Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

not despise. They warm the heart; they enlarge and liberalize our minds; they animate our courage in a time of conflict. Old as I am, I read the fine raptures of Lucan and Corneille with pleasure. Neither do I wholly condemn the little arts and devices of popularity. They facilitate the carrying of many points of moment; they keep the people together; they refresh the mind in its exertions; and they diffuse occasional gaiety over the severe brow of moral freedom. Every politician ought to sacrifice to the graces; and to join compliance with reason. But in such an undertaking as that in France, all these subsidiary sentiments and artifices are of little avail. To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power; teach obedience: and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE.

No man, under the false and hypocritical pretence of liberty of conscience, ought to be suffered to have no conscience at all.

LOANS.

A CORRUPT and improvident loan, like every thing else corrupt or prodigal, cannot be too much condemned but there is a short-sighted parsimony still more fatal than an unforeseeing expence. The value of money must be judged like every thing else from its rate at market. To force that market, or any market, is of all things the most dangerous. For a small

temporary benefit, the spring of all public credit might be relaxed for ever. The monied men have a right to look to advantage in the investment of their property. To advance their money, they risk it; and the risk is to be included in the price. If they were to incur a loss, that loss would amount to a tax on that peculiar species of property. In effect, it would be the most unjust and impolitic of all things, unequal taxation. It would throw upon one description of persons in the community, that burthen which ought by fair and equitable distribution to rest upon the whole. None on account of their dignity should be exempt; none (preserving due proportion) on account of the scantiness of their means. The moment a man is exempted from the maintenance of the community, he is in a sort separated from it. He loses the place of a citizen.

So it is in all taxation; but in a bargain, when terms of loss are looked for by the borrower from the lender, compulsion, or what virtually is compulsion, introduces itself into the place of treaty. When compulsion may be at all used by a state in borrowing, the occasion must determine. But the compulsion ought to be known, and well defined, and well distinguished: for otherwise treaty only weakens the energy of compulsion, while compulsion destroys the freedom of a bargain. The advantage of both is lost by the confusion of things in their nature utterly unsociable. It would be to introduce compulsion into that in which freedom and existence are the same; I mean credit. The moment that shame, or fear, or force, are directly or indirectly applied to a loan, credit perishes.

There must be some impulse besides public spirit, to put private interest into motion along with it. Monied men ought to be allowed to set a value on their money; if they did not, there could be no monied

men. This desire of accumulation, is a principle without which the means of their service to the state could not exist. The love of lucre, though sometimes carried to a ridiculous, sometimes to a vicious excess, is the grand cause of prosperity to all states. In this natural, this reasonable, this powerful, this prolific principle, it is for the satyrist to expose the ridiculous; it is for the moralist to censure the vicious; it is for the sympathetic heart to reprobate the hard and cruel; it is for the judge to animadvert on the fraud, the extortion, and the oppression; but it is for the statesman to employ it as he finds it, with all its concomitant excellencies, with all its imperfections on its head. It is his part, in this case, as it is in all other cases, where he is to make use of the general energies of nature, to take them as he find them.

*

It is never wise to quarrel with the interested views of men, whilst they are combined with the public interest and promote it: it is our business to tie the knot if possible, closer. Resources that are derived from extraordinary virtues, as such virtues are rare, so they must be unproductive.

LOCAL ATTACHMENT.

Ir is boasted, that the geometrical policy has been adopted, that all local ideas should be sunk, and that the people should no longer be Gascons, Picards, Bretons, Normans, but Frenchmen, with one country, one heart, and one assembly. But instead of being all Frenchmen, the greater likelihood is that the inhabitants of that region will shortly have no country. No man ever was attached by a sense of pride, partiality, or real affection, to a description of square mea

*

surement. He never will glory in belonging to the checquer, N° 71, or to any other badge-ticket. We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen. We pass on to our neighbourhoods, and our habitual provincial connexions. These are inns and resting places. Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so many little images of the great country in which the heart found something which it could fill. The love to the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality. Perhaps it is a sort of elemental training to those higher and more large regards, by which alone men come to be affected, as with their own concern, in the prosperity of a kingdom so extensive as that of France. In that general territory itself, as in the old name of provinces, the citizens are interested from old prejudices and unreasoned habits, and not on account of the geometric properties of its figure.

****

It is exceedingly common for men to contract their love to their country, into an attachment to its petty subdivisions; and they sometimes even cling to their provincial abuses, as if they were franchises, and local privileges.

LOVE.

THE passion called love, has so general and powerful an influence; it makes so much of the entertainment, and indeed so much the occupation of that part of life which decides the character for ever, that the mode and the principles on which it engages the sympathy, and strikes the imagination, become of the

The

Self Love but serves
generous soul to wake,
as the small pebble stirs the peaceful Lake -
mova a circle next succeeds,

[ocr errors]

and still another spreadls

hours, kinsmens fist it tell embrace, at, and then the human race.

utmost importance to the morals and manners of every
society.

LOVE OF ADVENTURE.

OUR complexion is such, that we are palled with enjoyment, and stimulated with hope; that we become less sensible to a long-possessed benefit, from the very circumstance that it is become habitual. Specious, untried, ambiguous prospects of new advantage recommend themselves to the spirit of adventure, which more or less prevails in every mind. From this temper, men, and factions, and nations too, have sacrificed the good, of which they had been in assured possession, in favour of wild and irrational expectations.

MANNERS.

BUT the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters,
œconomists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the
glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never,
never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to
rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified
obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept
alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted
freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap de-
fence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and
heroic enterprize is gone! It is gone, that sensibility
of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain
like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it miti-
gated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched,
and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing
all its grossness

This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had
its origin in the ancient chivalry; and the principle,
though varied in its appearance by the varying state
of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a
long succession of generations, even to the time we

barth smiles around in boundless beauty blast,

and heaven beholdes his

[ocr errors]
« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »