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Questions
[2] This
policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection, or rather the
happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and
above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper
and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of
England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of
conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a
principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free, but it secures what it
acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these
maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family
settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever. By a constitutional
policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit
our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we enjoy and
transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of
fortune, the gifts of providence are handed down to
us, and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed
in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world and with
the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory
parts, wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together
the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time,
is never old or middle-aged or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable
constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall,
renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the
conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we
retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those
principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of
antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of
inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in
blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic
ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections,
keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and
mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres,
and our altars. [3]
Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in
our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and
powerful instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our
reason, we have derived several other, and those no small, benefits from
considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if
in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in
itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of
a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity which
prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing
those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our
liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect.
It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits, its
monumental inscriptions, its records, evidences, and titles. We procure
reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature
teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age and on account
of those from whom they are descended. All your sophisters
cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly
freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature
rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the
great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges. [4] YOU
MIGHT, IF YOU PLEASED, have profited of our example and have given to your
recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though
discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your constitution, it is true, whilst
you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you
possessed in some parts the walls and in all the foundations of a noble and
venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built
on those old foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was perfected,
but you had the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be
wished.. . . [5] You
had all these advantages in your ancient states, but you chose to act as if
you had never been molded into civil society and had everything to begin anew.
You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to
you. You set up your trade without a capital. If the last generations of your
country appeared without much luster in your eyes, you might have passed them
by and derived your claims from a more early race of
ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations
would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom beyond the vulgar
practice of the hour; and you would have risen with the example to whose
imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been
taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the
French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of lowborn servile wretches
until the emancipating year of 1789. . . . [6]
BELIEVE ME, SIR, those who attempt to level, never equalize. In all
societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description
must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the
natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in
the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. The
association of tailors and carpenters, of which the republic (of Paris, for
instance) is composed, cannot be equal to the situation into which by the
worst of usurpations- an usurpation on the prerogatives of nature- you
attempt to force them. [7] I do
not, my dear Sir, conceive you to be of that sophistical, captious spirit, or
of that uncandid dulness,
as to require, for every general observation or sentiment, an explicit detail
of the correctives and exceptions which reason will presume to be included in
all the general propositions which come from reasonable men. You do not
imagine that I wish to confine power, authority, and distinction to blood and
names and titles. No, Sir. There is no qualification for government but
virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive. Wherever they are actually found,
they have, in whatever state, condition, profession, or trade, the passport
of Heaven to human place and honor. Woe to the country which would madly and
impiously reject the service of the talents and virtues, civil, military, or
religious, that are given to grace and to serve it, and would condemn to
obscurity everything formed to diffuse luster and glory around a state. Woe
to that country, too, that, passing into the opposite extreme, considers a
low education, a mean contracted view of things, a sordid, mercenary
occupation as a preferable title to command. Everything ought to be open, but
not indifferently, to every man. No rotation; no appointment by lot; no mode
of election operating in the spirit of sortition or
rotation can be generally good in a government conversant in extensive
objects. Because they have no tendency, direct or indirect, to select the man
with a view to the duty or to accommodate the one to the other. I do not
hesitate to say that the road to eminence and power, from obscure condition,
ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much
of course. If rare merit be the rarest of all rare things, it ought to pass
through some sort of probation. The temple of honor ought to be seated on an
eminence. If it be opened through virtue, let it be remembered, too, that
virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle. . . . [8] The
science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it,
is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is
it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because
the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; but that which in
the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation,
and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the
beginning. The reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very
pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions. In
states there are often some obscure and almost latent causes, things which
appear at first view of little moment, on which a very great part of its
prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend. The science of
government being therefore so practical in itself and intended for such
practical purposes- a matter which requires experience, and even more
experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and
observing he may be- it is with infinite caution that any man ought to
venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable
degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again without
having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes. [9]
These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which
pierce into a dense medium, are by the laws of nature refracted from their
straight line. Indeed, in the gross and complicated mass of human passions
and concerns the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of
refractions and reflections that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they
continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is
intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity;
and, therefore, no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable
either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear the
simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political
constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly
ignorant of their trade or totally negligent of their duty. The simple
governments are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them. . . . [10] The
pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in proportion as
they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The
rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not
impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their
advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good, in
compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and
evil. Political reason is a computing principle: adding, subtracting,
multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically,
true moral denominations.
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