christopher Sly says.

There is another subject on which Mr. Southey’s silence is still more inexcusable. It was understood to be for his exertions in the cause of Spanish liberty that he was made Poet-Laureate. It is then high time for him to resign. Why has he not written a single ode to a single Spanish patriot who has been hanged, banished, imprisoned, sent to the galleys, assassinated, tortured? It must be pleasant to those who are suffering under the thumb-screw to read Mr. Southey’s thoughts upon that ingenious little instrument of royal gratitude. Has he discovered that the air of a Court does not very well agree with remonstrances against acts of oppression and tyranny, when exercised by those who are born for no other purpose? Is his patriotism only a false cover, a Carlton-House convenience? His silence on this subject is not equivocal. Whenever Mr. Southey shews the sincerity of his former professions of zeal in behalf of Spanish liberty, by writing an elegy on the death of Porlier, or a review of the conduct of Ferdinand VII. (he is a subject worthy of Mr. Southey’s prose style), or by making the lame tailor of Madrid (we forget his name) the subject of an epic poem, we will retract all that we have said in disparagement of his consistency—But not till then.

We meant to have quoted several other passages, such as that in which old Praxis, that is, Experience, recommends it to the Princess to maintain the laws by keeping all that is old, and adding all that is new to them—that in which he regrets the piety and learning of former times, and then promises us a release from barbarism and brutishness by the modern invention of Sunday Schools—that in which he speaks of his own virtues and the wisdom of his friends—that in which he undertakes to write a martyrology.—But we are very tired of the subject, and the verses are not worth quoting. There is a passage in Racine which is; and with that, we take our leave of the Laureate, to whom it may convey some useful hints in explanation of his ardent desire for the gibbeting of Bonaparte and the burning of Paris:—

120Nabal.—Que peut vous inspirer une haine si forte?

Est-ce que de Baal le zèle vous transporte?

Pour moi, vous le savez, descendu d’Ismaël,

Je ne sers ni Baal ni le Dieu d’Israel.

Mathan.—Ami, peux-tu penser que d’un zèle frivole

Je me laisse aveugler pour une vaine idole!

Né ministre du Dieu qu’en ce temple on adore,

Peut-être que Mathan le serviroit encore,

Si l’amour des grandeurs, la soif de commander,

Avec son joug étroit pouvoient s’accommoder.

Qu’est-il besoin, Nabal, qu’à tes yeux je rappelle

De Joad et de moi la fameuse querelle?

Vaincu par lui j’entrai dans une autre carrière,

Et mon âme à la cour s’attacha tout entière.

J’approchai par degrés l’oreille des rois;

Et bientôt en oracle on érigea ma voix.

J’étudiai leur cœur, je flattai leurs caprices,

Je leur semai de fleurs le bord des précipices:

Près de leurs passions rien ne me fut sacré;

De mesure et de poids je changeois à leur gré,

Autant que de Joad l’inflexible rudesse

De leur superbe oreille offensoit la mollesse;

Autant je les charmois par ma dextérité,

Dérobant à leurs yeux la triste vérité,

Prêtant à leur fureur des couleurs favorables,

Et prodigue surtout du sang des misérables.^[18]

Déserteur de leur loi, j’approuvai l’entreprise,

Et par là de Baal méritai la prêtrise;

Par là je me rendis terrible à mon rival,

Je ceignis la tiare, et marchai son égal.

Toutefois, je l’avoue, en ce comble de gloire,

De Dieu que j’ai quitté l’importune mémoire

Jette encore en mon âme un reste de terreur;

Et c’est ce qui redouble et nourrit ma fureur.

Heureux, si sur son temple achevant ma vengeance,

Je puis convaincre enfin sa haine d’impuissance,

Et parmi les débris, les ravages, et les morts,

A force d’attentats perdre tous mes remords.^[19]

121

TO THE EDITOR OF THE EXAMINER

Sir,—I hope you will not omit to notice two passages in Mr. Southey’s poem, in which, to try his talent at natural description, he gives an account of two of ‘the fearfullest wild-fowl living’—a British Lion and a Saxon one. Both are striking likenesses, and would do to hang on the outside of Exeter-‘Change to invite the curious. The former (presumed not to be indigenous) is described to be in excellent case, well-fed, getting in years and corpulent, with a high collar buried in the fat of the neck, false mane, large haunches (for which this breed is remarkable), paws like a shin of beef, large rolling eyes, a lazy, lounging animal, sleeping all day and roaring all night, a great devourer of carcases and breaker of bones, pleased after a full meal, and his keepers not then afraid of him. Inclined to be uxorious. Visited by all persons of distinction, from the highest characters abroad down to the lowest at home.—The other portrait of the Saxon Lion is a contrast to this. It is a poor lean starved beast, lord neither of men nor lands, galled with its chain, which it has broken, but has not got off from its neck. This portrait is, we understand, to be dedicated to Lord Castlereagh.—Your constant reader,

Ne Quid Nimis.

‘A new View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, and the Application of the Principle to Practice.’ Murray, 1816.—‘An Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark, on opening an Institution for the Formation of Character.’ By Robert Owen, one of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the County of Lanark.’—Hatchard, 1816.

[‘Dedicated to those who have no Private Ends to accomplish, who are honestly in search of Truth, for the purpose of ameliorating the Condition of Society, and who have the firmness to follow the Truth wherever it may lead, without being turned aside from the Pursuit by the Prepossessions or Prejudices of any part of Mankind;—to Mr. Wilberforce, the Prince Regent,’ &c.]

August 4, 1816.

‘A New View of Society’—No, Mr. Owen, that we deny. It may be true, but it is not new. It is not coeval, whatever the author 122and proprietor may think, with the New Lanark mills, but it is as old as the royal borough of Lanark, or as the county of Lanark itself. It is as old as the ‘Political Justice’ of Mr. Godwin, as the ‘Oceana’ of Harrington, as the ‘Utopia’ of Sir Thomas More, as the ‘Republic’ of Plato; it is as old as society itself, and as the attempts to reform it by shewing what it ought to be, or by teaching that the good of the whole is the good of the individual—an opinion by which fools and honest men have been sometimes deceived, but which has never yet taken in the knaves and knowing ones. The doctrine of Universal Benevolence, the belief in the Omnipotence of Truth, and in the Perfectibility of Human Nature, are not new, but ‘Old, old,’ Master Robert Owen;—why then do you say that they are new? They are not only old, they are superannuated, they are dead and buried, they are reduced to mummy, they are put into the catacombs at Paris, they are sealed up in patent coffins, they have been dug up again and anatomised, they have been drawn, quartered and gibbetted, they have become black, dry, parched in the sun, loose, and rotten, and are dispersed to all the winds of Heaven! The chain in which they hung up the murdered corse of human Liberty is all that remains of it, and my Lord Shallow keeps the key of it! If Mr. Owen will get it out of his hands, with the aid of Mr. Wilberforce and the recommendation of The Courier, we will ‘applaud him to the very echo, which shall applaud again.’ Till then, we must content ourselves with ‘chaunting remnants of old lauds’ in the manner of Ophelia:—

‘No, no, he is gone, and we cast away moan,

And will he not come again,

And will he not come again?’

Perhaps, one of these days, he may ... ‘like a cloud over the Caspian’: then if ever, and never till then, human nature will hold up its head again, and the holy and Triple Alliance will be dissolved. But as to this bald spectre of Liberty and Necessity conjured up by Mr. Owen from the falls of the Clyde, with a primer in one hand, and a spinning-jenny in the other, coming down from the Highlands in a Scotch mist, and discoverable only by second-sight, we may fairly say to it—

‘Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;

Thou hast no speculation in those eyes,

Which thou dost glare with.’

Why does Mr. Owen put the word ‘New,’ in black-letter at the head of the advertisements of his plan of reform? In what does the New Lanark differ from the old Utopia? Is Scotland, after all, 123the true Lubber-land? Or must the whole world be converted into a cotton-factory? Does not Mr. Owen know that the same scheme, the same principles, the same philosophy of motives and actions, of causes and consequences, of knowledge and virtue, of virtue and happiness, were rife in the year 1793, were noised abroad then, were spoken on the house-tops, were whispered in secret, were published in quarto and duodecimo, in political treatises, in plays, poems, songs, and romances—made their way to the bar, crept into the church, ascended the rostrum, thinned the classes of the universities, and robbed ‘Durham’s golden stalls’ of their hoped-for ornaments, by sending our aspiring youth up to town to learn philosophy of the new teachers of philosophy; that these ‘New Views of Society’ got into the hearts of poets and the brains of metaphysicians, took possession of the fancies of boys and women, and turned the heads of almost the whole kingdom: but that there was one head which they never got possession of, that turned the heads of the whole kingdom round again, stopped the progress of philosophy and necessity by wondrous fortitude, and that ‘thus repelled, philosophy fell into a sadness, then into a fast, thence to a watching, then into a weakness, thence to a lightness, and by this declension, to the lamentable state wherein it now lies,’ hooted by the boys, laughed at by the women, spit at by fools, trod upon by knaves, damned by poet-laureates, whined over by maudlin metaphysicians, rhymed upon by mincing ballad-makers, ridiculed in romances, belied in histories and travels, pelted by the mob, sneered at by the court, driven from the country, kicked out of society, and forced to take refuge and to lie snug for twenty years in the New Lanark mills, with the connivance of the worthy proprietor, among the tow and spindles; from whence he lets us understand that it is coming up again to Whitehall-stairs, like a spring-tide with the full of the moon, and floating on the blood that has flowed for the restoration of the Bourbons, under the patronage of the nobility, the gentry, Mr. Wilberforce, and the Prince Regent, and all those who are governed, like these great personages, by no other principle than truth, and no other wish than the good of mankind! This puff will not take with us: we are old birds, not to be caught with chaff: we shall not purchase in this new lottery, where there are all prizes and no blanks! We are inclined to throw Mr. Owen’s ‘New View,’ behind the fire-place, as we believe most people do the letter they receive from the proprietors of the lucky lottery-office, informing them that their ticket was drawn a blank the first day, and in the postscript soliciting their future favours!

Mr. Owen may think that we have all this while been jesting, when we have been in sad and serious earnest. Well, then, we will 124give him the reason why we differ with him, out of ‘an old saw,’ as good as most ‘modern instances.’ It is contained in this sentence:—‘If to do were as easy as to teach others what were good to be done, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.’ Our author has discovered no new theory; he has advanced no new reasons. The former reasons were never answered, but the plan did not succeed. Why then does he think his must? All that he has done has been to leave out the reasons for his paradoxes, and to give his conclusions in capitals. This may take for a time with Mr. Wilberforce and the Methodists, who like hieroglyphics, but it cannot last. Here is a plan, strange as it may seem, ‘a new View of Society,’ published by two of our most loyal booksellers, and what is still more extraordinary, puffed in The Courier as an extremely practical, practicable, solid, useful, and good sort of work, which proposes no less than to govern the world without religion and without law, by the force of reason alone! This project is in one of its branches dedicated to the Prince Regent, by which (if carried into effect) he would be stuck up in his life-time as ‘a useless piece of antiquity’; and in another part is dedicated to Mr. Wilberforce, though it would by the same rule convert that little vital member of the community into ‘a monkey preacher,’ crying in the wilderness with no one to hear him, and sneaking about between his character and his conscience, in a state of ludicrous perplexity, as indeed he always appears to be at present! What is most remarkable is, that Mr. Owen is the first philosopher we ever heard of, who recommended himself to the great by telling them disagreeable truths. A man that comes all the way from the banks of the Clyde acquires a projectile force that renders him irresistible. He has access, we understand, to the men in office, to the members of parliament, to lords and gentlemen. He comes to ‘pull an old house about their ears,’ to batter down all their establishments, new or old, in church or in state, civil, political, and military, and he quietly walks into their houses with his credentials in his pocket, and reconciles them to the prospect of the innumerable Houses of Industry he is about to erect on the site of their present sinecures, by assuring them of the certainty of his principles and the infallibility of his practice, in building up and pulling down. His predecessors were clumsy fellows; but he is an engineer, who will be sure to do their business for them. He is not the man to set the Thames on fire, but he will move the world, and New Lanark is the place he has fixed his lever upon for this purpose. To shew that he goes roundly to work with great people in developing his formidable system of the formation of character, he asks, p. 7 of the second Essay,—

125‘How much longer shall we continue to allow generation after generation to be taught crime from their infancy, and when so taught, hunt them like beasts of the forest, until they are entangled beyond escape in the toils and nets of the law? When, if the circumstances from youth of these poor unpitied sufferers had been reversed with those who are even surrounded with the pomp and dignity of justice, these latter would have been at the bar of the culprit, and the former would have been in the judgment-seat.

‘Had the present Judges of these realms, whose conduct compels the admiration of surrounding states, been born and educated in St. Giles’s, or some similar situation, is it not reasonable to conclude, as they possess native energies and abilities, that ere this they would have been at the head of their then profession, and in consequence of that superiority and proficiency, have already suffered imprisonment, transportation, or death? Or can we for a moment hesitate to decide, that if some of those men whom our laws, dispensed by the present Judges, have doomed to suffer capital punishment, had been born, trained, and surrounded as these Judges were born, trained, and surrounded; that some of those so imprisoned, transported, or hanged, would have been the identical individuals who would have passed the same awful sentences on our present highly esteemed dignitaries of the law?’

This is a delicate passage. So then according to the author of the ‘New View of Society,’ the Prince Regent of these realms, instead of being at the head of the allied sovereigns of Europe, might, in other circumstances, have been at the head of a gang of bravoes and assassins; Lord Castlereagh, on the same principle, and by parity of reasoning, without any alteration in his nature or understanding, but by the mere difference of situation, might have been a second Count Fathom; Mr. Vansittart, the chancellor of the exchequer, might, if he had turned his hand that way in time, have succeeded on the snaffling lay, or as a pickpocket; Lord Wellington might have entered houses, instead of entering kingdoms, by force; the Lord-chancellor might have been a Jew-broker; the Marquis of —— or Lord —— a bawd, and their sons, tapsters and bullies at bagnios; the Queen (God bless her) might have been an old washer-woman, taking her snuff and gin among her gossips, and her daughters, if they had not been princesses, might have turned out no better than they should be! Here’s a levelling rogue for you! The world turned inside out, with a witness!—Such are Mr. Owen’s general principles, to which we have nothing to say, and such his mode of illustrating them in his prefaces and dedications, which we do not think the most flattering to persons in power. We do not, 126however, wish him to alter his tone: he goes swimmingly on at present, ‘with cheerful and confident thoughts.’ His schemes thus far are tolerated, because they are remote, visionary, inapplicable. Neither the great world nor the world in general care any thing about New Lanark, nor trouble themselves whether the workmen there go to bed drunk or sober, or whether the wenches are got with child before or after the marriage ceremony. Lanark is distant, Lanark is insignificant. Our statesmen are not afraid of the perfect system of reform he talks of, and, in the meantime, his cant against reform in parliament, and about Bonaparte, serves as a practical diversion in their favour. But let the good which Mr. Owen says he has done in one poor village be in danger of becoming general,—let his plan for governing men by reason, without the assistance of the dignitaries of the church and the dignitaries of the law, but once get wind and be likely to be put in practice, and his dreams of elevated patronage will vanish. Long before he has done as much to overturn bigotry and superstition in this country, as he says Bonaparte did on the continent, (though he thinks the restoration of what was thus overturned also a great blessing) Mr. Wilberforce will have cut his connection. When we see Mr. Owen brought up for judgment before Lord Ellenborough, or standing in the pillory, we shall begin to think there is something in this New Lanark Scheme of his. On the other hand, if he confines himself to general principles, steering clear of practice, the result will be the same, if ever his principles become sufficiently known and admired. Let his ‘New View of Society’ but make as many disciples as the ‘Enquiry concerning Political Justice,’ and we shall soon see how the tide will turn about. There will be a fine hue and cry raised by all the good and wise, by all ‘those acute minds’ who, Mr. Owen tells us, have not been able to find a flaw in his reasonings, but who will soon discover a flaw in his reputation. Dr. Parr will preach a Spital sermon against him; lectures will be delivered in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, to prove that a perfect man is such another chimera as a golden mountain; Mr. Malthus will set up his two checks of vice and misery as insuperable bars against him; Mr. Southey will put him into the ‘Quarterly Review’; his name will be up in the newspapers, The Times, The Courier, and The Morning Post; the three estates will set their faces against him; he will be marked as a Jacobin, a leveller, an incendiary, in all parts of the three kingdoms; he will be avoided by his friends, and become a bye-word to his enemies; his brother magistrates of the county of Lanark will refuse to sit on the bench with him; the spindles of his spinning-jennies will no longer turn on their soft axles; he will have gone out for wool, and will go 127home shorn; and he will find that it is not so easy or safe a task as he imagined to make fools wise, and knaves honest; in short, to make mankind understand their own interests, or those who govern them care for any interest but their own. Otherwise, all this matter would have been settled long ago. As it is, things will most probably go on as they have done, till some comet comes with its tail; and on the eve of some grand and radical reform, puts an end to the question.

The Speech of Charles C. Western, Esq. M.P. on the Distressed State of the Agriculture of the Country, delivered in the House of Commons, March 7, 1816. The Speech of Henry Brougham, Esq. M.P. on the same subject, delivered in the same place, April 9, 1816.

This is a sore subject; and it is here handled with much tenderness and delicacy. It puts one in mind of the traveller’s nose, and the nuns of Strasburgh, in the tale of Slaukenbergius. ‘I will touch it, said one; I dare not touch it, said another; I wish I had touched it, said a third; let me touch it, said a fourth.’ While the gentlewomen were debating the point, the traveller with the great nose rode on. It would be no ungracious task to treat of the distresses of the country, if all were distressed alike; but that is not the case; nor is it possible to trace the necessities of one part of the community to their source, or to hint at a remedy, without glancing invidiously at the superfluities of others. ‘Aye, there’s the rub, that makes calamity of so long life.’ The speeches before us are to the subject what a veil is to a lady’s face, or a blind to a window. Almost all that has been said or written upon it is a palpable delusion—an attempt to speak out and say nothing; to oppose something that might be done, and propose something that cannot be done; to direct attention to the subject, and divert it from it; to do something and nothing; and to come to this potent conclusion, that while nothing is done, nothing can be done. ‘But have you then any remedy to propose instead?’ What sort of a remedy do you mean? ‘Oh, one equally safe and efficacious, that shall set every thing to rights, and leave every thing just as it is, that does not touch either the tythes or the national debt, nor places and pensions, nor property of any kind, except the poor’s fund; that you may take from them to make them independent of the rich, as you leave Lord Camden in possession of thirty thousand a year to make him independent of the 128poor.’—Why, then, what if the Lord Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Exchequer were to play a game at push-pin on the top of St. Paul’s; or if Mr. Brougham and Mr. Horner were to play at cat’s-cradle on the top of the Monument; or if the little garden between the Speaker’s house and the river-side were to be sown with pearls and cockle-shells? Or if——Pshaw! Patience, and shuffle the cards.

The great problem of our great problem-finders appears to be, to take nothing from the rich, and give it to the poor. That will never do. We find them and their schemes of diversion well described in Rabelais, book v. chap. xxii.

‘How Queen Whim’s Officers were employed, and how the said Lady retained us among her Abstractors.

‘I then saw a great number of the Queen’s officers, who made blackamoors white, as fast as hops, just rubbing their bellies with the bottom of a pannier.

‘Others, with three couples of foxes in one yoke, ploughed a sandy shore, and did not lose their seed.

‘Others washed burnt tiles, and made them lose their colour.

‘Others extracted water out of pumice-stones, braying them a good while in a mortar, and changed their substance.

‘Others sheered asses, and thus got long fleece wool.

‘Others gathered off of thorns grapes, and figs off of thistles.

‘Others stroked he-goats by the dugs, and saved their milk, and much they got by it.

‘Others washed asses’ heads, without losing their soap.

‘Others taught cows to dance, and did not lose their fiddling.

‘Others pitched nets to catch the wind, and took cock lobsters in them.

‘Others out of nothing made great things, and made great things return to nothing.

‘Others made a virtue of necessity, and the best of a bad market; which seemed to me a very good piece of work.

‘I saw two Gibroins by themselves, keeping watch on the top of a tower; and we were told they guarded the moon from the wolves.’

The war has cost the country five or six hundred millions of money. This has not been a nominal expense, a playing at ducks and drakes with the King’s picture on the water, or a manufacturing of bank-notes, and then lighting our pipes with them, but a real bonâ fide waste of the means, wealth, labour, produce, or resources 129of the country, in the carrying on of the war. About one hundred of these five or six hundred millions have been sent directly out of the country in loans to our Allies, from the year 1793 to the year 1815, inclusive, during which period there is not a single year in which we did not (from our desire of peace with the legitimate government of that country) subsidise one or all of the powers of Europe, to carry on war against the rebels, regicides, republicans, and usurpers of France. Now the interest of this money alone would be five millions yearly, which would be nearly enough to pay the amount of the poor-rates of the whole country, which is seven millions of our yearly taxes, or might at least be applied to mitigate the mild severity of Mr. Malthus’s sweeping clauses on that defenceless part of the subject. Here is a hundred millions then gone clean out of the country: there are four or five hundred millions more which have been sunk in the expenses of the war, and which might as well have been sunk in the sea; or what has been saved out of the wreck by those who have been most active in running the vessel aground, is in the hands of persons who are in no hurry that the public should go snacks with them in their excessive good fortune. In all three cases, and under each several head of loans, waste, or monopoly, John Bull pays the piper, or the interest of the whole money in taxes. He is just so many hundred millions the worse for the war, (whoever may be the better for it) not merely in paper, which would be nothing, nor in golden guineas, which would be something; but in what is better and more substantial than either, in goods and chattels, in the produce of the soil, and the work of his hands—in the difference between what the industry of man, left to itself, produces in time of peace for the benefit of man, and what the same industry, under the direction of government, produces in time of war for the destruction of others, without any benefit to himself, real, imaginary, or pretended; we mean in a physical and economical point of view, which is here the question—a question, which seems to last when the religion, politics, and morality of the affair are over. We have said that the expenses of the war might as well have been sunk in the sea; and so they might, for they have been sunk in unproductive labour, that is, in maintaining large establishments, and employing great numbers of men in doing nothing or mischief; for example, in making ships to destroy other ships, guns and gunpowder to blow out men’s brains, pikes and swords to run them through the body, drums and fifes to drown the noise of cannon and the whizzing of bullets; in making caps and coats to deck the bodies of those who live by killing others; in buying up pork and beef, butter and cheese, to enable them to do this with more effect: in barracks, in transport-ships, 130in baggage and baggage-waggons, in horses, bridles and saddles, in suttlers and followers of the camp, in chaplains of the regiment, in common trulls, and the mistresses of generals and commanders in chief; in contractors, in army and navy agents, their partners, clerks, relations, dependants, wives, families, servants in and out of livery, their town and country houses, coaches, curricles, parks, gardens, grottos, hot-houses, green-houses, pictures, statues, libraries; in treasury scribes, in secretaries and under-secretaries of state, of the foreign, colonial, and war departments, with their swarms of underlings, all of whom are maintained out of the labour and sweat of the country, and for all of whom, and for all that they do (put together) the country is not one pin the better, or at least, one penny more in pocket, than if they were at the bottom of the Channel. The present may have been the most just and necessary war, in a political, moral, and religious point of view, that ever was engaged in; but it has also been the most expensive; and what is worse, the expense remains just the same, though it may have been the most unjust and unnecessary in the world. We have paid for it, and we must pay for it equally in either case, and wholly out of our own pockets. The price of restoring the Pope, the Inquisition, the Bourbons, and the doctrine of Divine Right, is half of our nine hundred millions of debt. That is the amount of the government bill of costs, presented to John Bull for payment, not of the principal but the interest; that is what he has got by the war; the load of taxes at his back, with which he comes out of his glorious five and twenty years’ struggle, like Christian’s load of sins, which whether it will not fall off from his back like Christian’s, into the Slough of Despond, will be seen before long. The difference between the expense of a war or a peace establishment is just the difference between a state of productive and unproductive labour. Now this whole question, which from its complexity puzzles many people, and has given rise to a great deal of partly wilful and partly shallow sophistry,^[20] may be explained in two words.—Suppose I give a man five shillings a day for going out in a boat and catching fish for me. This is paying for productive labour: that is, I give him so much for what he does, or a claim upon so much of the public stock: but in taking so much from the stock by laying out his five shillings, he adds so much to it by his labour, or the disposal of his time in catching fish. But if I, having the money to do what I please with, give him five shillings a day for shooting at crows, he is paid equally for his trouble, and accordingly takes so much from the public stock, while he adds 131nothing to it but so much carrion. So if the government pay him so much a-day for shooting at Frenchmen and Republicans, this is a tax, a loss, a burthen to the country, without any thing got by it; for we cannot, after all, eat Frenchmen and Republicans when we have killed them. War in itself is a thriving, sensible traffic only to cannibals! Again—if I give a man five shillings for making a pair of shoes, this is paying for productive labour, viz. for labour that is useful, and that must be performed by some one; but if I give the same man five shillings for standing on his head or behind my chair while I am picking my teeth, or for running up a hill and down again for a wager—this is unproductive labour, nothing comes of it, and though the man who is thus idly employed lives by it, others starve, upon whose pittance and whose labour he lives through me. Such is the nature and effect of war; all the energies of which tend to waste, and to throw an additional and heavy burthen upon the country, in proportion to the extent and length of time that it is carried on. It creates so many useless members of the community: every man paid by the war out of the taxes paid by the people, is, in fact, a dead body fastened to a living one, that by its weight drags it to the earth. A five and twenty years’ war, and nine hundred millions of debt, are really a couple of millstones round the neck of a country, that must naturally press her down a little in the scale of prosperity. That seems to be no riddle. We defy any sophist to answer this statement of the necessary tendency of war in its general principle to ruin and impoverish a country. We are not to wonder, when it does so; but when other causes operate to counteract or retard this tendency. What is extraordinary in our own case is, that the pernicious effects of war have been delayed so long, not that they have come upon us at last.^[21]—That money laid out in war is thrown away is self-evident from this single circumstance, that government never refund. The reason is, because they never do any thing with their money that produces money again. They are the worst bankers in the world. The Exchequer is a true Sinking Fund. If you lend money to a farmer, a manufacturer, a merchant, he employs it in getting something done, for which others will pay, because it is useful; as in raising corn, in weaving cotton, in bringing home sugar or tobacco. But money sunk in a war brings in no returns—except of killed and wounded. What will any one give 132the government for the rotten bones that lie buried at Walcheren, or the dry ones at Waterloo? Not a six-pence. They cannot make a collection of wooden legs or dangling sleeves from the hospitals at Greenwich or Chelsea to set up a raffle or a lottery. They cannot bring the fruits of the war to auction, or put up the tottering throne of the Bourbons to the best bidder. They can neither bring back a drop of the blood that has been shed, nor recover a shilling of the treasure that has been wasted. If the expenses of the war are not a burden to the people, which must sink it according to their weight, why do not government take the whole of this thriving concern into their own hands, and pay the national debt out of the Droits of Admiralty? In short, the way to ascertain this point is, by the old method of reductio ad absurdum: Suppose we had to pay the expenses of such another peace-establishment and such another war. Who does not see that they would eat up the whole resources of the country, as the present peace-establishment and actual debt do just one half?

Speeches in Parliament on the Distresses of the Country, by Mr. Western and Mr. Brougham.

(CONCLUDED)

‘Come, let us leave off children’s play, and go to push-pin.’

Polite Conversation.

Aug. 18, 1816.

The war has wasted the resources of the country in foolery, which the country has now to pay for in a load of taxes on its remaining resources, its actual produce and labour. The tax-gatherer is a government-machine that takes sixty-five millions a-year from the bankrupt pockets of the nation, to give to those who have brought it into that situation; who takes so much from the necessaries of life belonging to the poor, to add to the superfluities of the rich; who adds so much to the hard labour of the working part of the community, to ‘relieve the killing languor and over-laboured lassitude of those who have nothing to do’; who, in short, out of the grinding poverty and ceaseless toil of those who pay the taxes, enables those who receive them to live in luxury and idleness.

Mr. Burke, whom we have just quoted, has said, that ‘if the poor were to cut the throats of the rich, they would not have a meal the more for it.’ First, (for truth is the first thing in our thoughts, and not to give offence the second) this is a falsehood; a greater one than the answer of a Bond-street lounger, who coming out of a 133confectioner’s shop, where he has had a couple of basons of turtle-soup, an ice, some jellies, and a quantity of pastry, as he saunters out picking his teeth and putting the change into his pocket, says to a beggar at the door, ‘I have nothing for you.’ We confess, we have always felt it an aukward circumstance to be accosted in this manner, when we have been caught in the act of indulging a sweet tooth, and it costs us an additional penny. The rich and poor may at present be compared to the two classes of frequenters of pastry-cooks’ shops, those on the outside and those on the in. We would seriously advise the latter, who see the gaunt faces staring at them through the glass-door, to recollect, that though custard is nicer than bread, bread is the greatest necessary of the two.—We had forgot Mr. Burke’s sophism, to which we reply in the second place, that the cutting of throats is a figure of speech, like the dagger which he produced in the House of Commons, not necessary to the speculative decision of the question. The most civil, peaceable, and complaisant way of putting it is this—whether if the rich were to give all that they are worth to the poor, the latter would be none the richer for it? If so, the rich would be none the poorer, and so far could be no losers on Mr. Burke’s own hypothesis, which supposes, with that magnanimity of contempt for plain matter of fact which distinguished the author’s theories, that the rich have nothing, and the poor have every thing? Had not Mr. Burke a pension of 4000l. a-year? Was this nothing? But even this is not the question neither. It is not, whether if the rich were to part with all they have to the poor (which is a mere absurdity) but whether if the rich do not take all they have left from the poor (which we humbly hope is a proposition that has common sense in it) the latter may not be the better off with something to live upon than with nothing? Whether, if the whole load of taxes could be taken off from them, it would not be a relief to them? Whether, if half the load of taxes were taken off from them, it would not be a relief to them? Whether, if any part of the load of taxes that can be taken off from them were taken off, it would not in the same proportion be a relief to them? We will venture to say, that no one will deny these propositions who does not receive so much a year for falsehood and impudence. The resistance which is made to the general or abstract principle is not intended to prevent the extreme sweeping application of that principle to the plundering or (as Mr. Burke will have it) to the cutting the throats of the rich, but it is a manœuvre, by getting rid of the general principle altogether, viz. that the extravagance and luxury of the rich, war, taxes, &c., have a tendency to increase the distresses of the poor, or measures of retrenchment and reform to lighten those 134distresses—to give carte-blanche to the government to squander the wealth, the blood, the happiness of the nation at pleasure; to grant jobs, places, pensions, sinecures, reversions without end, to grind down, to starve and impoverish the country with systematic impunity. It is a legerdemain trick played off by hireling politicians, to enable their patrons and employers to pick our pockets and laugh in our faces at the same time.

It has been said by such persons that taxes are not a burthen to the country; that the wealth collected in taxes returns through those who receive to those who pay them, only divided more equally and beneficially among all parties, just (they say) as the vapours and moisture of the earth collected in the clouds return to enrich the soil in soft and fertilizing showers. We shall set ourselves to shew that this is not true.

Suppose a society of ten persons, without taxes to pay, and who live on their own labour, on the produce of the ground, and the exchange of one commodity among themselves for another. Some of these persons will be naturally employed in tilling the ground, others in tending cattle, others, in making instruments of husbandry, others in weaving cloth, others in making shoes, others in building houses, others in making roads, others in buying and selling, others in fetching and carrying what the others want. All will be employed in something that they want themselves, or that others want. In such a state of society, nothing will be given for nothing. If a man has a bushel of wheat, and only wants half of it, he will give the other half to some one, for making him a coat or a pair of shoes. As every one will be paid for what he does out of the earnings of the labour of others, no one will waste his time or his strength in doing any thing that is not wanted by some one else, that is not as useful and necessary, to his subsistence and comfort, and more so, than the commodity which he gives in exchange for it. There will be no unproductive labour. What each person gets will be either in proportion to what he has done for himself, or what he has added to the comforts of others. Exchange there will be no robbery. The wealth of all will be the result of the exertions of each individual, and will circulate equally and beneficially, because those who produce that wealth will share it among themselves. This is an untaxed state of society, where wealth changes hands indeed, but finds its level, notwithstanding.—Now suppose two other individuals to be fastened upon this society of ten persons—a government-man and a fund-holder. They change the face of it in an instant. The equilibrium, the balance is upset. The amount of the wealth of the society before was a thousand pounds a-year, suppose. The two new-comers take 135a writ out of their pockets, by which they quietly lay hands on five hundred of it as their fair portion. Where are the ten persons now? Mr. Burke, Mr. Coleridge, Mr. Vansittart, The Courier, say—Just where they were before! We say, No such thing. For three reasons: 1. It cannot be denied that the interlopers, the government-man and his friend, the fund-holder, who has lent him money to sport with on all occasions, are substantial bonâ fide persons, like other men, who live by eating, drinking, &c., and who, if they only shared equally with the other ten what they had got amongst them, (for they add nothing to the common stock) must be a sufficient burthen upon the rest, that is, must diminish the comforts or increase the labour of each person one-fifth. To hear the other side talk, one would suppose that those who raise and are paid out of the taxes never touch a farthing of them, that they have no occasion for them, that they neither eat nor drink, nor buy clothing, or build houses with them; that they live upon air, or that harmless food, bank notes (a thing not to speak of), and that all the money they are so anxious to collect is distributed by them again for the sole benefit of others, or passes back through the Exchequer, as if it were a conduit-pipe or empty tunnel, into the hands of the original proprietors, without diminution or diversion. Now this is not so. 2. Not only do our government-man and his friend live like other people upon their means, but they live better than other people, for they have better means, that is, these two take half of what the other ten get. They would be fools if they gave it back to them; no, depend upon it, they lay out their five hundred a-year upon themselves, for their own sole use, benefit, pleasure, mirth, and pastime. For each of these gentlemen has just five times as much to spend as any of those that he lives upon at free cost, and he has nothing to do but to think how he shall spend it. He eats and drinks as much as he can, and always of the best and most costly. It is pretended that the difference in the consumption of the produce of the soil is little or nothing, for a poor man’s belly will hold as much as a rich man’s. But not if the one is full and the other empty. The man who lives upon the taxes, feasts upon venison and turtle, and crams himself to the throat with fish, flesh, and fowl; the man who pays the taxes, upon a crust of mouldy bread, and fat rusty bacon: the man who receives the taxes drinks rich and sparkling wines, hock and canary; the man who pays them, sour small beer. If the poor man gets drunk and leads an idle life, his family starve: the rich man drinks his three bottles a day and does nothing, while his family live on the fat of the land. If the poor man dies of hard labour and poor living, his family comes to the parish; if the rich man dies of hard 136living and want of exercise, he leaves his family to be provided for by the state. But, 3. All that the government-man and the fund-holder do not spend upon their bellies, in revelling and gormandising, they lay out upon their backs, their houses, their carriages, &c., in inordinate demands upon the labour of the former ten persons, who are now employed, not in working for one another, but in pampering the pride, ostentation, vanity, folly, or vices, of our two gentlemen comers. After glutting their physical appetites, they take care to apply all the rest to the gratification of their factitious, arbitrary, and fantastic wants, which are unlimited, and which the universe could not supply. ‘They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these:’—while the poor are clothed in rags, and the dogs lick up their sores. The money that is taken from you and me, or the more industrious members of the community, and that we should have laid out in having snug, comfortable houses built for us all, or two bed-rooms for our families instead of one, is employed, now that it has got into the tax-gatherer’s hands, in hiring the same persons to build two enormous houses for the government-man and the fund-holder, who live in palaces while we live in hovels. What are we, the people, the original ten men, the better for that? The taxes enable those who receive them to pay our masons, carpenters, &c., for working for them. If we had not been forced to pay the money in taxes, the same persons would have been employed by us for our common benefit. Suppose the government-man takes it into his head to build a colossus, a rotunda, a pyramid, or anything else equally absurd and gigantic, it would, we say, be a nuisance in proportion to its size. It would be ten times as great a nuisance if it was ten times bigger. If it covered a whole county, it would ruin the landed interest. If it was spread over the whole country, the country must starve. When the government-man and the fund-holder have got their great houses built, they must next have them furnished with proportionable magnificence, and by the same means; with Persian and Turkey carpets, with Egyptian sofas, down beds, silk curtains, china vases, services of plate, tables, chairs, stoves, glasses, mirrors, chandeliers, paper hangings, pictures, busts, ornaments, kickshaws without number, while you and I live on a mud floor, with bare walls, stuck with a penny ballad, with a joint-stool to sit upon, a tea-pot without a tea-spout to drink out of, a truckle-bed or some straw and a blanket to lie upon! Yet Mr. Burke says, that if we were suddenly converted into state-pensioners with thirty-thousand a year, we could not furnish our houses a bit the better for it. This is like Lord Peter, in the Tale of a Tub. Then the government-man and his friend must have their train of coaches, 137horses, dogs, footmen dressed in blue, green, yellow, and red, lazy rascals, making work for the taylor, the hatter, the shoemaker, the button-maker, the hair-dresser, the gold and silver laceman, to powder, dress, and trick them out, that they may lounge behind their mistresses’ coaches, walk before their sedan chairs, help on their master’s stockings, block up his doors, and perform a variety of little nameless offices, much to the ease and satisfaction of the great, but not of the smallest benefit to any one else. With respect to the article of dogs and horses, a word in Mr. Malthus’s ear. They come under the head of consumption, and a swinging item they are. They eat up the food of the children of the poor. The pleasure and coach-horses kept in this kingdom consume as much of the produce of the soil as would maintain all the paupers in it. Let a tax be laid upon them directly, to defray the expense of the poor-rates, and to suspend the operation of Mr. Malthus’s geometrical and arithmetical ratios. We see no physical necessity why that ingenious divine should put a stop to the propagation of the species, that he may keep two sleek geldings in his stable. We have lately read Swift’s account of the Houynhyms and Yahoos. There is some truth in it; but still it has not reconciled us to Mr. Malthus’s proposal of starving the children of the poor to feed the horses of the rich. But no more of that! We have said enough at present to shew how the taxes fly away with the money of a nation; how they go into the hands of the government-man and the fund-holder, and do not return into the pockets of the people, who pay them. For the future, Mr. Burke’s assertion, that the taxes are like the vapours that ascend into the clouds and return to the earth in fertilizing showers, may pass for an agreeable metaphor, but for nothing more. A pretty joke truly, this, of the people’s receiving their taxes back again in payment for what the rich want of them. It is as if I should buy a pound of beef in a butcher’s shop, and take the money out of his own till to pay him! It is as if a bill is presented to me for payment, and I ask the notary for the money to take it up with! It is as if a Noble Earl was to win 50,000l. of a Noble Duke over-night, and offer to return it to him the next morning, for one of his estates! It is as if Mr. Burke had been robbed of a bond for 4000l. and the fortunate possessor had offered to restore it, on receiving in lieu his house and gardens at Beaconsfield! Having thus pointed out the nature of the distress, we need not inquire far for the remedy.