right, and breaking down the defences of its political liberty, have been to our country for more than seven hundred years a constant source of oppression and calamity, sometimes more galling, sometimes less sensibly vexatious, but at all periods, with very transient exceptions even at the moment of critical reform, producing a greater or lesser inundation of evil, laying waste and deforming our political inheritance, how delightful the thought that, by asserting our natural right and by restoring the defences of our liberty, the inundation shall be stayed, and the virtuous heart of England be gladdened by a golden harvest of freedom waving through the land! 83. Although, on the grounds we have explained, we are full of hope and confidence of a happy result, yet we forget not our remark that in place of benefiting from the soundness of the Constitution, we are suffering through its decay, in place of experiencing national se'curity from a faithful adherence to this criterion of right government, 'unfaithful deviations have brought us into the extremity of danger.'* 84. Great, indeed, must have been the decay and the deviations that can account for the visible desperation with which ministers now prosecute a losing and hopeless war; for an obvious despair among ordinary statesmen of our affairs being long mended by a peace; and for the very extensive foreboding, that our state, having lost its once proud ascendant over France, is tottering to its fall, and our country rapidly sinking into ruin and slavery. 85. The wide extent of our foreign possessions affords no consolation; the capture of island after island adds nothing to our strength; vassals brought under our yoke by millions promise no support; nor can the occasional flashes of glory from naval and military heroism dissipate the gloom; hundreds of millions, wrung from industry by taxation without representation have been spent-to humble our own country and exalt her foe; and profusely on every soil has the blood of England been shed ;—but still, deeper and deeper we sink in difficulty, danger, and despondence! 86. The sole secret of this mockery of our madness, of this desertion of our duty, of this bitter fruit of our folly, is that legislative authority is transferred from legitimate, responsible trustees, to lawless spoilers; spoilers whose wealth increases with national distress, whose aggrandisement keeps pace with national degradation, and whose gainful corruptions, blinding the eyes and hardening the heart, cause an infatuation as inveterate as that of Pharaoh, which ended not until he, his chariots, his horsemen, and his whole host were overwhelmed in destruction, so that there remained not so much as one of them? 87. So long as a Borough Faction shall in reality be our rulers, servility will continue to be the prime recommendation to all employments, experienced enmity to the rights of the people their strongest bond of union. From rulers such as these, what has a 56 56. See Sect. 6. nation to expect but "great and insufferable oppressions?" They accordingly incessantly ply the dire scourge of laxation without repre sentation, which draws blood at every stroke:"-richly merited, we confess, by a nation that neglects its duties and deserts its rights! But rulers such as these sympathetically screen peculators from pu.. nishment; and when they, in " contempt of all law," have themselves either defrauded the Treasury, or planted their daggers in the bosom of the Constitution, a Bill of Indemnity, a mere act of their own will and pleasure, protects them from a nation's vengeance!* 88. We like not the language of asperity; still less do we approve that of indecorum; but when "great and insufferable oppressions" are felt; when wrong is extreme and insolently wanton; when a settled systematic scheme of such a faction" to enslave the nation" is become as notorious as the sun at noon day; fallen and base indeed must they be, who, in compliment to the fashionably tame or politely servile, weigh their words in the scales of polish and refinement ! 89. With the anomaly of legislation and executive government being in the same hands, and those the hands of the agents of a borough faction holding power by USURPATION, as well as by the tenure of daily sacrificing to the demon of despotism, could it be a matter of surprise that, although a nation were writhing in the agony of the worst of all distempers, that is, the existence of such a faction, all courses for bettering its condition should be pursued except the right one; all expedients resorted to, except that alone which could throw off the disease, of which failure abroad and calamity at home are but the mere symptoms? No, here is nothing to excite surprise. The sole ground of surprise is, that the nation, suffering as it does, doth not determine to throw off the faction, which would at once throw off its disease, with its train of symptoms, venal elections, a persecuted press, tyranny and pillage! 57. See Sect. 67. 58. See the Statutes of 1801, 1803, 1804 and 1805, to indemnify ministers for illegally advancing money; and particularly the Act of 1805, for indemnifying Mr. Pitt and Mr. Dundas, who lent 40,0001. of public money to Boyd and Benfield, members of Parliament, without interest, and which was kept secret for eight years, and then only brought to light by accident. men. But indemnities to those who had dared, against law, to introduce into the kingdom an army of FOREIGN SOLDIERS, are of far more serious consideration. By the Act of 1804, c. 75. the number of these FOREIGNERS was limited to ten thousand men; by that of 1806, c. 23, it was augmented to sixteen thousand We now probably have double that number. The original of these statutes, in a kingdom whose militia ought to consist of two millions five hundred thousand fighting men, organized and trained to arms, has this astonishing pre. amble:"Whereas it hath been deemed expedient by His Majesty, in order to provide in the speediest manner for the better DEFENCE and greater se curity of the United Kingdom, in the present important juncture of affairs, to permit certain FOREIGNERS, now in Great Britain, to inlist as soldiers into his Majesty's service;"&c. The Act acknowledges that such FOREIGNERS had, against law," been already inlisted, and formed into regiments, battalions, or corps. 59. See Section 67. PART V. Perfection of the Constitution. Means of restoring it. Their simplicity and sufficiency. Above all things, Liberty. The ancient Empires. Comparisons between Rome and England. 90. Ours is a case in which to know our disease, is to know our cure, to know our wrong is to know our remedy; and seeing that when our oppressive distemper shall be removed, health and vigour will return, we repeat DESPAIR NOT OF THE COMMONWEALTH! The Constitution restored by radical reform, all will yet be well! 91. Shall a People who boast a government founded on the purest principles of freedom, endure the thought of slavery! Shall a people who have exhibited in familiar practice a polity deemed by wise antiquity an unattainable perfection; a polity which a Tacitus, a Cicero, a Plato, rather contemplated as a divine speculation, than hoped for as possible among men; shall this people consent to surrender but with life a blessing so inestimable! Shall a people who for ten centuries have been the envied exemplars and political teachers of mankind allow themselves to become the most despised of Nations! the scorn of their species! Shall Islanders who, through RADICAL REFORM may organize a force of Two Millions and a half of fighting men, such as drew the bow at Agincourt, and charged with bayonet at Maida, such as mounted the breach at Badajos, and astonished the East at Aboukir, and the West at Trafalgar, consent to remain in a condition exposing them to subjugation by a foreign or domestic despot, and in which courage is unavailable! Shall an enlightened generation, whose unlettered ancestors unravelled the machinations, who broke all the measures of tyranny-who, by their UNION and FIRMNESS extorted a magna charta, be at a loss for the means of recovering their Rights and Liberties! 92. The military means, a restoration, according to the wish of the wise and virtuous Sir William Jones, of our proper Militia to "full vigour and energy;" the civil means, a recovery agreeably to the parliamentary proposition of one no less patriotic, of A DULY PROPORTIONED REPRESENTATION IN PARLIAMENTS OF A CONSTITU E 60 TIONAL DURATION. How beautiful, how grand, how simple the means of just government for the happiness and glory of nations! How adorable the divine Author of Nature affording to man for navigating the political ocean a compass whose needle is ever faithful to the pole of freedom, and whose every point is a principle of rectitude! 61 93. What more need be said, for inducing the well educated part of the community to support in their own conduct the reputation of their ancestors! What more need be said, for animating the disinterested, the noble, the high minded of a people, as devoted to truth and freedom as renowned in arts and arms, to flock around that constitutional standard—that rallying banner of the land, inscribed in letters of gold, “ Above all things Liberty!"* Or what more need be said for influencing the honest, the feeling, and the lovers of tranquillity, conscientiously to augment the UNION, until countless and invincible, it shall in the peaceful way of "petitions of right" ensure its object, RADICAL REFORM; that this generation may receive right, posterity, justice; and the virtues, and energies, and glory of England continue a blessing to mankind; A REFORM, without which, with the fallen empires of Assyria, of Persia, of Greece, and Rome, she must drink the bitter cup of degradation and human contempt! 94. No: this, we trust, shall not be! With none of these may England be strictly compared. The three first of those empires erected on no maxims of free government, were wholly without principles of duration. The last, though more deservedly fortunate, had those principles but very imperfectly. Springing from an acorn dropped on the bank of the Tiber, slow was the growth of this storm-withstanding oak to that greatness with which she overshadowed so many nations. Schooled as she had been in simplicity of manners and hardihood, in civic virtue, martial wisdom, growing out of the necessity of war, long it is true she retained her verdant honours. Circumstanced and surrounded as she originally had been, her alternative was, to conquer or to be subdued. But subsequent to the fall of her rival Carthage, the ascendant she maintained was more the effect of comparative weakness and inferior military science in other nations, than of true principles of duration in her own government. 95. Strong without doubt must have been that state which, from its maturity to its dissolution, required ages and centuries for its decay. But this, as already intimated, was a contingent; whereas, had her government possessed true principles of duration, she might have flourished to this day, and yet been young, although Carthage had never fallen, and in contempt of Goths and Vandals. 96. The principles of duration which, correctly speaking, were un 60. See Commons' Journals, 15 June, 1809. 61. Written by Selden in all his books in the original Greek, but with the feelings of an enlightened Englishman. See those books in the Bodleian Li brary at Oxford, to which they were bequeathed by that learned man. known to Rome, are the fundamental principles, military and civil, of the English Constitution. The early Romans, although they exhibited, and with an energy beyond all praise, what may be called the spirit of a military state, were yet without a perpetually existing body. Every Citizen, it is true, was trained to arms; but if an armed force were suddenly wanted, it did not exist. This was a radical defect in principle. Besides which, no line was drawn between the duty of defending their own state, and, at the command of the government, invading others. Unversed in political science, and misled by a vi sible necessity of sometimes acting offensively in self-defence, they saw not the fatal consequences to which this unlimited military obedience was to lead; an obedience incompatible with any idea of li-' berty, and consequently adverse to the duration of a state. 97. We have noticed the extraordinary fact, that, even for defence against sudden assault, although the whole Roman territory did not, at the expulsion of the Kings, exceed half the county of Middlesex, there existed not at all times in readiness an armed force for meeting invaders.* The manner of forming an army was this: An edict was issued; the people were assembled at the capitol; the tribes being separated into centuries, if four legions (the usual custom) were to be embodied, then four citizens were called out by name from lists kept for such purposes, respect being had to the age and the class of each citizen; three Tribunes having chosen each his soldier, the fourth belonged of course to the remaining legion; when the like process was repeated till the levy was completed. Here, then, in the community lay the military matter inert, until the creating voice of a consul called it into existence, moulding it into a military body, which it quickened with the breath of life. And it is obvious that, besides the circumstance of there not existing a defensive force, either against invasion, insurrection, or tumult, so inconsistent with true and well secured freedom, here, in this military creation contrary again to genuine liberty, there was far too much of an arbitrary selection and discretion vested in the magistrate. 98. Essentially superior, being essential to political liberty itself, is that military system of England, which received at its creation both a perpetual body and an imperishable soul; in its NATURAL or PROPER MILITIA, and in its PRINCIPLES, arising from the selfevident right, and the self-evident duty, of being ever in armed readiness for preserving the peace and defending the life of the state. It was beautifully feigned, that the goddess of WISDOM, spear in hand, and in complete panoply, sprang from the head of Jove; so the martial WISDOM of England, at the voice of the Magistrate comes forth at any moment, armed, majestic, resistless! And thus every particle of the physical force of the whole kingdom may, " on one uni 62 63 62. Kennet, who says, of no larger extent than that of Parma or Mantua at present; namely, 1746, p. 5. 63. Ib. 183. |