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A Selection by

R. J. WHITE

Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of History,
Uni'versity of Cambridge

A/, •.ii

JONATHAN CAPE
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FIRST PUBLISHED I938

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CONTENTS

PREFACE 9

INTRODUCTION IX

PART ONE, YOUTH. (179I-I796)

1. RELIGION 31

2 , PHILOSOPHY ./ 33

3. POLITICS 34

(a) The French Revolution; the first phase 34

(b) Pantisocracy "■ 35

4, HIS OWN TIMES 44

Edmund Burke 44

PART TWO. GROWTH. (1797-I809)

1. RELIGION 47

2 . PHILOSOPHY 48

3. POLITICS 49

(a) The French Revolution: the second phase 52

(b) Men and Governments 54

(d) Political power proportionate to property 56

(e) The English Aristocracy 57

4. HIS OWN TIMES 57

(a) In defence of enthusiasm 57

(b) On the Constitution of the Consulate: i 799 5 ^

(d) Desirability of peace with France: 1800 63

(e) Mr. Pitt 68

(f) The Spanish resistance to Bonaparte: 1809 74

(g) Bonaparte: 1809 75

(h) Political squibs and satires: 1798-1800 77

CONTENTS

PART THREE. MATURITY. (1809-1834)

1. RELIGION 83

(a) Confessio Fidei: November 3rd5 i8i6 83

(b) Essay on Faith 85

2, PHILOSOPHY 92

(a) The importance of philosophy 92

(b) Decline of philosophy in modern times 98

(d) The Reason and the Understanding 106*

POLITICS 109

a) Criticism of Political Thought resulting from

Mechanic Philosophy 109

(i) Hobbes 109

(ii) Rousseau " x 13

(iii) Jacobinism: or rights before duties 118

(iv) Major Cartwright and Universal Suffrage 120

12 I

(v) Utilitarian Ethics

(b) The Idealist Method

(i) The State as an organism
(li) The Spirit of a Nation

(iii) Patriotism the basis of Internationalism

(iv) The Law of Nations

(v) The Purposes of the State

(vi) The State in relation to the Church
The English Constitution

(i) Permanence and Progression
(li) Property as a Public Trust
Jii) The National Church
Jv) Functions of the National Church
(v) Conditions of the health of the Body Politic 175

131

139

142

146

152

154

U 5

155

161

164

168

CONTENTS

4. HIS OWN TIMES 182

(a) The Present Discontents: 1817 182

(i) An appeal to the higher and middle

classes 182

(ii) England's advantages 183

(hi) Immediate occasion of the discontents 184

(iv) Ultimate causes of the discontents 194

(b) A Letter to Lord Liverpool: 1817 209

(d) Political Economy 221

(e) Education. Mistaken ideas — 223

(i) That it is dangerous 223

(ii) That reading and writing are education 224

(iii) That the Monitorial system is adequate 226

(iv) That Infant Schools are preferable to

‘cottage-home education’ 227

(f) The Great Reform Bill: 1832 227

(g) Personalities and Problems 234

BIBLIOGRAPHY 247

REFERENCES 2^1

SOME INTERPRETERS OF COLERIDGE AS A POLITICAL

THINKER 2 65

INDEX 269

Setting out to write a book on the political thought of
Coleridge, I became immediately aware of the difficulty
of referring readers to his original writings. Almost all the
great volume of his work on politics is long out of print and
generally difficult of access. It seemed a useful, and, in view
'of my original purpose, an essential task, to put together
those passages of his political writings which remain of
permanent interest and importance. To this incentive was
added the needs of a number of students to whom I was
engaged in expounding Coleridge’s political thought. 1
would inscribe this book to them.

My aim has been to try to present, in the author’s own
words, both the development ot his ideas, and a view of his
thought at its maturity. Since Coleridge never composed
anything like a comprehensive statement of his political
thought, this has involved the extensive use of scissors and
paste. I have constructed the patchwork from the great
variety of materials, pamphlets, table-talk and letters, which is
described in the bibliography: concealing the seams, so far
as possible, by the adjustment of punctuation, capital letters,
and a few linking sentences of my own in square brackets.
Everything, except the words in square brackets, is Coler¬
idge’s own, and its origin may be discovered by the marginal
numbers which refer to the table of references at the end of
the book.

I have to thank the Rev. G. H. B. Coleridge for per¬
mission to iise a passage from an unpublished MS. in his
possession and to quote at length from Coleridge’s letters;

PREFACE

Professor J. H, Muirliead both for advice and for the aids to
rad^ment of Coleridge's achievement which are so excellently
provided in his book, Coleridge as Philosopher'^ Dr. Philip
Gosse for permission to reprint excerpts from the two
Addresses of Coleridge on Sir Robert Peel's Bill, which
were privately printed by his father, Sir Edmund Gosse, in
1913; and the Oxford University Press for permission to
quote at length from E. H. Coleridge's edition of the Poems.
To Messrs. Jonathan Cape I am greatly indebted for their
enlightenment in undertaking to publish a work which"
might otherwise have been relegated to the limbo of 'un-
commierciar propositions.

Cambridge, 1938

R. J. W.

As poet and critic, Coleridge is ranked among the greatest
in our literature. As a thinker on politics he remains, at
least to the average reader, either unknown or as a ‘renegade
’Jacobin’. Most people bracket him with the other ‘Lake
Poets’, Wordsworth and Southey, who gloried in their youth
in the French Revolution and spent the rest of their days
in a kind of stupor of penitent reaction. This is not quite
false as regards Wordsworth, nor quite true as regards
Southey. It is not true at all of Coleridge. Yet even Alice
Meynell could write of him: ‘He soon yielded to the fatuous
impulse of reaction, when he became a Tory.’ Even if
there were nothing fatuously reactionary in being a Tory,
the statement would be absurd.

Coleridge was never any more a Tory than he was a
Radical. He was a great Christian philosopher and seer.
To attach party labels to such a man is even less informative
than to call Burke a Whig or Cobbett a Radical. The
procedure is misleading, and in Coleridge’s case abusive.
The only sense in which the use of the description ‘Tory’ for
Coleridge is meaningful, is that of Mr. Keith Feiling.
Mr. Feiling associates Coleridge with Tories of the stamp
of Harley, Bolingbroke, Pitt, Canning, Young England
and Disraeli, ‘those who have performed the pioneer task
of bridging the party over the intellectual and political
revolutions’ of the last two hundred years . . . When,
accordingly, they pruned the abuses of one age with

INTRODUCTION

1 ..

111

ij.ns"D2.011 they reverted, to tlie first 3 ,iid perrri 3 ,iicnt

orinciDies of conservatism^ and looked behind the institu¬
tions Oi their own g’cneration for the spirit of the nation
which ^ave them lite^. This is, perhaps, little more than to
sav that they are political thinkers with a sense of history.
Certainly their conservatism should be written with a
small Th And when all is said, Coleridge’s influence was
rather on Carlyle, Newman and Maurice than on Disraeli.
His name does not appear in the index to the three thousand
pages of Messrs. Monypenny and Buckle.

He described himself^, a little bitterly, in i Say, as a Man
of Letters, friendless because of no Faction’ who had seen
his publications 'abused by the Edinburgh Review as the
representative of one Party, and not even noticed by the
Quarterly Review as the Representative of the other . .
Nearly twenty years earlier, Lord Lovrther had deplored
the non-party character of The Friend, 'I almost despair of
the Conser\^ative Party,’ Coleridge wrote in 1832, 'too truly,
I fear, and most ominously, self-designated Tories, and of
course half-truth men.’ The great ministries of his lifetime
w'ere those of Pitt and Liverpool. He was a regular critic of
the one, and contemptuous of the other. He was as likely a
party man as Thomas Carlyle or D. H. Lawrence. Like
William Cobbett and Robert Owen, he sought not the
triumph of a party, but the regeneration of society. Cobbett
w^anted a healthy peasantry, beer, and common decency,
which he imagined to be the past, Owen wanted a clean
and virtuous commonwealth of Socialists, which he
imagined to be the future. Coleridge wanted the England
of Christian patriots which belonged to neither past,
present, nor future; the England which existed, and still
exists, immanent in her history, obscured by men’s sins

INTRODUCTION

and follieSj plain for all to see who are not made blind by
party-isms or sectarian doxies. He wanted England to be
herself, and Englishmen to be themselves.

‘In two points of view I reverence man; first, as a citizen
. , . and secondly, as a Christian. If men are neither the one
nor the other, but a mere aggregation of individual bipeds,
who acknowledge no national unity, nor believe with me in
Christ, I have no more personal sympathy with them than
with the dust beneath my feet.’ He is, therefore, a teacher [ivj
'for those who love men rather than Man. His most bitter
criticism of Pitt was that he talked in ‘general phrases,
unenforced by one single image, one single fact, of real
national amelioration; of any one comfort enjoyed where it
was not before; of any one class of society becoming
healthier, wiser, or happier. These are things^ these arc [v]
realities , . He suspected philanthropists as ‘men not
benevolent or beneficent to individuals . . . yet lavishing
money and labour and time on the race, the abstract notion’, [vi]
In supporting Peel’s Factory Bill in i8i8 he wrote:
‘Generalities are apt to deceive us. Individualize the
sufferings which it is the object of this Bill to remedy,
follow up the detail in some one case with a human sympathy,
and the deception vanishes.’ [vii]

Such a position might, at first sight, seem to indicate an
apostle of ‘common sense’, whereas everyone knows that
Coleridge was a ‘High German Transcendentalist'. But
the apostle of common sense generally ends in uncommon
nonsense, and the metaphysician brings home the bacon.

If we dismiss Coleridge’s metaphysics we shall understand
neither the origin nor the true nature of his political ideas.
Metaphysics has never been the strong suit of English
political theorists. Our most typical political philosopher

INTRODUCTION

is ToKn Locke, and Locke did little more than rationalize
the common sense of the intelligent Englishman of his day.
‘NIercy on the Age and the People for whom Locke is
profound and Hume subtle/ Coleridge exclaimed in a note
in Pepys’s Diary. Yet, for all the pragmatism of the English
mind, it was reserved for a Scot to describe Coleridge's
mietaphysics as ‘Transcendental Moonshine'. In sober fact,
It was Coleridge’s metaphysics w^hich preserved him first
iromi the barren formulas of the Utilitarian, and secondly
from the confusion of the Ideal and the Actual which is the'
bane ot the Transcendentalist.

John Stuart Mill, who ranked Coleridge with Bentham,
as one of the two great seminal minds of their age, realized
tliat one of the chief weaknesses of Utilitarianism was its

[ix] ignorance of a philosophy of national character. Such a
philosophy Coleridge supplied. Again, the Utilitarians
had little regara tor history t they might never have heard of
Burke s conception of the State as a partnership between the
living, the dead, and the yet unborn. Coleridge restored
historicity to political thought, and taught that ‘the flux
of individuals m any one moment of existence is there for the
sake of the State, far more than the State for them; though

[x] both positions are true proportionally . , And he arrived
at these conceptions through his metaphysics, otherwise so
despised among his countrymen. Idealism, self-derivative,
deepened by his study of the German thinkers, had given
him the philosophy of the Tdea' - the indwelling idea of
man, the State, the universe, determined by their own ends,
immanent in their history, working themselves out in Time!
Ail codes and customs and institutions were to be studied
with reference to their embodiment of an idea. 'All history,
in the largest sense, was a vast redemptive process. As

INTRODUCTION

Professor Muirhead has put it: 'Coleridge regarded all
actual constitutions, including that of his own country, as
temporary and imperfect embodiments of an "idea'^ that was
slowly revealing itself on earth, if not as a City of God,
at any rate as a society of seekers after Him.’ The vital [xi]
difference between Coleridge and the high-and-dry Idealist
is, that he distinguished between the existing, imperfect
embodiment of the idea, and the ultimate, perfect embodi-
- ment. This distinction left him free to submit existing
institutions to a searching criticism. It made impossible
his allegiance to the Tory Party. It was the source of a
radicalism more radical than that of the ‘Philosophic’ of
that ilk, a criticism more profound and more constructive than
that of any of his contemporaries, and most of his successors.

The 'Idea’ of private property as a public trust, for instance,
was, and will yet be, more revolutionary than the communist
doctrine of property, not least because it was a reversion to
the ‘Idea’ of private property rather than an unwarranted [xii]
assumption about human nature.

And just as his metaphysics preserved him from the
atomic view of the State, so his religion — which was
unseparable from his metaphysics — preserved him from
the folly of the State-worshipper. First and last is man’s
conscience. First and last men are individuals. They are
equal only in the sight of God, and a Church is the only true
democracy. We are men first, and because we are men we [xiii]
are Christians, and because we are Christians we are
individuals. God is the unity of every nation, and the first
duty of every man is to his conscience, which is the still,
small voice of God. The State exists to enable us to be
better men. ‘Let us become a better people’ and all else
shall be added unto us. It is, he might almost have said with [xiv]

INTRODUCTION

Sc An^iistinej a penalty and a remedy for man’s sin. We
are not ^cod enoneh to live without the StatCj but together
we may use it for our redemption.

Perhaps he wavered. England seemed on the verge ot
anarchv wEen he wrote to Lord Liverpool, in 1817, that it
w^as hiAn time that the subjects of Christian Governments
'should be taught that neither historically, or morally, in
fact, or bv right, have men made the State; but that the
State and that alone makes them men’; that they are there •
for the State, rather than the State for them 'though both
[w] positions are true proportionally . . .’ Proportionally,
There is the crux. It is useless to search the pages of
Coleridge for a blessing upon the Totalitarian State. He
was a Christian before he was an Idealist, even if he was an
Idealist because he was a Christian.

Coleridge’s religious faith has deterred, and no doubt still
deters, many who would otherwise accept his teaching.
To Carlyle it was incomprehensible that such 'a sublime
man should subscribe to the old Anglican Church 'with
[xvi] its singular old rubrics and surplices at All Hallowtide . . .’
To such critics, there is no answer, only an admonishment :
Go, read wEat Coleridge had to say on the National Church,
and rememiber always the distinction between its Idea and
the actualization thereof. In Idea, the National Church was
the guardian of the national culture, and included within it
£ill the learned, or the clensy’, of the realm. It was the
Tvii] civilizing force in society, the leaven in the lump. In actual¬
ity, however, the Church of Coleridge’s day was far from a
perfect embodiment of its Idea, and he was keenly aware
of It. 'The present prospects of the Church weigh heavily
on my soul ,. . There seems to me at present to be a curse
upon the English Church . . .’ It had clung too much to

INTRODUCTION

the court and the State^ it had lost the hearts of the people,
it was 'blighted with prudence’. But, by holding fast to its [xviii]
Idea, he was able to set men on the right path to its revival
as a living influence in society.

I I

Coleridge’s lifetime coincided with that re-birth of the
Lockian materialist philosophy which found its form in
Benthamite Utilitarianism. Born in 1772, four years before
the publication of Bentham’s Fragment of Government^ he
died in 1834, only two years before Bentham’s most influen¬
tial disciple, James Mill. Moreover, Coleridge, though
never a Utilitarian (save with a small 'u’), lived in the Locke
‘tradition before he became its critic. It can never be said
that he criticized it as an outsider: he knew it from within,
and burst from its cramping confines. He belonged to its
Hartleyan period: like Hartley, he was at Jesus College,
Cambridge; he called his first-born David Hartley Coler¬
idge ; and it is notable that he laid stress on Hartley as a great
'Christian philosopher. This was in But his mind [xix]

could not rest there. What was it that drove him thence.^

First, I think it is well to remember that he came of a
country clergyman’s family: his earliest impressions must
■ have been steeped in the gentle piety of the Rev. John
Coleridge, Vicar of Ottery St. Mary’s. He lived in a
Christian home until he was ten. Again, he came of country¬
folk, a long line of farmers and peasants, dwellers in remote
places where change is slow and the abiding verities of man
are not easily dismissed as antique prejudices. The love of
nature, the beauty of wood and field and stream, entered

INTRODUCTION

into him early, and no sensitive child brought up in the
country can escape a wondering sense of the unity of all
living things. There dwells a spirit immanent in nature;
to a young Hardy or a Housman it may be a cruel and
malicious fate; to a gentler, more trusting mind, it is a just
and merciful God.

There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind,

Omniiic, His most holy name is Love. . . ,

. . . But his God

Diffused through all that doth make all one whole . . .

While to James Mill there was no God because there was
cruelty and suffering in the world, to the young Coleridge
who from lakes and mountain-rills, clouds, quiet dales,
and rocks and seas, had drunk in all his intellectual life,
there could be no extinction at the grave. Where was there
room for death hn this moving, stirring and harmonious
universe’? The problem resolves itself finally to this: a
man either knows that there is no death, or he does not;
either he knows that matter is not the ‘ultimate particle’ of
the universe, or he does not; no one, and no thing, can prove
it to him, either way, Coleridge knew, always. He was that
kind of man. His upbringing strengthened the knowledge,
it did not create it.

But how was this inconsistent with the philosophy of
Locke and the gentle Hartley? There might be one Mind,
Ommific, etc. .. . but, suppose that Mind made the universe
and man as a kind of machine, a clock with wheels within
wheels? Why not? Was there any reason why the mind of
man should not be ‘a lazy looker-on,’ a register of sense-
impressions, a kind of automatic contrivance that works on
the phenomena presented to it by the one Mind Omnific?

INTRODUCTION

There was nonCj so far as Coleridge could see^ until i8oi.

So he was a Necessitarian. Men are made what they are by
circumstances. It was a doctrine well-suited to the under-
graduatCj the writer of odes on the destruction of bastilleSj
the Pantisocrat. Change the world and you can change men.
Infinite perfectability follows. Unlimited hope of improve¬
ment in this world. It is only a matter of getting rid of
KingS) Priests, Aristocrats, and like pests. Nor was the
young Coleridge prepared to sit down and wait for the
iliillennium. He lectured at Bristol, he preached and tried
to practise Pantisocracy, he founded The Watchman ('That
all may know the truth, and the truth may make us free’),
and went on tour to get subscribers. The most important
of these activities for the future development of his mind
was Pantisocracy. He decided to actualize the Tdea’ in a
little community on the banks of the Susquehannah.
Pantisocracy has been the subject of tolerant smiles on the
part of the unknowing. To Coleridge it was, as Stephen
Potter has shown, his first attempt to actualize an Tdeak [xxii]
It failed. Men proved to be less susceptible of practical
enthusiasm than he had once thought. The failure of The
Watchman and his experience of patriots when he canvassed
for subscribers, drove home the lesson, Tn the amiable
intoxication of youthful benevolence’, he was to write in
1809, 'men are apt to mistake their own best virtues and
choicest powers for the average qualities and attributes of
the human character . . .’ Already, in The Watchman in [xxiii]
1796, he was writing: Tn my calmer moments I have the
firmest faith that all things work together for good, but
alas! it seems a long and a dark process.’ Within two years [xxiv]
the change had come. T wish’, he wrote to his brother
George in April, 1798, 'to be a good man and a Christian,

INTRODUCTION

bnt I am no Whig^ no Reformist, no Republican . , .
[xsv] Governments’, he says, ‘are more the effect than the cause
of that which we are.’ Men will, in fact, get the kind of
government they deserve. The stress has moved from
circumstances to men. Make men good, and governments
will be good. The wheel has come full circle.

How are we to make men good.^ By ‘nigher and more
continuous’ agencies than governments. Nor is infinite
perfectability in this world to be hoped for. In that same
letter of 1798 he admits to a steadfast belief in original siii.
The sole cure is to be found in the spirit of the Gospel.

If human institutions are not to be regarded as the
finally efficient instruments of human perfectability, how
are they to be regarded.^ During the next three years he was
discovering the answer. From September 1798 to July 1799
he was studying in Germany. From 1799 to 1801 he was
studying the problems of his own times as a writer on the
Morning Post, In 1801 he was hard at work on German
metaphysics. In March, 1801, come the famous letters to
Thomas Poole, in which he claims to have overthrown ‘all
the irreligious metaphysics of modern infidels — especially
the doctrine of necessity’. The mind of man, he is con¬
vinced, is no mere ‘lazy looker-on on an external world’ but
[ixvi] made in God s image . And, as ever, his metaphysical
notions and his religious beliefs went together. Looking
back on this period in 1817, he wrote; T cannot doubt that
the difference of my metaphysical notions from those of
Unitarians in general contributed to my final re-conversion
.0 the whole truth in Christ.. And hi politics? ml of
human institutions? They are to be studied ‘according to
the Idea’. Coleridge is an Idealist.

How much did Germany contribute to this development?

INTRODUCTION

Was it just a plagiarism of 'Kant and the Germans’?
Professor Muirhead, who has gone into the question with
great learning and perception in his Coleridge as Philosopher^
tells us that 'the view that his own philosophy was little more
than a transcript from the German of Kant and Schelling
, . , would be a superficial view of the real state of the case,
and one of the first results of a closer study of his philo¬
sophical opinions as a whole is the conviction of its entire
baselessness.’ Professor Muirhead thinks 'there is no
reason to question either the sincerity or truth’ of Coleridge^s
own story of the development of his views. [xxviii

Moving into the Idealist position, delivered from the
Sensationalist impasse of a radical opposition between
subjective and objective reality, rejoicing in the return of
the mind from the position of a machine registering sense-
impressions to be a creative force in the shaping of truth;
Coleridge was led to initiate a revolution in English political
thought. Mind, ceasing to be the simple analytic reason of
the philosophes, and becoming a spiritual force capable of
apprehension by the individual by virtue of direct intuition,
the relationships of individuals are no longer confined to
external contacts between eternally separate entities.
Individuals meet and inter-penetrate and modify each
other. A society ceases to be simply the sum of the indi- [xxix]
viduals who compose it. In short, four and five may make
nine, but they are not nine. The State is now conceived as a
community bound together not only for reasons of utility:
it is a unity of mind, a spiritual community. Hence
Coleridge’s attempt to regain the State for the spiritual
sphere, hence his conception of the National Church.

He is led on to attempt a complete re-orientation of the
method of political science. The perceptions resulting from

INTRODUCTION

the impact of phenomena on the mind become the material
of philosophy. The political thinker is concerned with
something more than such phenomena in themselves. He is
concerned with their Tdea', the Tdea’ of the State, the Tdea'
of the National Church. And because these Tdeas' manifest
themselves in Time, History ceases to be a glorified news¬
reel, as it had been to the eighteenth-century philosopher,
and becomes a stereoscopic panorama, an epic of ideas.

The full fruit of this development of Coleridge’s thought
belongs to the last period of his life, after he had settled
at Highgate in 1816 and had sufficiently recovered from his
physical disabilities to compose The Lay Sermons and
The Constitution of the Church and State, But the first-
fruits may be seen at a much earlier date. Indeed, the
Idealist approach may be discerned even before his
intensive study of the German thinkers. It is evident as
early as 1799-1801 when he was writing for the Morning
Tosl To Thomas de Quincey it seemed that 'no more
appreciable monument could be raised to the memory of
Coleridge than a republication of his essays in the Morning
Tostj but still more of those afterwards published in tL
Courier . . . Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast
abyss^. .They were republished by his daughter, Sara
Coleridge, in 1850, under the title Essays on His Own
Times. The volumes have been long out of print. Yet
these writings, thrown off with the printer’s devil at his
elbow, contain some of the finest work that has ever
appeared in the English press. Rarely in political journalism
has any man evinced an equal power to grasp the meaning
and direction of contemporary events, to catch the very
stuff of history before it has become ‘History’, to convey
such swift and yet profound impressions in language which.

INTRODUCTION

while it remains good journalismj is yet great literature, [xxx]
We might say of Coleridge the journalist what Coleridge
said of Burke: that by habitual reference to principles he
was able to see all things, actions, and events, in relation to
the laws which determine their existence and circumscribe
their possibility. In other words, that he had become a
seer.

His Idealism comes out more plainly in the articles in
The Courier and in his periodical publication (1809-1810)

'The Friend. The former contain his brilliant exposure of [xxsi]
Utilitarian ethics and a striking passage on ‘the spirit of a [xxxii]
Nation’. In the pages of The Friend are to be found all the
essentials of his later philosophy: the Kantian distinction
between the Reason and the Understanding, the innate moral
principle of men and societies of men, the destructive
analysis of ‘the grounds of government as laid exclusively
in the pure reason’. The more formal and less perishable
works which proceeded from the Highgate period go no
further in substance.

Ill

The most striking feature of Coleridge’s thought is its
unity. This is true even of its expression in literary form.
It is a false dichotomy which would divide his metaphysics
from his poetry, or his politics from either. Why not
metaphysics in poetry? he asked Thelwall in 1797 -
not draw up a self-denying ordinance for poets. And the
author of Fears in Solitude might well have asked, why
not politics in poetry? Nor will the candid reader attempt to
separate the religion, the metaphysics, and the poetic imagery
from the politics of such works as The Lay Sermons and

INTRODUCTION

The Church and State. To Coleridge, the political world
hung by the interwoven threads of religion, metaphysics
and poetry, from the little finger of God. We may admit
that his poetic powers declined after 1800. He himself
knew well enough what had happened (see ‘Ode to Dejec¬
tion’, vi). But the work went on. The prose-works are not
a second best, save as a brother may be second best to his
sister. They are of the same parent, and the same spirit
breathes in them.

Setting aside the question of literary form, the unity of
Coleridge’s thought is, as it were, both horizontal and
vertical. It is a unity in time: from the morning of the young
Pantisocrat to the evening light on Highgate Hill. It is also
a unity in substance: religion, philosophy, and politics are
absolutely interdependent. He was prepared to admit, and
to allow for, the errors of a man’s developing mind. He
would even admit that wrong principles have a golden side.
He knew well enough that he had made many mistakes on
the way to working out his principles. But he might have
claimed that the principles that he was working out were the
same^from beginning to end. To use his own word, the
Idea’ was the same. He made his mistakes, as a strong and
creative mind must. One is reminded of Beethoven wrestling
with the Idea’ of the Eroica Symphony. The great and
glorious fruth exists — somewhere. It is his God-given
purpose,^ by trial and error and the bloody sweat of labour

and oAer men ,n politics. The artist does not ‘change his

uth IS a vision, not a synthesis of ideas intellectually con-
ceived. John Stuart Mill changed his mind.- HisTind
changed as he read and learned more about his fellow-men

INTRODUCTION

Mill changed. Coleridge grew. Mill was a pile of bricks.
Coleridge was an acorn.

The remarkable consistency in fundamentals which runs
throughout Coleridge’s political thought may be best
appreciated by reference to his long-forgotten writings in
The Watchman and his only slightly better-known lectures,
'Condones ad Populum’ (1795-6). Here are all the essentials
of his later analysis of social ills and remedies: the dangers of
an 'inorganic’ society, the need for constant reference to fixed [xsxiii]
principles, the importance of education as a fore-runner of [xxxiv]
social change, the duty of the enlightened to refrain from [xxxv]
appealing to the people but to plead for them, the stress on [xxxvi]
duties as the basis of rights, the value of religion as [xxxvii]
philosophy capable of immediate application to social [xxxviii]
purposes. It was a queer Jacobin who could see any good in
Burke and who summed up his advice to 'Patriots’ in the [xxxix]
words: ‘Go, preach the Gospel to the poor!’ No doubt
patriots were embarrassed to be addressed thus: ‘You must
give up your sensuality and your philosophy, the pimp of
your sensuality; you must condescend to believe in God and
in the existence of a Future State!’

Secondly, there is what I have called the unity of his
thought vertically. Coleridge was incapable of holding
philosophical opinions that quarrelled with his religious
beliefs, and vice versa. He was equally incapable of holding
political views that did not grow out of his religion and his
philosophy. When he was a Necessitarian he was a Deist:
and therefore a Democrat — albeit of the Pantisocratic
variety. Necessitarianism failed to clothe what he knew
about men and nature, and he accepted the doctrine of
original sin and redemption through the Word. He called
it a conversion to the whole truth in Christ, but it was

INTRODUCTION

rather an expansion to embrace all the facts than a change
from one creed to another. And it followed, as night follows
day, that he ceased to believe in infinite perfectability in this
world. Therefore, governments are what we make them.
Therefore politics are second to religion, governments
second to men; and he was prevented from ever being an
Idealist in the sense of a Fascist or a Communist. Christi¬
anity, with its teaching of the eternal value of each individual
soul, kept alive in him the core of individualism. Kantian
metaphysics, with its destruction of the conflict between
subjective and objective reality, kept alive in him the inter¬
dependence of men. The State, to Coleridge, was St.
Augustine's Civitas Terrena with a Kantian underlay.

The principle of unity, when that unity is organic and
not imposed from without, is a source of strength to a
thinker on politics; but it may also detract from his effective¬
ness. It is a source of strength in that he cannot be incon¬
sistent: he is obliged persistently to refer his thought to
fundamentals, he is — as Coleridge said of Burke (and as
was equally true of himself) — a scientific statesman, a
[xl] seer. On the other hand, it may be a source of weakness in
that the unifying principle is so clear and all-pervading to
himself that he feels no necessity to construct an elaborate
statement of his philosophy. There is greater superficial
clarity and orderliness about the work of the thinker who
builds up his thought synthetically: he is obliged to be
orderly because his thoughts come one after the other. But
when a man possesses the abiding unity of his thought in
his own soul, he may throw off a hundred scraps of wisdom
deeply dyed with its colour, but may leave behind him no
neat text-book containing his gospel.

Yet Coleridge did wish to leave behind him an elaborate

INTRODUCTION

statement of his philosophy. Not only did he wish to satisfy
his friends, who had been deploring his ‘wasted talents’
for years, but he was moved by a passionate longing to
save the world from its sins and follies. It was a false and
hateful philosophy which afflicted England; economic
systems, and all the material evils of the age, were but
symptoms of that. As he wrote to Lord Liverpool in r 8 17,
‘the predominant philosophy is the keynote’ (see pp. 209-
16, and also 9 ^“3? of text). He longed to leave on record
his own testimony to the truth that would save men: to write
the Magnum Opus for which, he believed, mankind was
athirst. To the end, the motto of his youthful Watchman
inspired his pen: ‘That all may know the Truth, and the
Truth may make us free.’

As early as 1814 he was planning a comprehensive and
systematic statement of his thought which was to ‘revolu¬
tionize all that has been called Philosophy or Metaphysics in
England and France since the era of the commencing pre¬
dominance of the mechanical system’. He makes frequent
reference to the work after 1821, and large fragments of the
Magnum Opus exist in manuscript. Professor Muirhead
tells us that these remains show him to have made ‘a far
more serious attempt to work out his ideas into a clear and
consistent form than is commonly supposed.’ But the work
was never completed, and the student of Coleridge’s political
speculations remains confronted with a mass of essays,
tracts, and pieces d'occasion. Even in set performances like
The Constitution of the Church and State he is likely to be
baffled by excursions into Hebrew History, anecdotal
illustrations, and a host of wondrous appendices. For Coler¬
idge wrote 'as he talked, and, as De Quincey tells us,
listeners to his talk were frequently perplexed by the huge

INTRODUCTION

circuit of his ideas, and losing him 'naturally enough sup¬
posed that he had lost himself. But the written, unlike the
spoken word, allows of a process of re-arrangement and
integration which may serve to show the true shape and
character of the argument. That process is what has been
attempted in the text that follows.

PART ONE

YOUTH

1791-1796

Oh never can I remember those days with either
shame or regret. For I was most sincere^ most
disinterested. My opinions were^ indeed^ in
many and most important points erroneous; hut
my heart was single

(Biographic LiterariAj 1817)

I HAVE little faithj yet am wonderfully fond of speculating on
mystical systems. [i]

I long ago theoretically and in a less degree experi¬
mentally knew the necessity of faith in order to regulate
virtue, nor did I even seriously disbelieve the existence of a
future state. In short, my religious creed bore, and perhaps
bears, a correspondence with my mind and heart. I had too
much vanity to be altogether a Christian, too much tender¬
ness of nature to be utterly an infidel. Fond of the dazzle of
wit, I could not read without some degree of pleasure the
levities of Voltaire or the reasonings of Helvetius; but,
tremblingly alive to the feelings of humanity, and susceptible
to the charms of truth, my heart forced me to admire the
^beauty of holiness’ in the Gospel, forced me to love Jesus,
whom my reason (perhaps my reasonings) would not permit
me to worship — my faith, therefore, was made up of the
Evangelists and the deistic philosophy — a kind of religious
twilight. ... [n]

The religion which Christ taught is simply, first, that there
is an omnipresent Father of infinite power, wisdom and
goodness; and, secondly, that when we appear to men to die,
we do not utterly perish, but after this life shall continue to
enjoy or suffer the consequences and natural effects of the
habits we have formed here, whether good or evil. This is
the Christian religion.^ and all of the Christian religion ... Tt
is a religion for democrats.’ It certainly teaches in the most
explicit terms, the rights of man, his right to wisdom, his

YOUTH

right to an equal share in all the blessings of nature; it com¬
mands its disciples to go everywhere, and everywhere to
preach those rights ,, , By faith I understand, first a deduc¬
tion from experiments in favour of the existence of some¬
thing not experienced, and secondly the motives which
attend such a deduction. Now motives, being selfish, are
only the beginning and the Joundatiofij necessary and of
first-rate importance, yet made of vile materials and hidden
[iii] beneath the splendid superstructure.

RELIGIOUS MUSINGS

1794-1796

There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind,

Omnific. His most holy name is Love.

Truth of subliming import! with the which
Who feeds and saturates his constant soul.

He from his small particular orbit flies
With blest outstarting! From himself he flies,

Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze
Views all creation; and he loves it all,

And blesses it, and calls it very good!

’Tis the sublime of man,

Our noontide Majesty, to know ourselves
Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole!

This fraternizes man, this constitutes

Our charities and bearings. But ’tis God

Diffused through all, that doth make all one whole;

Believe thou, O my soul,

Life is a vision shadowy of truth;

PHILOSOPHY

And vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave,
Shapes of a dream! The veiling clouds retire.

And lo! the Throne of the redeeming God

Forth flashing unimaginable day

Wraps in one blaze earth, heaven and deepest hell.

2 PHILOSOPHY

Mrs. Coleridge was delivered on Monday, September
19th, 1796, half past two in the morning, of a SON ... Its
name is David Hartley Coleridge. I hope that ere he be a
man, if God destines him for continuance in this life, his
head will be convinced of, and his heart saturated with, the
truths so ably supported by that great master of Christian
Philosophy. [i]

We cannot inculcate on the minds of each other too often
or with too great earnestness the necessity of cultivating
benevolent affections . . . For this ‘subdued sobriety’ of
temper, a pi-actical faith in the doctrine of philosophical
necessity, seems the only preparative. That vice is the effect
of error and the offspring of surrounding circumstances, the
object therefore of condolence not of anger, is a proposition
easily understood and as easily demonstrated. But to make
it spread from the understanding to the affections ... it is
not enough that we have once swallowed these truths —
we must feed on them as insects on a leaf, till the whole heart
be coloured by their qualities and show its food in every
the minutest fibre. [ii]

I have the firmest faith that the final cause of all evils in
c 3.1

YOUTH

the moral and natural world is to awaken intellectual
activity .. . Benevolence may be defined 'Natural sympathy
made permanent by enlightened selfishness’, la my calmer
moments I have the firmest faith that all things work to-
[iii] gether for good, but alas! it seems a long and a dark process.

3 POLITICS

(a) T H E FRENCH REVOLUTION: T H Iv FIRST

PHASE

My feelings . ., and imagination did not remain unkindled
in this general conflagration; and I confess I should be
more inclined to be ashamed than proud of myself, if they
had: I was a sharer in the general vortex, though my little
world described the path of its revolution in an orbit of
[i] its own.

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE BASTILE

1789

But cease, ye pitying bosoms, cease to bleed!

Such scenes no more demand the tear humane;

I see, I seel glad Liberty succeed

With every patriot virtue in her train 1
And mark yon peasant’s raptured eyes;

Secure he views the harvests rise;

No fetter vile the mind shall know.

And Eloquence shall fearless glow
Yes 1 Liberty the soul of life shall reign, •

Shall throb in every pulse, shall flow thro’ every vein.

3 +

POLITICS

Shall France alone a despot spurn?

Shall she alone, O Freedom, boast thy care?

Lo, round thy standard Belgians heroes burn,

Tho’ Power’s blood-stain’d streamers fire the air,

And wider yet thy influence spread,

Nor e’er recline thy weary head,

Till every land from pole to pole
Shall boast one independent soul!

And still, as erst, let favour’d Britain be
‘First ever of the first and freest of the free! [ii]

(b) P A N T I S O C R A C Y

Whatever my principles might be in themselves, they were
almost equidistant from all the three prominent parties, the
Pittites, the Foxites and the Democrats. [iii]

What I dared not expect from constitutions of govern¬
ment and whole nations, I hoped from religion and a small
company of chosen individuals, and formed a plan, as
harmless as it was extravagant, of trying the experiment of
human perfectability on the banks of the Susquehannah;
where our little society, in its second generation, was to have
combined the innocence of the patriarchal age with the
knowledge and genuine refinements of European culture, [iv]

PANTISOCRACY

1795

No more my visionary soul shall dwell
On joys that were; no more endure to weigh
The shame and anguish of the evil day,

YOUTH

Wisely forgetful! O’er the ocean swell
Sublime of Hope, I seek the cottag'd dell
Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray,

And dancing to the moonlight roundelay,

The wizard Passions weave an holy spell.

Eyes that have ach’d with Sorrow! Ye shall weep
Tears of doubt-mingled joy, like theirs who start
From Precipices of distemper’d sleep,

On vvHch the fierce-eyed Fiends their revels keep,

[v] And see the rising Sun, and feel it dart

New rays of pleasance trembling to the heart.

S. T. Coleridge to R. Southey, Health and Republicanism

[vi] to be! ... I preached pantisocracy and aspheterism with so
much success that two great huge fellows of butcher-like
appearance danced about the room in enthusiastic agitation.
And one of them of his own accord called for a large gFass of
brandy, and drank it off to this his own toast, 'God save the
King! And may he be the last’. Southey, such men may
be of use . . . At the inn I v/as sore afraid that 1 had caught the
itch from a Welsh democrat; who was charmed with my
sentiments; he grasped my hand with flesh-bruising ardour,
and I trembled lest some disappointed citizens of the

[vii] animalcular republic should have emigrated,

Pantisocracy! Oh, I shall have such a scheme of it! My
head, my heart are all alive. I have drawn up my arguments
in battle-array; they shall have the tactician excellence of the
mathematician with the enthusiasm of the poet. The leading
idea or pantisocracy is to make men necessarily virtuous by

[Uii] removing all motives to evil — all possible temptation.

It is wrongs Southey, for a little girl with a half-famished
sickiv baby in her arms to put her head in at the window of

POLITICS

an inn — Tray give me a bit of bread and meat!’ from a
party dining on lamb, green peas and salad. Why? Because
it is impertinent and obtrusiveX am a gentleman! and
wherefore the clamorous voice of woe intrude upon my ear?’

My companion is a man of cultivated though- not vigorous
understanding; his feelings are all on the side of humanity;
yet such are the unfeeling remarks which the lingering
remains of aristocracy occasionally prompt . . . Farewell,
sturdy Republican! [ix]

To his brother George:

How often and how unkindly are the ebullitions of
youthful disputations mistaken for the result of fixed
principles. People have resolved that I am a democrat, and
accordingly look at everything I do through the spectacles
of prejudication , . . Solemnly, my brother, I tell you, I am
not a democrat. I see, evidently, that the present is not the
highest state of society of which we are capable. After a
diligent, I may say an intense, study of Locke, Hartley,
and others who have written most wisely on the nature of
man, I appear to myself to see the point of possible perfec¬
tion at which the world may perhaps be destined to arrive.
But how to lead mankind from one point to the other is a
process of such infinite complexity, that in deep-felt humility
I resign it to that Being ‘Who shaketh the Earth out of her
place, and the pillars thereof tremble, , .

I have been asked what is the best conceivable mode of
meliorating society. My answer has been this: ‘Slavery
is an abomination to my feeling of the head and the heart.
Did Jesus teach the abolition of it? No! He taught those
‘ principles of which the necessary effect was to abolish all
slavery. He prepared the mind for the reception before

YOUTH

he poured the blessing.’ You ask me what the friend of
universal equality would do. I answer: ‘Talk not politics,
[x] Preach the Gospel!’

LECTURER

Towards the close of the first year from the time that
in an inauspicious hour I left the friendly cloisters, and the
happy grove of quiet, ever-honoured Jesus College,
Cambridge, I was persuaded by sundry philanthropists and
Anti-polemists to set on foot a periodical work, entitled
The Watchman^ that, according to the general motto of the
work, all might know the truth, and the truth might make us
free! ... I made enemies of all my Jacobin and democratic
patrons; for, disgusted by their infidelity, and their adoption
of French morals together with French psilosophy, and per¬
haps thinking that charity ought to begin nearest home;
instead of abusing the Government and the Aristocrats
chiefly or entirely, as had been expected of me, I levelled
my attacks at ‘modern patriotism’ ... At the same time,

I avowed my conviction that national education and a
concurring spread of the Gospel were the indisjicnsablc
condition of any true political melioration. Thus by the
time the seventh number was published, I had the mortifica¬
tion . ,. of seeing the preceding numbers exposed in sundry
old iron shops for a penny a piece.

zi]

[The following excerpts are taken from The Watchman ,1796
and from Conciones ad Populum, published in 179 rl :

The importance of principles ' '

The times are trying; and in order to be prepared against

POLITICS

their difficulties we should have acquired a prompt facility
of adverting in all our doubts to some grand and compre¬
hensive truth. In a deep and strong soil must that tree
fix its roots, the height of which is to 'reach to heaven,
and the sight of it to the ends of all the earthh

A has les doctrinaires I

The majority of democrats appear to me to have attained
that portion of knowledge in politics which infidels possess
inT'eligion . . . they both attribute to the system which they
reject all the evils existing under it . . . both, contemplating
truth and justice 'in the nakedness of abstraction’ condemn
constitutions and dispensations without having sufficiently
examined the natures, circumstances and capacities of their
recipients.

The searcher after truth must love and be loved; for
general benevolence is a necessary motive to constancy of
pursuit; and this general benevolence is gotten and rendered
permanent by social and domestic affections. Let us beware
of that proud philosophy which affects to inculcate philan¬
thropy while it denounces every home-born feeling by
which it is produced and nurtured. The paternal and filial
duties discipline the heart and prepare it for the love of all
mankind. The intensity of private attachments encourages,
not prevents, universal benevolence.

The Ideal Patriot

Accustomed to regard all the affairs of men as a process,
they never hurry and they never pause . , . Convinced that
vice originates not in the man but in the surrounding
circumstances'; not in the heart but in the understanding;
he is hopeless concerning no one — to correct a vice or

YOUTH

generate a virtuous conduct he pollutes not his hujids with
ihe scourge of coercion, but by endeavouring to alter the
circumstances, would remove, or by strengthening the

[xv] intellect, disarm the temptation.

Education

The annals of the French Revolution have recorded in
letters of blood that the knowledge of the few cannot counter¬
act the ignorance of the many; that the light of philosophy,
when it is confined to a small minority, points out the
possessors of it as the victims, rather than the illuminators

[xvi] of the multitude.

The purifying alchemy of education may transmute the
fierceness of an ignorant man into virtuous energy .
For can we wonder that men should want humanity, who
want all the circumstances of life that humanize? Can wc
wonder that with the ignorance of brutes they should unite
[xvii] their ferocity? . . . That general illumination should precede
revolution is a truth as obvious as that the vessel should be
cleansed before we fill it with a pure liquor. But the mode
[mu] of diffusing it is not discoverable with equal facility.

YThe ifjipediments to the di^usion of knowledge ave vested
interests^ but Providence is counteracting these inipedmients by
the following ?nea?tsf

First, and principally, the progress of the Methodists
and other disciples of Calvin . . . the very act of dissenting
from established opinions must generate habits precursivc
to the love of freedom ... Nor should we forget that
however absurd their enthusiasm may be, yet if Methodism
produce^ sobriety and domestic habits among the lowcr
cksses, it makes them susceptible of liberty; and this very
enthusiasm does perhaps supersede the use of spirituous

POLITICS

liquors and bring on the same pleasing tumult of the brain
without injuring the health or exhausting the wages.

Secondly, the institution of large manufactories; in many
of which it is the custom for a newspaper to be regularly
read, and sometimes larger publications.

Thirdly, the number of book-societies established in
almost every town and city of the kingdom.

Fourthly, the increasing experience of the dreadful
effects of war and corruption. [six]

The present duty of Patriots.

In the disclosal of opinion, it is our duty to consider
the character of those to whom we address ourselves, their
situations, and probable degree of knowledge. We should
be bold in the avowal of political truth among those only
whose minds are susceptible of reasoning: and never to the
multitude, who, ignorant and needy, must necessarily act
from the impulse of inflamed passions. [xx]

We certainly should never attempt to make proselytes
by appeals to the selfish feelings — and consequently should
plead for the oppressed, not to them. The Author of an
essay on political justice considers private societies as the
sphere of real utility — that each one illuminating those
* immediately beneath him — truth by a gradual descent may
at last reach the lowest order. But this is rather plausible
than just or practicable. Society, as at present constituted,
does not resemble a chain that ascends in a continuity of
links. There are three ranks possessing an intercourse with
each other: these arc well comprised in the superscription
of a perfumer’s advertisement which I lately saw — 'The
Nobility, Gentry, and People of Dress’. But, alas! between
the parlour and the kitchen, the tap and the coffee-room,

YOUTH

there is a gulph that may not be passed. He would appear
to me to have adopted the best as well as the most benevolent
mode of diffusing truth, who, uniting the zeal of the
Methodist with the views of the philosopher, should be
personally among the poor, and teach them their duties in
order that he may render them susceptible of their rights.

Yet by what means can the lower classes be made to
learn their duties and urged to practise them? The human
race may perhaps possess the capability of all excellence:
and truth, I doubt not, is omnipotent to a mind already-
disciplined for its reception; but assuredly the overworked
labourer skulking into an ale-house is not likely to exemplify
the one or prove the other. In that barbarous tumult of
inimical interests which the present state of society exhibits,
religion appears to offer the only means universally efficient.
The perfectness of future men is indeed a benevolent tenet,
and may operate on a few visionaries, whose studious habits
supply them with employment and seclude them from
temptation. But a distant prospect which we are never to
reach will seldom quicken our footsteps, however lovely it
may appear . . . ‘Go, preach the gospel to the poor.'
By its simplicity it will meet their comprehension, by its
benevolence soften their affections, by its precepts it will
direct their conduct, by the vastness of its motives ensure
their obedience. The situation of the poor is perilous: they
are indeed both

k . . from within and from without

Unarmed to all temptations.'

Prudential reasonings will in general be powerless with
them. For the incitements of this world are weak in propor¬
tion as we are wretched , . . They, too, who live from hand-

L !'r I r s

4 ^ '

to-mouth, will rnosi free jucnt ly iu I n ( * MI 1

Possessing no of ha[)j)iiK‘s‘; {\\cy cmoc’i K >ri/r fli" : os:

fication of the nioineiit . Nor S:; fhe (IcooLifr ' o;: ■ ^
their families a rcailraininr^' ino(i\’(\ uii%(<1 fcoird .r, i\\-\ -

by education, and benumhetl intt) soUl'.hnr'o In; ;

touch of extreme want, Domostu aiuntion'. djC'^^'’' '
association. We love an objem il, an nffiai ;r. or * ^
recollect it, an agTtaaible scmsiatinn .um-n in oui on,
But alas! how should, //e jdow with tlu' (ha?n!> , ra iab-
and husband who, gaining; laatarlv iumu' tb.m Ir ^ ‘
necessities demand, must havt' bo(m awuaduird f<. /

his wife and children not a‘> tlu' -'.oMfluan t.| tud ,is( nl Nir-'r
but as rivals for the insidfuient uumI! In a nrot a. , n u ’
stanced the tyranny ol’thc* /over/// ^an br n ju > | * ■
by the ten-fold mig’htim^ss ol tlu; fuiutr, K' lnnon 'wli . r-
his gloom with heu- [ironiisea, amf In liaintu.ntn;- in ^ dd
to anticipate': an infinitt'ly jnadit nn-ohniNn ism ni ’
prepare it even for tfvo sndilcn ndfgvtnid m ^ !

of amelioration in this world.

Those institutions of so( ioty vv!u( h idiiaih! .of.dddi

to the necessity ol' twc'lve hours* tl.nU' foil \w.uid dw,' ^ ;
soul a slavey and sink the'’ ef///d/;(i/ licaun in tin* nun,' ad* ;; :
It is a mockery of our (cTow taasif mv-f wnarw i.» < sli o' ■ ^

equal in rights, wlum, by the fiittei » ouigut-aod .a : , '
wants, wc make them infeirin- to us m all that i lO

the heart or dignify the under-dfandimg Let u, n-ii
this is the work of tum^ ■ that if is impi ami^ abhwu w-
unless WC- e ac h in our me 1 1 vu 1 1 la 1 e :q su if if*. tin f t ra • a» n
pcrseveringly enthaivour to elithrv amono, ou'
those comle)rt:s aud, that illununat ion wlu< h,, bn b , *

political oidmaiu'es, are* the* tiaie c*<jiiah/ei' < g a';/

lon (S a n

YOUTH

4 HIS OWN TIMES
Edmund Burke

Mr. Burke always appeared to me to have dispilaycd great
vigour of intellect, and an almost prophetic keenness of
penetration; nor can I think his merit diminished because he
has secured the aids of sympathy to his cause by the warmth
of his emotions . . . Alas! we fear that this Sun of Genius
is well-nigh extinguished: a few bright spots linger on its
orb, but scarcely larger than the dark maculae visible on it
in the hour of its strength and effulgence . . . We feel for
the honour of his genius; and mourn to find one of her most
richly-gifted children associated with the Youngs, Wynd-
hams, and Reeveses^ of the day... and the rest of that motley
pack that open in the most hideous concert whenever our
State-Nimrod provokes the scent by a trail of rancid plots
and false insurrections! ... It is consoling to the lovers of
human nature to reflect that Edmund Burke, the only
writer of that faction ‘whose name would not sully the page
of an opponent’, learnt the discipline of his genius in" a
different corps. At the flames which rise from the altar of
freedom he kindled that torch with which he since en¬
deavoured to set fire to her temple. Peace be to his spirit
when it departs from us: this is the severest punishment
I wish for him - that he may be appointed undl-porter to
St.^ Peter, and be obliged to open the gate of heaven to
Brissot, Roland, Fayette, and Priestley!

& Anti-Jacobi„ policy of

PART TWO

1797-1809

I have for soyjie time fast withdrawn myself
totally from the consideration of immediate
causes, zvhich are infinitely complex and un¬
certain^ to muse on fundamental aotd general
causes^ the causae causarum . . . I wrap my face
in my mantle and wait^ with a subdued and
patient thought^ expecting to hear dhe still
small voicd which is God.

(April, 1798)

I RELIGION

[_ 0 n the last day of the year 1796] I retired to a cottage in
Somersetshire, at the foot of Quantock, and devoted my
thoughts and studies to the foundations of religion and
morals. Here I found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in;
broke upon me 'from the fountains of the great deep’,
and fell 'from the windows of heaven’. The fontal truths
of natural religion and the books of Revelation alike
contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my ark touched
on an Ararat, and rested. [i]

yrhe following excerpts from letters written at this time show his
gradual recovery of religious faith during the years 1797~t 802] :

All things appear little^ all the knowledge that can be
acquired child’s play; the universe itself! what but an
immense heap of little things? I can contemplate nothing
but parts^ and parts are all little\ My mind feels as if it
ached to behold and know something great, something one
and indivisible, [ii]

I will not believe that it \fLife'\ ceases — in this moving,
stirring, and harmonious universe — I cannot believe it!

Can cold and darkness come from the Sun? where the sun
is not there is cold and darkness! But the living God is
everywhere — and where is there room for death? [iii]

But although all my doubts are done away, though
Christianity is my passion,^ it is too much my intellectual
passion, and therefore will do me but little good in the hour
of temptation and calamity. [iv]

I believe most steadfastly in original sin; that from our
mothers’ wonibs our understandings are darkened; and
even where our understandings are in the light, that our

GROWTH

organization is depraved and our volitions imperfect; and
we sometimes see the good without wishing to attain it,
and oftener wish it without the energy that wills and per¬
forms. And for this inherent depravity, I believe that the
spirit of the Gospel is the sole cure; but permit me to add,
that I look for the spirit of the Gospel ‘neither in the

[v] mountain, nor at Jerusalem’ ....

Surely, religious Deism is infinitely nearer the religion
of our Saviour than the gross idolatry of Popery, or the more
decorous, but not less genuine, idolatry of a vast majority
of Protestants. If there be meaning in words, it appears
to me that the Quakers and Unitarians are the only
Christians, altogether pure from idolatry . . . Evt;n the
worship of one God becomes Idolatry in my convictions,
when, instead of the Eternal and Omnipresent, in whom we
live and move and have our being, we set up a distinct
Jehovah, tricked out in the anthropomorphic attributes of
Time and successive Thoughts, and think of him as a
Person from whom we had our Being . . . God is a Spirit,

[vi] and must be worshipped in spirit. . . .

My creed is very simple — my confession of Faith very
brief. I approve altogether and embrace entirely the
Religion of the Quakers, but exceedingly dislike the Sect,
and their own notions of their own Religion. By Quakerism
I understand the opinions of George Fox rather than those

[vii] of Barclay — who was the St. Paul of Quakerism.

2 PHILOSOPHY

After I had successively studied in the schools of Locke,
Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in none of

PHILOSOPHY

them an abiding place for my reason, I began to ask
myself: is a system of philosophy, as different from mere
history and historic classification, possible? If possible,
what are its necessary conditions? I was for a while disposed
to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit
that the sole practicable employment for the human mind
was to observe, to collect, and to classify. ... [i]

While my mind was thus perplexed, by a gracious
providence for which I can never be sufficiently grateful,
the generous and munificent patronage of Mr. Josiah,
and Mr. Thomas Wedgwood enabled me to finish my
education in Germany ... I made the best use of my time
and means; and there is therefore no period in my life on
which I can look back with such unmingled satisfaction. . . . [ii]

I can not only honestly assert, but I can satisfactorily
prove by reference to writings . . . that all the elements,
the differentials^ as the algebraists say, of my present
opinions existed for me before I had ever seen a book of
German Metaphysics, later than Wolf and Leibnitz, or could
have read it, if I had. But what will this avail? A High Ger¬
man Transcendentalist I must be content to remain. . . . [iii]
\ldxcerpts from letters written during his residence in^ and
after his return from^ Germany\:

What and who are these horrible shadows ‘necessity’ and
‘general law’ to which God himself must offer sacrifices —
hecatombs of sacrifices? I feel a deep conviction that these
shadows exist not — they are only the dreams of reasoning
pride, that would fain find solutions for all difficulties with¬
out faith . . . God works in each for all — most true — but
more comprehensively true is it that he works in all for each.

I confess that the more I think, the more I am discontented
with the doctrines of Priestley. [iv]

GROWTH

If I do not greatly delude myself, I have not only
completely extricated the notions of time and space but
have overthrown the doctrine of association, as taught by
Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of

[v] modern infidels — especially the doctrine of necessity.

I am here, in the vicinity of Durham, for the purpose
of reading, from the Dean and Chapter’s Library, an
ancient of whom you may have heard. Duns Scorns \
I mean to set the poor old Gemman on his feet again; and
in order to wake him out of his present lethargy, I am
burning; Locke, Hume, and Hobbes under his nose.

[vi] They stink worse than feather or assafoetida ... I am
confident that I can prove that the reputation of these three

[vii] men has been wholly unmerited.

My opinion is thus: that deep thinking is only attainable
by a man of deep feeling, and that all truth is a species
[viii] of revelation ... A metaphysical solution that does not
instantly tell you something in the heart is grievously to be
suspected as apocryphal. I almost think that ideas never
recall ideas, as far as they are ideas, any more than the leaves
in a forest create each other’s motion. The breeze it is that
runs through them — it is the soul, the state of feeling. If I
had said no one idea ever recalls another, I am confident
[ix] that I could support the assertion.

Newton was a mere materialist. Mind^ in his system,
is always passive — a Lazy Looker-on on an external world.
If the mind be not passive^ if it be indeed made in God’s
Image, and that too in the sublimest sense, the Image of
the Creator^ there is ground for suspicion that any system
built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a
[x] system. ...

POLITICS

3 POLITICS

From what source are we to derive this strange pheno¬
menon, that the young and the inexperienced who, we know
by regular experience, are deceived in their religious
antipathies and grow wiser; in their friendships and grow
wiser; should, if once deceived in a question of abstract
politics, cling to the error for ever and ever? . . . "Once a
Jacobin, always a Jacobin!' And why? Is it because the
creed ... is dazzling at sight to the young, the innocent,
the disinterested, and to those who, judging of men in
general from their own uncorrupted hearts, judge
erroneously and expect unwisely? Is it because it deceives
the mind in its purest and most flexible period? Is it because
it is an error . . . against which all history is full of warning
examples? Or is it because the experiment has been tried
before our eyes and the error made palpable? ... [i]

I am prepared to suffer without discontent the con¬
sequences of my follies and mistakes; and, unable to
conceive how that which I am of God could have been
without that which I have been of evil, it is withheld from me
to regret anything. I therefore consent to be deemed a
Democrat and a Seditionist. A man’s character follows him
long after he has ceased to deserve it; but I have snapped
my squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition, and the fragments
lie scattered in the lumber-room of penitence. I wish to be
a good man and a Christian, but I am no Whig, no Reform¬
ist, no Republican. [ii]

GROWTH

(a) THE FRENCH REVOLUTION." THE

SECOND PHASE

History has taught me that rulers are much the same in
all ages, and under all forms of government; that they are
as bad as they dare to be. The vanity of ruin and the curse
of blindness have clung to them like an hereditary leprosy.
Of the French Revolution, I can give my thoughts most
adequately in the words of Scripture: 'A great and strong
wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks
before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; and
after the wind an earthquake; and after the earthquake a
iii] fire; and the Lord was not in the fire’ . . .

FRANCE: AN ODE

1798

Forgive me. Freedom! O forgive those dreams!

I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament,

From bleak Helvetia’s icy caverns sent —

I hear thy groans upon her blood-stained streams 1
Heroes that for your peaceful country perished,

And ye that, fleeing, spot your mountain snows

With bleeding wounds; forgive me that I cherished
One thought that ever blessed your cruel foes!

To scatter rage and traitorous guilt,

Where peace her jealous home had built;

A patriot-race to disinherit
Of all that made their stormy wilds so dear;

And with inexpiable spirit
To taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer —

POLITICS

O France, that mockest Heaven, adulterous, blind,

And patriot only in pernicious toils!

Are these thy boasts. Champion of human kind?

To mix with Kings in the low dust of sway.

Yell in the hunt, and share the murderous prey;

To insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils
From freemen torn; to tempt and to betray?

The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain.

Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game
'They burst their manacles and wear the name
Of Freedom, graven on a heavier chain!

O Liberty! with profitless endeavour
Have I pursued thee, many a weary hour;

But thou nor swell’st the victor's strain, nor ever
Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power.

Alike from all, how'er they praise thee,

(Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee)

Alike from Priestcraft's harpy minions,

And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves,

Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions,

The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!
And there I felt thee! —on that sea-cliff’s verge,

Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above,

Had made one murmur with the distant surge!

Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare,

And shot my being through earth, sea, and air,

Possessing all things with intensest love,

O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there. [iv]

GROWTH

(b) MEN AND GOVERNMENTS

One good consequence which I expect from revolution
is that individuals will see the necessity of individual cfl'ort;
that they will act as good Christians, rather than as citizens
and electors; and so by degrees will purge off that error,
which to me appears as wild and more pernicious than the
xxy/pvcrov and panacea of the alchemists, the error of
attributing to governments a talismanic influence over our
virtues and our happiness, as if governments were not rather
effects than causes. It is true that all effects react and
become causes, and so it must be in some degree with
governments; but there are other agents which act more
powerfully because by a nigher and more continuous
agency, and it remains true that governments are more
[v] the eject than the cause of that which we are.

. . . Some, belike,

Groaning with restless enmity, expect

All change from change of constituted power;

As if a Government had been a robe,

On which our vice and wretchedness were tagged
Like fancy-points and fringes, with the robe
Pulled off at pleasure. Fondly these attach
A radical causation to a few
Poor drudges of chastising Providence,

Who borrow all their hues and qualities
From our own folly and rank wickedness,

Which gave them birth and nursed them. .

(Fears in Solitude, 1798)

POLITICS

DUTIES

A Jacobin ... is one who believes, and is disposed to act
on the belief, that all or the greater part of the happiness or
misery, virtue or vice of mankind depends on forms of
government; who admits no form of government as either
good or rightful which does not flow directly and formally
from the persons governed; who — considering life, health,
moral and intellectual improvement and liberty both of
person and conscience as blessings which governments are
bound as far as possible to increase and secure to every
inhabitant, whether he has or not any fixed property, and
moreover as blessings of infinitely greater value to each
individual than the preservation of property can be to any
individual — does consequently and consistently hold that
every inhabitant who has attained the age of reason has a
natural and inalienable right to an equal share of power in
the choice of the governors. In other words, the Jacobin
affirms that no legislature can be rightful or good which
did not proceed from universal suffrage. In the power, and
under the control, of a legislature so chosen he places all
and everything, with the exception of the natural rights of
man, and the means appointed for the preservation and
exercise of these rights, by a direct vote of the nation itself —
that is to say, by a constitution. Finally, the Jacobin deems
it both justifiable and expedient to effect these requisite
changes in faulty governments by absolute revolutions, and
considers no violence as properly rebellious or criminal
which are the means of giving to a nation the power of
declaring and'enforcing its sovereign will. . . .

Whoever builds a government on personal and natural

GROWTH

rights is so far a Jacobin. Whoever builds on social rights,
that is, hereditary rank, property, and long prescription,
is an Anti-Jacobin, even though he should nevertheless
be a republican or even a democrat . . . Milton was a pure
republican, and yet his notions of government were highly
aristocratic: Brutus was a republican, yet he perished in
[vii] consequence of having killed the Jacobin, Caesar. . . .

(d) POLITICAL POWER PROPORTIONATE

TO PROP.ERTY

We have repeatedly pressed upon the attention of our
readers the impracticability of all theories founded on
'personal rights \ we have contended zealously that the security
and circulation of property, with political power propor¬
tioned to property, constitute a good government, and bring
with them all other blessings which our imperfect nature
[viii] can or ought to expect . . , The prejudice of superstition,
birth, and hereditary right have been gradually declining
during the four last centuries, and the empire of property
establishing itself in their stead. Whether or no this, too, will

not in a distant age submit to some more powerful principle,
is indeed a subject fruitful in dreams to poetic philosophers
who accuse themselves with reasonings on unknown
quantities, but to all present purposes it is a useless and
impertinent speculation. For the present race of men
Governments must be founded on property; that govern-'
ment is good in which property is secure and circulates; that
government the hest^ which^ in the exactest ratio^ makes each
fix] man s power proportionate to his property. ... "

Between the acknowledged truth that in all countries

HIS OWN TIMES

both governments and subjects have duties — duties both
to themselves and each other— . . , between this truism and
the Jacobinal doctrine of the universal inalienable right of
all the inhabitants of every country to the exercise of their
inherent sovereignty, there is no intermediate step, no middle
meaning. [x]

(e) THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY

' Our nobles in England, from the largeness of their
landed estates, have an important stake in the immediate
prosperity of their country; and, from the antiquity of their
families, may be reasonably presumed likely to associate
with it a more deeply-rooted and partial affection. By the
more delicate superstition of ancestry they counteracted
in former ages, and to a certain degree still counteract,
the grosser superstitions of wealth . , . Has not the [xi]
hereditary possession of a landed estate been proved by
experience to generate dispositions equally favourable to
loyalty and established freedom? [xii]

4 HIS OWN TIMES

(a) IN DEFENCE OF ENTHUSIASM

Woe to that man who, on circumstances which vitally
affect the weal and woe of the whole human race, in time
and for eternity, can reason in as cold-blooded a tone as if he
were demonstrating a problem in geometry. The warmth

GROWTH

which the development and disclosure of such truths
occasions is altogether different from the heat of passion. , . .
A complete tranquillity, a cold self-possession in the
contemplation and defence of man’s highest interests and
most awful concerns, is the commencement of that depraved
indifference, that deadness of the moral and religious sense,
which ... so easily passes into the brutal and stupid revolu-
tion-phrenzy, and then, having raved out its hour of mad¬
ness, sinks to sleep in the strait-waistcoat of military
[i] despotism.

(b) ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE

consulate: 1799

The whole first chapter of the constitution, we do indeed
consider as the mere ornamental outworks of a military
despotism. No real power is left to the people. . . . The
first chapter brings forward the undeniable truth that the
government of France is to be an oligarchy supported, and
only supportable, by the military, who are therefore placed
entirely and absolutely under the command of the Chief
Consul, Bonaparte; all which follows we regard as mere
theatrical evolutions of a figure-dance. ... If the French
people accept, or rather submit to, this constitution, all
danger from French principles is passed by; the volcano
[ii] is burnt out and the snow has fallen round the crater. . . .

A Senate elected by Bonaparte and Sieyes can only be
considered as the accomplices of Bonaparte and Sieyes. AVe
are justified, therefore, in considering the Executive govern¬
ment and the Senate as one and the same body. This body
possesses all the influence of France, appoints all the offices

HIS OWN TIMES

throughout all the nation, civil and military, legislative or
judicial, lucrative or honourable. Supposing that this vast
and enormous influence were only powerful enough to bring
in one man in ten among the candidates returned by the
successive assemblies (a supposition absurd and incredible!)
yet this would be still sufficient. The Senate, by choosing
the tenth part of the candidates, might constitute a legisla¬
ture entirely of its own creatures. The whole process of
popular election is therefore a mere trick — a miserable
masquerade domino to throw around the nakedness of
despotism. . . . [iii]

Our readers have learnt that the candidates for all offices,
national, departmental and those of the sub-departments,
are to be gradually obtained by a series of honourable
decimations. We have before objected to this system of
election by primary, secondary and tertiary assembles (in
all which the same persons are at once candidates and voters)
from its pernicious moral tendency. We believed, and we still
continue to believe, that such an arrangement must neces¬
sarily tend to exasperate those political agitations so insepar¬
able from important elections, by the super-addition of
violent personal passions. If this has been proved to have
been the case in the Primary assemblies under the former
constitution, if those were found to generate and diffuse
the spirit of intrigue and the disposition to innovation, the
argument of course applies three-fold against the present
constitution: a constitution, too, which makes such enormous
sacrifices to the wish of producing stability and preventing
innovation. In favour of this arrangement it may be said
that it confirms and realizes two opposite advantages, and
both of the highest importance. It takes from the people the
all-unsettling power of acting from immediate and

GROWTH

momentary impulses, while, at the same time, by the stimula¬
tion of hope and the sense of personal self-importance, it
impels every individual to be a citizen^ suffers no man to
remain dead to the public interest, and thus elevates the
selfish into a social principle without detriment to social

[iv] peace. . ..

One error appears to us to pervade the whole, viz. the
assumption that checks and counter-checks can be produced
in legislative bodies merely by division of chambers and
diversity of titles, where no real difference exists in the
legislature, as individuals, except that transient one arising
from their functions. It appears to us simply a skein of
[v] threads, tangled rather than divided.

FRANCE

It is too common to mistake for the causes of the late
Revolution in France the accidents which determined the
manner and moment of its explosion. The arrival of Bona¬
parte from Egypt, his ambition, his temerity, and his good
luck, were indeed indispensable as occasions and subordinate
agents; but would of themselves have been as powerless, and
of as rapid extinction, as the sparks from a sky-rocket let off
in a storm of rain. The real causes of the usurpation must be
sought for in the general state of the public feeling and
opinion; in the necessity of giving concentration and per¬
manence to the executive government; and in the increasing
conviction that it had become good policy to exchange the
forms of political freedom for the realities of civil security,
m order to make a real political freedom possible at some

HIS OWN TIMES

future period. The reasons for preferring a new power under
a new title to the restoration of monarchy were many and
irrefragible.

First, the attempt could be realized without any approxi¬
mation to that most dreadful of all revolutions, a revolution
of property; a fact, the knowledge and deep feeling of which
attach all the new rich men to the Chief Consulate. Now in all
great cities in all countries, much more therefore in a revolu¬
tionary country, the possessors of wealth newly acquired
will be more powerful than men of hereditary wealth,
because they are more pliant, because they are more active,
and because in consequence of having experienced a greater
variety of scene and circumstance they have collectively
more talent and information. Add to this, that in France
the men of hereditary wealth are of very various creeds
respecting the restoration of monarchy; but the new rich
men can have but one creed on that subject, and of that one
creed they are not only unwavering believers but likewise
zealous apostles.

Secondly, a Chief Consulate admitted a choice of person;
a circumstance of incalculable significance in the present
affairs of France ... In conniving at the usurpation of
Bonaparte, they have seated on the throne of the Republic a
man of various talent, of commanding genius, of splendid
exploit, from whose policy the peaceful adherents of the old
religion anticipate toleration; from whose real opinions and
habits the men of letters and philosophy are assured of
patronage; in whose professional attachment and individual
associations the military, and the men of military talent, look
confidently for the exertions of a comrade and a brother;
and finally in Whose uninterrupted felicity the multitude find
an object of superstition and enthusiasm. . . .

GROWTH

Thirdly, a Chief Consulate was the only conceivable
means of uniting the parties in France, or at least of suspend¬
ing their struggles. . . .

These seem to us the causes which placed Bonaparte in
the Chief Consulate. Of his own share in that event we have
repeatedly declared our abhorrence; but it is required of us
by truth and common justice to admit that since then his
interests, and those of his country and of Europe, have run
completely parallel. The first and chief article of the test
required of those whom Bonaparte employs in the service
of the republic is, not that they shall have such and such
opinions, but that they shall assent to the necessity of
suspending the operation of such and such opinions wherein
they run counter to the existing circumstances. By this
toleration he has collected around his immediate interests
all the talent of France; and as man is a placable being,
as abstract notions give way to surrounding realities, as
assumed opinions soon become real ones ... it is probable
that by this toleration he may really reconcile those whom
he had brought together and convert this armistice of
factions into a permanent peace ... In this usurpation,
Bonaparte stabbed his honesty in the vitals; it has perished
— we admit that it has perished — but the mausoleum where
[vi] it lies interred is among the wonders of the world. . . .

He is a despot indeed, but not a tyrant . . . Bonaparte
has buried under his new constitution the principles of
revolution; but he excites the hopes of almost all descriptions
of men ... He has palsied the hostility of all parties, if he
has gained the enthusiastic support of none. His is a govern¬
ment of experiment rather than of popularity. His object
is to give tranquillity and gain the confidence of temperate,
wise men, rather than to fanaticize factions and to rule by

HIS OWN TIMES

public delirium . . . Whether he will act with true greatness
and make the happiness of the nation, rather than personal
power, his object, is a question which time alone can decide.
Upon that question depends the character of his present
conduct. If it be necessary for the public welfare to deposit
the whole authority of the state in the hands of one man,
Bonaparte is the person of all others to whom such a trust
should.be confided. He is without a rival in renown; no
one can attempt to cope with him in personal influence;
his great genius points him out as the man who is best able
to restore to France peace and prosperity; and to give repose
and confidence to Europe. If his virtues be as great as his
genius, he may do for the old world what Washington has
done for the new. [vu]

(d) ON THE DESIRABILITY OF PEACE
WITH FRANCE: l8oO

The public will not be persuaded that because the French
government is an usurpation, a despotism, or a tyranny, we
therefore must prosecute the war. This was not the argu¬
ment of ministers themselves on former occasions. They
contended that the war was justifiable to extinguish
French principles and reduce French power; but they always
disavowed any determination to persevere merely to change
the JoTM of the French Government. Their motives for
rejecting overtures of peace, at this period must therefore
be an opinion that the principles of the present government
in France are dangerous to surrounding states, or that they
have a certain prospect of reducing her power. In our
paper of yesterday we endeavoured to prove that wild

GROWTH

Jacobin principles having received a mortal blow by the
last revolution, can be no longer dangerous; and that
prospects of conquest from France will prove delusive, the
history of the war gives too much reason to dread. These,
therefore, are unwise motives for continuing hostilities.

But we are told that France is insincere in professing a
desire for peace! If that were known to be the fact, ministers
would certainly treat with her, since they would again
secure the support of the British people in the war, and
expose the ambition of the enemy. We rather suspect that
ministers know France is sincere^ and are apprehensive a
negotiation would either entrap them into a peace, or show
in a forcible manner how^ desperately and unreasonably
they are bent on the further prosecution of the war. No
period was ever more favourable than the present for
[viii] accommodation and adjustment. . . .

War against France as a republic, produces in the French
republic ambition and insolence by its failure, and Jacobinism
by its success; nor is this difficult of explanation. When a
nation is in safety, men think of their private interests;
individual property becomes the predominating principle,
the lord of the ascendant; and all politics and theories
inconsistent with property and individual interest give way,
and sink into a decline, which, unless unnaturally stimulated,
would end in speedy dissolution.— But is the nation in danger.^
Every man is called into play; every man feels his interest
as a citizen predominating over his individual interests;
the high and the low and the middle classes become all
alike politicians; the majority carry the day; and Jacobinism
is the natural consequence. Let us not be deceived by
words. Every state in which all the inhabitants without
distinction of property are roused to the exertion of a public

HIS OWN TIMES

spirit, is for the time a Jacobin state. France at present is
only preparing to become so. — If the present consulate can
conclude a peace, the glory attached to it will, for a while,
reconcile the people to an Oligarchy, which can only exist
while it is popular; and as manufactures and commerce
revive, the spirit of property will regain its ascendency, and
the government of France will be modified accordingly. , . . [is]
Bonaparte deserted the gallant army which his own
ambition had led into Egypt, and, on his return into France,
instead of the death which was due to him, he procured
the unshared possession of the supreme pov/er. Bonaparte
is a fugitive and a deserter. These are our opinions; and in
a tranquil season, these would be the opinions of French¬
men. It will remain to ministers and their allies to menace
the republic, till the love of liberty is suspended by the
sense of national danger; to alarm and confuse the minds
of its inhabitants, till they consider the very crime of their
usurper only as traces of an high and mysterious destiny;
till in their distempered imaginations his flight from Egypt
becomes a call from heaven for the saving of his country. . . . W
Let these conjectures be well-founded, or without
foundation, there remains enough to fear, and nothing to
hope, from the war. It has already transferred the whole
trade of Europe into our hands, and it can do no more;
if we conclude a peace, the surplus of our revenues may be
applied successfully to the diminution of our national debt
. . . War, we repeat, can do no more for us than it has
already done: and the longer it is prolonged the heavier will be
the burthens which it will leave behind it... We may, indeed,
make ourselves masters of new colonies; but this would only
substitute the en-hon-point of dropsy for the muscular habit
of health, if indeed it be not already substituted. . . . [xi]

GROWTH

Tlie renewal of a vigorous trading and commercial spirit
in France would, at first, be a benefit and a stimulus,
even to our commerce; but it would be still more impor¬
tantly beneficial, both to us and to the quiet of all Europe,
in a political light, by giving the death-blow to Jacobinism,
by reviving all the wholesome and Anti-Revolutionary
influences of property, and by the assimilation of the
pursuits and feelings of the French nation to our own, which
must infallibly end in assimilating the sprit of their govern-
[xii] ment to that of our own. ...

But on the supposition that by a perpetual continuance of
the war, or by a restoration of despotism, or by any other
means, we could be and remain the monopolists of the
commerce of Europe, is it quite ascertained that it would be
a real national advantage? Is it quite certain that the
conditions and morals of the lower and more numerous
classes wuuld not be progressively deteriorated? Is it
quite certain that it would not give such a superiority to the
moneyed interest of the country over the landed as might
be fatal to our constitution? Has not the hereditary pos¬
session of a landed estate been proved by experience to
generate dispositions equally favourable to loyalty and
established freedom? Has not the same experience proved
that the moneyed men are far more malleable materials?
that ministers find more and more easy ways of obliging
them, and that they are more willing to go with a minister
through evil and good? Our commerce has been, it is said,
nearly trebled since the war; is the nation at large the happier?
Have the schemes of internal navigation, and of rendering
waste lands useful, proceeded with their former energy?
Or have not loans and other ministerial jo'b-work created
injurious and perhaps vicious objects for moneyed specula-

HI S OWN TIMES

tions? —And what mean these Committees for the labour¬
ing poor? These numerous soup-establishments? These
charities so kindly and industriously set on foot through
the whole kingdom? All these are highly honourable to the
rich of this country! But are they equally honourable to
the nation at large? — Is that a genuine prosperity^ in which
healthy labourers are commonly styled ‘the labouring poor
and industrious manufacturers obliged to be fed like Roman
clients or Neapolitan Lazzaroni? . . . Let us not forget that
coitimerce is still no otherwise valuable than as the means to
an end, and ought not itself to become the end, to which
nobler and more inherent blessings are to be forced into
subserviency. [xiii]

FEARS IN SOLITUDE

1798

Even so, my countrymen! have we gone forth
And borne to distant tribes slavery and pangs.

And, deadlier far, our vices, whose deep taint
With slow perdition murders the whole man,

His body and his soul! Meanwhile, at home.

All individual dignity and power
Engulfed in Courts, Committees, Institutions,
Associations and Societies,

A vain, speech-mouthing, speech-reporting Guild,

One Benefit-Club for mutual flattery,

We have drunk up, demure as at a grace,

Pollutions from the brimming cup of wealth;
Contemptuous of all honourable rule,

Yet bartering freedom and the poor manT life

For gold, as at a market! . . . [^v]

GROWTH

(e) MR. PITT

William Pitt was the younger son of Lord Chatham;
a fact of no ordinary importance in the solution of his
character, of no mean significance in the heraldry of morals
and intellect. His father's rank, fame, political connections,
and parental ambition y\^ere his mould — he was cast,
rather than grew. A palpable election, a conscious predes¬
tination controlled the free agency, and transfigured the
individuality of his mind; and that, which he mig/it Jrave
heen^ was compelled into that, which he was to be. From
his early childhood it was his father's custom to make him
stand on a chair, and declaim before a large company; by
which exercise, practised so frequently, and continued for
so many years, he acquired a premature and unnatural
dexterity in the combination of words, which must of
necessity have diverted his attention from present objects,
obscured his impressions, and deadened his genuine
feelings. Not the thing on which he was speaking, but the
praises to be gained by the speech, were present to his
intuition; hence he associated all the operations of his
faculties with words, and his pleasures with the surprise
excited by them.

But an inconceivably large portion of human knowledge
and human power is involved in the science and manage¬
ment of words \ and an education of words, though it
destroys genius, will often create, and always foster talent.
The young Pitt was conspicuous far beyond his fellows, both
at school and at college. He was always full grown: he
had neither the promise nor the awkwardness of a growing
intellect. Vanity, early satiated, formed and elevated itself
into a love of power; and in losing this colloquial vanity he

HIS OWN TIMES

lost one of the prime links that connect the individual with
the species, too early for the affections though not too early
for the understanding. At college he was a severe student;
his mind was founded and elemented in words and
generalities, and these too formed all the super-structure.
That revelry and debauchery, which are so often fatal to
the powers of intellect, would probably have been service¬
able to him; they would have given him a closer communion
with realities, they would have induced a greater presentness
to present objects. But Mr. Pitt's conduct was correct. . . .

His first political connections were with the Reformers,
but those who accuse him of sympathizing or coalescing
with their intemperate or visionary plans, misunderstand
his character, and are ignorant of the historical facts.
Imaginary situations in an imaginary state of things rise
up in minds that possess a power of facility in combining
images. — Mr. Pitt's ambition was conversant with old
situations in the old state of things, which furnished
nothing to the imagination, though much to the wishes.
In his endeavours to realize his father's plan of reform, he
was probably as sincere as a being, who had derived so little
knowledge from actual impressions, could be. But his
sincerity had no living root of affection; while it was propped
up by his love of praise and immediate power, so long it
stood erect and no longer. He became a member of the
parliament — supported the popular opinions, and in a few
years, by the influence of the popular party was placed in
that high and awful rank in which he now is. The fortunes
of his country, we had almost said, the fates of the world,
were placed in his wardship — we sink in prostration before
the inscrutable dispensations of providence, when we reflect
in whose wardship the fates of the world were placed!

GROWTH

The influencer of his country and his species was a
young man, the creature of another’s predetermination,
sheltered and weather-fended from all the elements of
experience^ a young man, whose feet had never wandered^
whose ver^^ eye had never turned to the right or to the left;
whose whole track had been as curveless as the motion of a
fascinated reptile! It was a young man, whose heart was
solitary, because he had existed always amid objects of
futurity, and whose imagination too was unpopulous,
because those objects of hope, to which his habitual wishes
had transferred, and as it were projected his existence, were
all familiar and long established objects! —A plant sown
and reared in a hot-house, for whom the very air that
surrounded him, had been regulated by the thermometer of
previous purpose; to whom the light of nature had penetrated
only through glasses and covers; who had had the sun with¬
out the breeze; whom no storm had shaken; on whom no
rain had pattered; on whom the dews of heaven had not
fallen! — A being, who had had no feelings connected with
man or nature, no spontaneous impulses, no unbiassed
and desultory studies, no genuine science, nothing that
constitutes individuality in intellect, nothing that teaches
brotherhood in affection! Such was the man — such
and so denaturalized the spirit, on whose wisdom and
philanthropy the lives and living enjoyments of so many
millions of human beings were made unavoidably depen¬
dent. From this time a real enlargement of mind became
almost impossible.

Still, however, Mr, Pitt’s situation, however inauspicious
for his real being, was favourable to his fame. He heaped
period on period; persuaded himself and the nation, that
extemporaneous arrangement of sentences was eloquence;

HIS OWN TIMES

and that eloquence implied wisdom. His father’s struggles
for freedom, and his own attempts, gave him an almost
unexampled popularity; and his office necessarily associated
with his name all the great events, that happened during
his administration. There were not however wanting men,
who saw through this delusion; and refusing to attribute
the industry, integrity, and enterprising spirit of our
merchants, the agricultural improvements of our land¬
holders, the great inventions of our manufacturers, or the
valour and skilfulness of our sailors, to the merits of a
minister, they have continued to decide on his character from
those acts and those merits, which belong to him and to him
alone. Judging him by this standard, they have been able
to discover in him no one proof or symptom of a com¬
manding genius. They have discovered him never con¬
trolling, never creating, events, but always yielding to them
with rapid change, and sheltering himself from inconsistency
by perpetual indefiniteness.

And now came the French revolution. This was a new
event; the old routine of reasoning, the common trade
of politics were to become obsolete. He appeared wholly
unprepared for it: half favouring, half condemning,
ignorant of what he favoured, and why he condemned,
he neither displayed the honest enthusiasm and fixed
principle of Mr. Fox, nor the intimate acquffintance with
the general nature of man, and the consequent prescience
of Mr. Burke.

After the declaration of war, long did he continue in the
common cant of office, in declamation about the Scheldt
and Holland, and all the vulgar causes of common contests!
and when at last the immense genius of his new supporter
had beat him out of these words (words signifying places

GROWTH

and dead objects, and signifying nothing more), he adopted
other words in their places, other generalities — Atheism
and Jacobinism — phrases which he learnt from Mr. Burke,
but without learning the Philosophical definitions and
involved consequences, with which the great man accom¬
panied those words. Since the death of Mr. Burke, the
forms and the sentiments, and the tone of the French have
undergone many and important changes: how indeed, is it
possible that it should be otherwise, while man is the
creature of experience.^ But still Mr. Pitt proceeds in ^an
endless repetition of the same general phrases. This is his
element; deprive him of general and abstract phrases, and
you reduce him to silence. But you cannot deprive him of
them. Press him to specify an individual fact of advantage
to be derived from a war, and he answers, security! Call
upon him to particularize a crime, and he exclaims —
Jacobinism! Abstractions defined by abstractions!
Generalities defined by generalities! As a minister of
finance, he is still, as ever, the man of words and abstrac¬
tions! Figures, custom-house reports, imports and exports,
commerce and revenue—-all flourishing, all splendid!
Never was such a prosperous country as England under his
administration! Let it be objected that the agriculture
of the country is, by the overbalance of commerce, and by
various and complex causes, in such a state that the country
hangs as a pensioner for bread on its neighbours,^ and a
bad season uniformly threatens us with famine — This
(it is replied) is owing to our prosperity — all prosperous
nations are in great distress for food!—still prosperity,
still GENERAL PHRASES, unenforced by one single image^ one

1 See Table Talk, ed. cit., pp. 306-7: ‘The nation that cannot even subsist with¬
out the commodity of another nation, is in effect the slave of that other nation/

HIS OWN TIMES

single fact of real national amelioration; of any one comfort
enjoyed where it was not before enjoyed; of any one class
of society becoming healthier, wiser, or happier. These are
things^ these are realities; and these Mr. Pitt has neither
the imagination to body forth, nor the sensibility to feel for.
Once, indeed, in an evil hour, intriguing for popularity, he
suffered himself to be persuaded to evince a talent for the
Real, the Individual; and he brought in his poor bill!
When we hear the minister’s talent for finance so loudly
trumpeted, we turn involuntarily to his poor bill — to that
acknowledged abortion — that unanswerable evidence of his
ignorance respecting all the fundamental relations and
actions of property, and of the social union!

As his reasonings, even so is his eloquence. One character
pervades his whole being. Words on words, finely arranged,
and so dexterously consequent, that the whole bears the
semblance of argument, and still keeps awake a sense of
surprise; but when all is done, nothing remarkable has been
said; no one philosophical remark, no one image, not even a
pointed aphorism. Not a sentence of Mr. Pitt’s has ever
been quoted, or formed the favourite phrase of the day —- a
thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation. . ..

Such appears to us to be the Prime Minister of Great
Britain, whether we consider him as a statesman or as an
orator. The same character betrays itself in his private
life; the same coldness to realities, and to all whose excellence
relates to reality. He has patronized no science, he has raised
no man of genius from obscurity; he counts no one prime
work of God among his friends. From the same source he
has no attachment to female society, no fondness for
children, no perceptions of beauty in natural scenery; but
he is fond of convivial indulgences, of that stimulation,

GROWTH

which^ keeping up the glow of self-importance and the
sense of internal power, gives feelings without the mediation
of ideas.

These are the elements of his mind; the accidents of his
fortune, the circumstances that enabled such a mind to
acquire and retain such a power, would form a subject of a
philosophical history, and that too of no scanty size. We
can scarcely furnish the chapter of contents to a work
which would comprise subjects so important and delicate
as the causes of the diffusion and intensity of secret influence;
the machinery and state intrigue of marriages; the over¬
balance of the commercial interest; the panic of property
struck by the late revolution; the short-sightedness of the
careful; the carelessness of the far-sighted; and all those
many and various events which have given to a decorous
profession of religion, and a seemliness of private morals
such an unwonted weight in the attainment and preserva¬
tion of public power. We are unable to determine whether
it be more consolatory or humiliating to human nature, that
so many complexities of event, situation, character, age,
and country, should be necessary in order to the production
[xv] of a Mr. Pitt.

(f) THE SPANISH RESISTANCE TO

Bonaparte: 1809

This is not a quarrel of governments, but a cause, which,
involving the most sacred social claims of mankind, neither
bewilders us on the one hand with visionary speculations of
natural rights \ nor like the former continental wars saddens
us on the other with the uncomfortable thought that bad

HIS OWN TIMES

is the best^ and that even the success of the better cause would
merely preserve the people at large from a yet more deplorable
state than they had endured under their former governors.
Besides, the Spanish contest has a separate and additional
interest for Englishmen of genuine English principles: for if
the peace of Amiens made the nation unanimous in its
dread of French ambition^ it was the noble efforts of Spanish
patriotism that first restored us, without distinction of
party, to our characteristic enthusiasm for liberty^ and,
presenting it in its genuine form, incapable of being
confounded with its French counterfeit, enabled us once
more to utter the names of our Hampdens, Sidneys and
Russels, without hazard of alarming the quiet subject, or of
offending the zealous loyalist.

(g) BONAPARTE : X Sop

. . .1 have styled the present ruler of France a Wretch
and a Monster, but on what occasion? Were these phrases
provoked by his Feni~vidi~vici victories over the armies of
Russia, Prussia, and Austria? No! I have denounced him
as a remorseless tyrant and the enemy of the human race.
But was it because he had sworn the ruin of Great Britain,
and had exhausted all the resources of his stupendous power
in preparations for its invasion? No! I exulted, indeed,
that his army of England lay encamped on his coasts like
wolves baying at the moon, and that he is condemned to
behold his vast flotillas as worthless and idle as the sea¬
weed that rots around their keels. I exulted, indeed, as
became a Briton; but I neither reviled nor even blamed him.
But that in order to gratify his rage against one country, he

[xvi]

GROWTH

made light of the ruin of his own subjects; that to under¬
mine the resources of one enemy, he would reduce the
Continent of Europe to a state of barbarism, and by a
remorseless suspension of the commercial system, destroy
the principal source of civilization, and abolish a middle-
class throughout Christendom; for this, Sir, and for the
murder of Palm, and for the torture and private assassination
of Wright, of Pichegru, and Toussaint (the latter a hero as
much his superior in genius as in goodness); for his remorse¬
less behaviour to the Swiss and to the Tyrolese, and for his
hatred of liberty everywhere; and lastly for his ingratitude,
perfidy, baseness, and fiend-like cruelty, for this amalgam
of all the vices, in the one vice of his conduct towards Spain.
I have spoken of him, and of his power, with abhorrence,
because it is only by a clear conception of its foul and dark
[xvii] foundations that this power can be eifectually resisted . . .
This cannot lie in vice as vice, for all injustice is in itself
feebleness and disproportion; but, as I have elsewhere
observed, the abandonment of all principle of right enables
the soul to choose and act upon a principle of wrong, and to
subordinate to this one principle all the various vices of
human nature. Hence, too, the means of accomplishing a
given end are multiplied incalculably, because all means
are considered as lawful. He who has once said with his
whole heart. Evil, be thou my good! has removed a world of
obstacles by the very decision that he will have no obstacles
[xviii] but those of force and brute matter.

GROWTH

and dead objects, and signifying nothing more), he adopted
other words in their places, other generalities — Atheism
and Jacobinism — phrases which he learnt from Mr. Burke,
but without learning the Philosophical definitions and
involved consequences, with which the great man accom¬
panied those words. Since the death of Mr. Burke, the
forms and the sentiments, and the tone of the French have
undergone many and important changes: how indeed, is it
possible that it should be otherwise, while man is the
creature of experience.^ But still Mr. Pitt proceeds in ^an
endless repetition of the same general phrases. This is his
element; deprive him of general and abstract phrases, and
you reduce him to silence. But you cannot deprive him of
them. Press him to specify an individual fact of advantage
to be derived from a war, and he answers, security! Call
upon him to particularize a crime, and he exclaims —
Jacobinism! Abstractions defined by abstractions!
Generalities defined by generalities! As a minister of
finance, he is still, as ever, the man of words and abstrac¬
tions! Figures, custom-house reports, imports and exports,
commerce and revenue—■ all flourishing, all splendid!
Never was such a prosperous country as England under his
administration! Let it be objected that the agriculture
of the country is, by the overbalance of commerce, and by
various and complex causes, in such a state that the country
hangs as a pensioner for bread on its neighbours,^ and a
bad season uniformly threatens us with famine — This
(it is replied) is owing to our prosperity — all prosperous
nations are in great distress for food!—still prosperity,
still GENERAL PHRASES, uncnforced by one single image^ one

1 See Table Talk, ed. cit., pp. 306-7: ‘The nation that cannot even subsist with¬
out the commodity of another nation, is in effect the slave of that other nation/

GROWTH

Lest some mad Devil suddenly unhamp^ring.

Slap-dash! the imp should fly off with the steeple.
On revolutionary broom-stick scampering. —
x] O ye soft-headed and soft-hearted people . . .

THE devil’s thoughts

1799

From his brimstone bed at break of day
A walking the Devil has gone.

To visit his snug little farm the earth,
And see how his stock goes on.

Down the river did glide, with wind and tide,

A pig with vast celerity;

And the Devil look’d wise as he saw how the while.
It cut its own throat. ‘There’ quoth he with a smile,
‘Goes “England’s commercial prosperity”.’

lie saw an old acquaintance

As he passed by a Methodist meeting; —
She holds a consecrated key,

And the Devil nods her a greeting.

She turned up her nose and said,
‘Avaunt! my name’s Religion,’

And she looked to Mr.-

And leered like a love-sick pigeon.

HIS OWN TIMES

He saw a certain minister
(A minister to his mind)

Go up into a certain House,

With a majority behind.

The Devil quoted Genesis
Like a very learned clerk.

How 'Noah and his creeping things

Went up into the Ark.’ [xx]

TALLEYRAND TO LORD GRENVILLE
A METRICAL EPISTLE,

I 800

• * « « «

My Lord! I’ve the honour to be Talleyrand,

And the letter’s from me 1 You’ll not draw back your hand
Nor yet take it up by the rim in dismay,

As boys pick up ha’pence on April fool-day.

I’m no Jacobin foul, or red-hot Cordelier

That your Lordship’s ^/;^gauntleted fingers need fear

An infection or burn 1 Believe me, ’tis true,

With a scorn like another I look down on the crew
That bawl and hold up to the mob’s detestation
The most delicate wish for a silent persuasion.

A jorm long-estahlisKd these Terrorists call
Bribes, perjury, theft, and the devil and all!

And yet spite of all that the Moralist prates,

’Tis the keystohe and cement of civili'zed States.

GROWTH

My Lord! though the vulgar in wonder be lost at
My transfigurations, and name me Apostate^

Such a mieaningless nick-name, which never incens'd me,
Cannot prejudice you and your cousin against me;

Fm Ex-bishop. What then? Burke himself would agree
That I left not the Church — 'twas the Church that left me.

« « • 9

But perhaps, dear my Lord, among other worse crimes,
The whole was no more than a lie of The Times,

It is monstrous, my Lord! in a civiliz’d state

That such Newspaper rogues should have license to prate.

Indeed printing in general — but for the taxes,

Is in theory false and pernicious in praxis!

You and I, and your Cousin, and Abbe Sieyes,

And all the great Statesmen that live in these days,

Are agreed that no nation secure is from vi’lence
Unless all who must think are maintain’d all in silence.

This printing, my Lord — but ’tis useless to mention
What we both of us think ~ ’twas a cursed invention,

And Germany might have been honestly prouder
[xsi] Had she left it alone, and found out only powder.

PART THREE

MATURITY

(1809-1834)

Locke says four and five are nine. Novo I say^
that four and five are not nine, but tha4 they
will make nine.

(‘table talk’: Aug, 24, 1831)

I RELIGION

(a)cONFESSIO FIDEi: NOVEMBER 3RD5 1816

L I believe that I am a freeagent, inasmuch as, and so far
as, I have a will, which renders me justly responsible for my
actions, emissive as well as commissive. Likewise that I
possess reason, or a law of right and wrong, which, uniting
with my sense of moral responsibility, constitutes the voice
of conscience.

11. Hence it becomes my absolute duty to believe, and I do
believe, that there is a God, that is, a Being, in whom supreme
reason and a most holy will are one with an infinite power;
and that all holy will is coincident with the will of God, and
therefore secure in its ultimate consequences by His omnipo¬
tence; — having, if such similitude be not unlawful, such a
relation to the goodness of the Almighty as a perfect time¬
piece will have to the sun.

COROLLARY

The wonderful works of God in the sensible world are a
perpetual discourse, reminding me of His existence and
shadowing out to me His perfections. But as all language
presupposes in the intelligent hearer or reader those pri¬
mary notions which it symbolizes . . . even so I believe that
the notion of God is essential to the human mind; that it is
called forth into distinct consciousness principally by the

MATURITY

conscience, and auxiliarly by the manifest adaptation of
means to ends in the ouT^^ard creation. It is therefore
evident to my reason that the existence of God is absolutely
and necessarily insusceptible of a scientific demonstration,
and that Scripture has so represented it. . . .

IIL My conscience forbids me to propose to myself the
pains and pleasures of this life as the primary motive or
ultimate end of my actions; *— on the contrary it makes me
perceive an utter disproportionateness and heterogeneity
between the acts of the spirit, as virtue and vice, and"the
things of the sense, such as all earthly rewards and punish¬
ments must be. Its hopes and fears, therefore, refer me to a
different and spiritual state of being: and I believe in the
life to come, not through arguments acquired by my under¬
standing or discursive faculty, but chiefly and effectively,
because so to believe is my duty, and in obedience to the
commands of my conscience., . .

IV. I believe, and hold it as the fundamental article of
Christianity, that I am a fallen creature; that I am of myself
capable of moral evil, but not of myself capable of moral
good, and that an evil ground existed in my will, previously
to any given act, or assignable moment of time, in my con¬
sciousness. I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery
I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the
possibility of it, but I know that it is so. My conscience, the
sole fountain of certainty, commands me to believe it, and
would itself be a contradiction were it not so — and what is
real must be possible.

\. I receive wnth full and grateful faith the assurance of
revelation, that the Vford, which is from all eternity with
God, and is God, assumed our human nature in order to
redeem me and all mankind from this our connate cor-

RELIGION

ruption. My reason convinces me that no other mode of
redemption is conceivable. . . .

VL I believe that this assumption of humanity by the Son
of God was revealed and realized to us by the Word made
flesh, and manifested to us in Christ Jesus; and that his
miraculous birth, his agony, his crucifixion, death, resurrec¬
tion and ascension, were all both symbols of our redemption
. . . and necessary parts of the awful process.

VIL I believe in the descent and sending of the Holy
Spirit, by whose free grace, obtained for me by my Redeemer,

I can alone be sanctified and restored from my natural
inheritance of sin and condemnation, be a child of God, and
an inheritor of the Kingdom of God. [i]

(b) ESSAY ON FAITH

Faith may be defined as fidelity to our own being — so far
as such being is not and cannot become an object of the
senses. . . .

That I am conscious of something within me peremptor¬
ily commanding me to do unto others as I would they
should do unto me; — in other words, a categorical (that is,
primary and unconditional) imperative; that the maxim
{regula maxima or supreme rule) of my actions, both inward
and outward, should be such as I could, without any con¬
tradiction arising therefrom, will to be the law of all moral
and rational beings; — this, I say, is a fact of which I am no
less conscious (though in a different way) nor less assured,
than I am of any appearance presented by my outward
senses. Nor is this all; but in the very act of being conscious

MATURITY

of this in my own nature, I know that it is a fact of which all
men either are, or ought to be, conscious. . . .

Well, this we have affirmed is a fact of which every honest
man is as fully assured as of his seeing, hearing or smelling.
But though the former assurance does not differ from the
latter in the degree, it is altogether diverse in the kind; the
senses being morally passive, while the conscience is essen¬
tially connected with the will . . . Thence we call the present¬
ations of the senses impressions, those of the conscience
commands or dictates. In the senses we find our receptivity,
and as far as our personal being is concerned, we are passive;
— but in the fact of the conscience we are not only agents,
but it is bv this alone that we know ourselves to be such;
nay, that our very passiveness in this latter is an act of pass-
iveness, and that we are patient {j}atientes) — not, as in the
other case, smply passive. , . ,

It appears then that even the very first step, that the
initiation of the process, the becoming conscious of a con¬
science, partakes of the nature of an act. It is an act, in and
by which we take upon ourselves an allegiance, and conse-
sequently the obligation of fealty; and this fealty or fidelity
implying the power of being unfaithful, it is the first and
fundamental sense of Faith. ., .

Soon, however, experience comes into play. We learn
that there are other impulses besides the dictates of con¬
science; that there are powers within us and without us
ready to usurp the throne of conscience, and busy in tempt¬
ing us to transfer our allegiance. We learn that there are
many things contrary to conscience, and therefore to be
rejected and utterly excluded, and many that can co-exist
with its supremacy only by being subjugated as beasts of
burthen; and others again, as for instance the social tender-

RELIGION

ness and affections, and the faculties and excitations of the
intellect, which must be at least subordinated. The pre¬
servation of our loyalty and fealty under these trials and
against these rivals constitutes the second sense of
Faith, , , .

Next we seek for that rightful superior on our duties to
whom all our duties to all other superiors, on our faithfulness
to whom all our bounden relations to all other objects of
fidelity, are founded. We must inquire after that duty in
which all others find their several degrees and dignities, and
from which they derive their obligative force. We are to
find a superior whose rights, including our duties, are pre¬
sented to the mind in the very idea of that Supreme Being,
whose sovereign prerogatives are predicates implied in the
subjects, as the essential properties of a circle are co¬
assumed in the first assumption of a circle ... In this sense,
then, faith is fidelity, fealty, allegiance of the moral nature,
to God, in opposition to all usurpation and in resistance to
all temptation to the placing any other claim above or equal
without fidelity to God.

The will of God is the last ground and final aim of all our
duties, and to that the whole man is to be harmonized by sub¬
ordination, subjugation or suppression alike in commission
and omission. But the will of God, which is one with the
supreme intelligence, is revealed to man through the con¬
science, But the conscience, which consists in an inappellable
bearing-witness to the truth, may legitimately be construed
with the term reason . . , This brings me to the last and
fullest sense of Faith, as the obedience of the individual
will to the reason. . . .

Thus then to conclude. Faith consists in the synthesis of
the reason and the individual will. By virtue of the latter

MATURITY

therefore it must be an energy, and inasmuch as it relates to
the whole moral man, it must be exerted in each and all of
his constituents or incidents, faculties and tendencies; — it
must be a total, not a partial; a continuous, not a desultory
or occasional energy . , . And by virtue of the former, that
is, reason, faith must be a light, a form of knowing, a be¬
holding of truth. In the incomparable words of the Evange¬
list, therefore — faith must be a light originating in the Logos^
or the substantial reason^ which is co-eternal and one with the
Holy Will^ and which light is at the sa?ne thne the life of men.
Now as life is here the sum or collective of all moral and
spiritual acts, in suffering, doing and being, so is faith the
source and the sum, the energy and the principle of the
fidelity of man to God, by the subordination of his human
will, in all provinces of his nature, to his reason, as the sum
of spiritual truth, representing and manifesting the will

The reason first manifests itself in man by the tendency
to the comprehension of all as one. We can neither rest in an
infinite that is not at the same time a whole, nor in a whole
that IS not infinite. Hence the natural man is always m a
state either of resistance or of captivity to the understanding
and the fancy, which cannot represent totality without limit:
and he either loses the one in the striving after the infinite,
that is, atheism with or without polytheism, or he loses the
infinite in the striving after the one, and then sinks into
anthropomorphic monotheism. The rational instinct, there¬
fore, taken abstractedly and unbalanced, did, in itself , . .

RELIGION

form the original temptation through which man fell: and in
all ages has continued to originate the same, even from
Adam, in whom we all fell, to the atheists Vvho deified the
human reason in the person of a harlot during the earlier
period of the French Revolution,

To this tendency, therefore, religion, as the consideration
of the particular and individual (^in which respect it takes up
and identifies with itself the excellence of the understanding:)
but of the individual as it exists and has its being in the
universal (in which respect it is one with the pure reason) ■—
to this tendency, I say, religion assigns the due limfits. . . .

There exists in the human being, at least in man fully
developed, no mean symbol of tri-unity in reason, religion
and the will. For each of the three, though a distinct agency
implies and demands the other two, and loses its own nature
at the moment that from distinction it passes into division
or separation. The perfect frame of man is the perfect
frame of a state: and in the light of this idea we must read
Plato’s Republic.

The comprehension, impartiality and far-sightedness of
reason (the legislative of our nature), taken singly and ex¬
clusively, becomes mere visionariness in intellect, and indol¬
ence or hard-heartedness in morals. It is the science of
cosmopolitanism without country, of philanthropy without
neighbourliness or consanguinity, in short, of all the im¬
postures of that philosophy of the French Revolution, which
would sacrifice each to the shadowy idol of all. For Jacob¬
inism is monstrum hybridum^ made up in part of despotism,
or the lust of rule grounded in selfness; and in part of abstract
reason misapplied to objects that belong entirely to experi¬
ence and the understanding. Its instincts and mode of
action are in strict correspondence with its origin. In all

MATURITY

places, Jacobinism betrays its mixed parentage and nature
by applying to the brute passions and physical force of the
multitude (that is, to man as a mere animal) in order to build
up government and the frame of society on natural rights
instead of social privileges, on the universals of abstract
reason instead of positive institutions, the lights of specific
experience and the modifications of existing circumstances.
Right, in its most proper sense, is the creature of law and
statute, and only in the technical language of the courts has
it any substantial and independent sense. In morals, rigit
is a word without meaning except as the correlative of duty.

From all this it follows that reason, as the science of all as
a whole, must be interpenetrated by a power that represents
the concentration of all in each — a power that acts by a con¬
traction of universal truths into individual duties, such
contraction being the only form in which those truths can
attain life and reality. Now this is religion, which is the
executive of our nature, and on this account the name of
highest dignity, and the symbol of sovereignty. . . .

Yet even religion itself, if ever in its too exclusive devo¬
tion to the specific and individual, it neglects to interpose the
contemplation of the universal, changes its being into
superstition, and becoming more and more earthly and
servile, as more and more estranged from the one in all, goes
wandering at length with its pack of amulets, bead-rolls . . ,
and the like pedlary, on pilgrimages to Loretto, Mecca, or
the temple of Juggernaut, arm in arm with sensuality on one
side and self-torture on the other, followed by a motley
group of friars, pardoners, faquirs, gamesters, flagellants,
mountebanks and harlots.

But neither can reason or religion exist or co-exist as
reason and religion, except as far as they are actuated by the

RELIGION

will . . . which is the sustaining, coercive, and ministerial
power, the functions of which in the individual correspond
to the officers of war and police in the ideal Republic of
Plato. In its state of immanence or indwelling in reason and
religion, the will appears indifferently as wisdom or as love:
two names of the same power, the former more intelligential,
the latter more spiritual , . . But in its utmost abstraction
and consequent state of reprobation, the will becomes
Satanic pride and rebellious self-idolatry in the relations of
the spirit to itself, and remorseless despotism relatively to
others: the more hopeless as the more obdurate by its sub¬
jugation of sensual impulses, by its superiority to toil and
pain and pleasure; in short, by the fearful resolve to find in
itself alone the one absolute motive of action, under which
all other motives from within and without must be either
subordinated or crushed.

This is the character which Milton has so philosophically
as well as sublimely embodied in the Satan of his Paradise
Lost, Alas! too often has it been embodied in real life. Too
often has it given a dark and savage grandeur to the historic
page . . . from Nimrod to Bonaparte. And from inattention
to the possibility of such a character as well as from ignor¬
ance of its elements, even men of honest intentions too fre¬
quently become fascinated. Nay, whole nations have been
so far duped by this want of insight and reflection as to
regard with palliative admiration, instead of wonder and
abhorrence, the Molochs of human nature who are indebted
for the larger portion of their meteoric success to their total
want of principle, and who surpass the generality of their
fellow creatures in one act of courage only, that of daring to
say with their whole heart, ‘Evil, be thou my good!’ . . .

I have only to add a few sentences in completion of this

MATURITY

comment^ on the conscience and on the understanding.
The conscience is neither reason, religion or will, but an
experience sui generis of the coincidence of the human will
with reason and religion. It might perhaps be called a spirit¬
ual sensation; but that there lurks a contradiction in the
terms ... In strictness, therefore, the conscience is neither
a sensation nor a sense; but a testifying state^ best described
in the words of Scripture, as the peace of God that passeth all
[iii] understanding, . . .

2 PHILOSOPHY

(a) THE IMPORTANCE OF PHILOSOPHY

It would not be difficult, by an unbroken chain of historic
facts, to demonstrate that the most important changes in the
commercial relations of the world had their origin in the
closets or lonely walks of uninterested theorists; that the
mighty epochs of commerce that have changed the face of
empires; nay, the most important of those discoveries and
improvements in the mechanic arts, which have numerically
increased our population beyond what the wisest statesmen
of Elizabeth’s reign deemed possible, and again doubled
this population virtually; that the most important, I say, of
those inventions that in their results

. . . best uphold

War by her two main nerves, iron and gold . . .
had their origin not in the cabinets of statesmen or in the

PHILOSOPHY

practical insight of men of business, but in the visions of
recluse genius. To the immense majority of men, even in
civilized countries, speculative philosophy has ever been,
and must ever remain, a terra incognita. Yet it is not the less
true that all the epoch-forming revolutions of the Christian
world, the revolutions of religion and with them the civil,
social and domestic habits of the nations concerned, have
coincided with the rise and fall of metaphysical systems.

So few are the minds that really govern the machine of
society. ... [i]

The reading of histories . . . may dispose a man to satire;
but the science of history, — history studied in the
light of philosophy, as the great drama of an ever-unfolding
Providence, — has a very different effect. It infuses hope
and reverential thoughts of man and his destination . . . If [H]
there be any antidote to that restless craving for the wonders
of the day, which, in conjunction with the appetite for
publicity, is spreading like an efflorescence on the surface of
our national character; if there exist any means for deriving
resignation from general discontent . . . that antidote and
these means must be sought for in the collation of the present
with the past, in the habit of thoughtfully assimilating the
events of our own age to those of the time before us , . . The [hi]
true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that
kind of evidence that can compel our belief; so many are the
disturbing forces which in every cycle of changes modify
the motion given by the first projection; and every age has,
or imagines it has, its own circumstances which render past
experience no longer applicable to the present case; that
there will never be wanting answers, and explanations, and
specious flatteries of hope to persuade a people and its
government that the history of the past is inapplicable to

jVI A T U R I T Y

their case. And no wonder, if we read history for the facts

[iv] instead of reading it for the sake of the general principles.. . ,
The remedial and prospective advantages that may be
rationally anticipated from the habit of contemplating par¬
ticulars in their universal laws; its tendency at once to fix
and to liberalize the morality of private life, at once to
produce and enlighten the spirit of public zeal . . . these
advantages I have felt it my duty and made it my main object
to press on your serious attention during the whole period of
my literary labours from earliest manhood to the present
hour. Whatever may have been the specific theme of my

Wcommunications, and whether they related to criticism,
politics, or religion, — still principles, their .subordination,
their connection and their application in all the divisions of
our tastes, duties, rules of conduct and schemes of belief,—

[v] have constituted my chapter of contents . . . An excess in our
attachments to temporal and personal objects can be counter¬
acted only by a pre-occupation of the intellect and the

[vi] affections with permanent, universal and eternal truths . . .
These alone can interest the undegraded human spirit
deeply and enduringly, because these alone belong to its

[vii] essence and will remain with it permanently ... At the an¬
nunciation of principles, of ideas, the soul of man awakes and
starts up, as an exile in a far distant land at the unexpected

[viiij sounds of his native language ....

The sense of expediency, the cautious balancing of com¬
parative advantages, the constant wakefulness to the cui
bom? — in connection with the quid mihi? — all these are in
their place in the routine of conduct by which the individual
provides for himself the real or supposed wants of to-day and
to-morrow; and in quiet times and prosperous circumstances
a nation presents an aggregate of such individuals, a busy

PHILOSOPHY

ant-hill in calm and sunshine. By the happy organization of
a well-governed society^ the contradictory interests of ten
millions of such individuals may neutralize each other, and
be reconciled in the unity of the national interest. But whence
did this happy organization first come? Was it a tree trans¬
planted from Paradise with all its branches in full fruitage?

Or was it sowed in sunshine? . . . Let history answer these
questions. With blood was it planted; it was rocked in
tempests; the goat, the ass and the stag gnawed it; the wild
bo^r has whetted his tusks on its bark. The deep scars are
still extant on its trunk, and the path of the lightning may be
traced among its higher branches . . . Mightier powers were
at work than expediency ever yet called up, yea, mightier
than the mere understanding can comprehend., . . [ix]

There is a wisdom higher than prudence, to which pru¬
dence stands in the same relation as the mason and carpenter
to the genial and scientific architect . , . The widest maxims [x]
of prudence are like arms without hearts, disjointed from
those feelings which flow forth from principles as from a
fountain. So little are even the genuine maxims of exped¬
ience likely to be perceived or acted upon by those who have
been habituated to admit nothing higher than expedience,
that I dare hazard the assertion, that in the whole chapter of
contents of European ruin,* every article might be unanswer¬
ably deduced from the neglect of some maxim that had been
repeatedly laid dowm, demonstrated and enforced with a
host of illustrations, in some one or other of the works of
Machiavelli, Bacon, or Harrington ... If ever there were a [xi]
time when the formation of just public principles becomes a
duty of private morality: when the principles of morality in
general ought to be made to bear on our public suffrages,
and to affect every great national determination; when, in

.\ I A T U R IT Y

short, his country should have a place by every Englishman’s
fire-side; and when the feelings and truths which give dignity
to the fire-side and tranquillity to the death-bed, ought to be
present and influensive in the cabinet and in the senate —
[sii] that time is now with us.

Berkeley indeed asserts, and is supported in his assertion
by the great statesmen, Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh,
that without an habitual interest in these subjects, a man
[liii] may be a dexterous intriguer, but never can be a statesman . . .
'And whatever the world may opine, he who hath not much
meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summum
lonum^ may possibly make a thriving earth-worm, but will
most indubitably make a blundering patriot and a sorry

[xiv] statesman.’ (Berkeley’s dim, § 350 ). The higher a man’s
station, the more arduous and full of peril his duties, the
more comprehensive should his foresight be, the more
rooted his tranquillity concerning life and death. But these
are gifts which no experience can bestow, but the experience
from within: and there is a nobleness of the whole personal
being, to which the contemplation of all events and pheno¬
mena in the light of the three master ideas, announced in the

[xv] foregoing pages, can alone elevate the spirit . . . Where
these are despised, or at best regarded as aliens from the
actual business of life, and consigned to the ideal world of
speculative philosophy and Utopian politics, instead of state-
wisdom we shall have state-craft ... We must content our¬
selves wdth expedient-makers, with fire-engines against
fires, life-boats against inundations; but no houses built fire-

[xvi] proof, no dams that rise above the water-mark.

I hold it the disgrace and calamity of a professed states¬
man not to know and acknowledge that a permanent,
nationalized, learned order, a national clerisy or church,

PHILOSOPHY

is an essential element of a rightly constituted nation, with¬
out which it wants the best security alike for its permanence
and its progression; and for which neither tract-societies nor
conventicles, nor Lancasterian schools, nor mechanics’
institutions, nor lecture-bazaars under the absurd name of
universities, nor ail these collectively, can be a substitute.

For they are all marked with the same asterisk of spurious¬
ness, show the same distemper-spot on the front, that they
are empirical specifics for morbid symptoms that help to feed
and'continue the disease.

But you wish for general illumination: you would spur-
arm the toes of society: you would enlighten the higher
ranks per ascensum ahrmis} You begin, therefore, with the
attempt to popularize science: but you will only effect its
plehijication . . . From a popular philosophy and a philosophic [svii]
populace. Good sense deliver us . . . It is folly to think of [xviii]
making all, or the many, philosophers, or even men of
science and systematic knowledge. But it is duty and wisdom
to aim at making as many as possible soberly and steadily
religious; — inasmuch as the morality which the state re¬
quires in its citizens for its own well-being and ideal immortal¬
ity, and without reference to their spiritual interest as
individuals, can only exist for the people in the form of
religion. But the existence of a true philosophy, or the power
and habit of contemplating particulars in the unity and
fontal mirror of the idea ~ this, in the rulers and teachers
of a nation, is indispensable to a sound state of religion
in all classes. In fine, Religion, true or false, is and ever has
been the centre of gravity in a realm, to which all other things
must and will accommodate themselves. fskl

MATURITY

(b) DECLINE OF PHILOSOPHY IN¬
MODERN TIMES

Under this head I include the general neglect of all the
maturer studies; the long and ominous eclipse of philosophy;
the usurpation of that venerable name by physical and
psychological empiricism; and the non-existence of a learned
and philosophic public, which is perhaps the only innoxious
form of an imperium m imperio^ but at the same time the only
form which is not directly or indirectly encouraged. . , T

The fact is simply this. We have — lovers, shall I
entitle them? or must I not rather hazard the introduction
of their own phrases and say amateurs or dilettanti^ as
musicians, botanists, florists, mineralogists and antiquarians
. . . Every work which can be made use of either to immediate
profit or immediate pleasure, every work which falls in with
the desire of acquiring wealth suddenly, or which can gratify
the senses or pamper the still more degrading appetite for
scandal and personal defamation, is sure of an appropriate
circulation. But neither philosophy nor theology in the
strictest sense of the words, can be said to have even a public
existence among us. . . .

As to that which passes with us under the name of meta¬
physics, philosophic elements and the like, I refer every man
of reflection to the contrast between the present times and
Aose shortly after the restoration of ancient literature. In
the latter we find the greatest men of the age, statesmen,
warriors, monarchs, architects, in the closest intercourse with
philosophy. I need only mention the names of Lorenzo the
Magnificent, Picus Mirandola, Ficinus and Politian; the
abstruse subjects of their discussion, and the importance
attached to them as the requisite qualifications of men

PHILOSOPHY

placed by Providence as guides and governors of their
fellow-creatures. If this be undeniable^ equally notorious is
it that at present the more eifective a man's talents arej
and the more likely he is to be useful and distinguished in the
highest situations of public life, the earlier does he show his
aversion to the metaphysics and the books of metaphysical
speculation which are placed before him: though they come
with the recommendation of being so many triumphs of
modern good sense over the schools of ancient philosophy.
Dante, Petrarch, Spenser, Philip and Algernon Sidney,
Milton and Barrow were Platonists. But all the men of
genius with whom it has been my fortune to converse,
either profess to know nothing of the present systems or to
despise them. It would be equally unjust and irrational to
seek the solution of this difference in the men; and if not, it
can be found only in the philosophic systems themselves.

And so in truth it is. The living of former ages communed
gladly with a life-breathing philosophy: the living of the
present age wisely leave the dead to take care of the dead. [kx]
The very terms of ancient wisdom are worn out, or, far
worse, stamped on baser metal . . . Sir Philip Sidney . . . [xxi]
held high converse with Spenser on the idea of supersensual
beauty; on all ‘earthly fair and amiable' as the symbol of the
idea; and on music and poesy as its living educts. With the
same genial reverence did the young Algernon commune
with Harrington and Milton on the idea of a perfect state;
and in what sense it is true that the men (that is, the aggre¬
gate of the inhabitants of a country at any one time) are made
for the State, not the State for the men. But these lights
shine no longer, or for a few. Exeunt: and enter in their
stead Holofernes and Costard, masked as Metaphysics
and Commonsense. And these, too, have their ideas. The

MATURITY

former has an idea that Hume, Hartley and Condillac have
[sxii] exploded all ideas but those of sensation; . . . that there is no
absurdity in asking what colour virtue is, inasmuch as the
proper philosophic answer would be black, blue or bottle-
green, according as the coat, waistcoat and small-clothes
might chance to be of the person, the series of whose motions
mdii] had excited the sensations which formed our idea of virtue.

And his friend, deputy costard, has no idea of a
better flavoured haunch of venison than he dined off at the

^xziv] London Tavern last week. . . .

The teeth of the old serpent sowed by the Cadmuses of
French literature under Louis XV produced a plenteous
crop of such philosophers and truth-trumpeters in the reign
of his ill-fated successor. They taught many facts, historical,
political, psychological and ecclesiastical, diffusing their
notions so widely that the very ladies and hair-dressers of
[sxv] Paris became fluent encyclopedists . . . Prurient, bustling
and revolutionary, this French wisdom has never more than
grazed the surfaces of knowledge. As political economy,
in its zeal for the increase of food it habitually overlooked
the Qualities and even the sensations of those that were to

feed on it. As ethical philosophy^ it recognized no duties
which it could not reduce into debitor and creditor accounts
on the ledgers of self-love, where no coin was sterling which
could not be rendered into agreeable sensations. And even
in its height of self-complacency as chemical art, greatly am
I deceived if it has not from the very beginning mistaken the
products of destruction, cadavera rerum^ for the elements of
composition: and most assuredly it has dearly purchased a
few brilliant inventions at the loss of all communion with
and the spirit of nature.

Consequences exemplified. State of nature, or the Ourang

lOO

PHILOSOPHY

Outang theology of the origin of the human race, substituted
for the Book of Genesis, Ch. I-X. Rights of nature for the
duties and privileges of citizens. Idea-less facts, misnamed
proofs from histor}^, grounds of experience, etc., substituted
for principles and the insight derived from them. State-
policy a Cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of the
head \ Our measures of policy either a series of anachronisms
or a truckling to events, substituted for the science that
should command them; for all true insight is foresight . . .
Mea'ntime, the true historical feeling, the immortal life of an
historical Nation, generation linked to generation by faith,
freedom, heraldry, and ancestral fame, languishing and
giving place to the superstitions of wealth and newspaper
reputation.

Talents without genius: a swarm of clever, well-informed
men: an anarchy of minds, a despotism of maxims. Despot¬
ism of finance in government and legislation — of vanity and
sciolism in the intercourse of life — of presumption, temerity,
and hardness of heart in political economy.

The guess-work of general consequences substituted for
moral and political philosophy, adopted as a text-book in one
of the universities and cited as authority in the legislature:

Plebs fro Senatu Pofuloque\ the wealth of the nation (i.e.
of the wealthy individuals thereof, and the magnitude of the
Revenue) for the well-being of the people.

Gin consumed by paupers to the value of about eighteen
millions yearly. Government by journeymen clubs; by
reviews, magazines, and above all by newspapers. Lastly,
crimes quadrupled for the whole country, and in some coun¬
ties decupled. [sxvii]

Thank Heaven i — notwithstanding the attempts of
Thomas Payne and his compeers, it is not so bad with us.

lOI

M A T U R I T Y

Open infidelity has ceased to be a means even of gratifying
vanity . . , Nay it became a mark of original thinking to
defend the Creed and the Ten Commandments: so the
strong minds veered round and religion came again into
fashion. But still I exceedingly doubt whether the super¬
annuation of sundry superstitious fancies be the result of
any real diffusion of sound thinking in the nation at large.

. . , As many errors are despised by men from ignorance as
[xxviii] from knowledge. . . .

For myself, I would much rather see the English people
at large believe somewhat too much than merely just enough,
if the latter is to be produced, or must be accompanied by,
a contempt or neglect of the faith and intellect of their fore¬
fathers. For ... it remains most worthy of our consideration,
whether a fancied superiority to their ancestors’ intellects
must not be speedily followed in the popular mind by dis¬
respect for their ancestors’ institutions. Assuredly, it is not
easy to place any confidence in a form of Church or State, of
the founders of which we have been taught to believe that
their philosophy was jargon, and their feelings and notions
[xxix] rank superstition. , . .

Now it is not denied that the fram.ers of our Church
Liturgy, Homilies, and Articles, entertained metaphysical
opinions irreconcilable in their first principles with the
system of speculative philosophy which has been taught
in this country . . . [A] it likely that the faith of our ancestors
will be retained when their philosophy is rejected — rejected
^ ‘priori^ as baseless notions not worth inquiring into, as
[xxx] obsolete errors which it would be slaying the slain to confute?

We have attached a portion even of our national glory
... to the name of the assumed father of the system (that
system of disguised and decorous Epicureanism which has

102

PHILOSOPHY

been tiie only orthodox philosophy of the last hundred
years) who raised it to its present pride of place and almost
universal acceptance throughout Europe. And how was this
effected? Extrinsicaliy, by all the causes, consequences,
and accompaniments of the Revolution of 1688 ... In¬
trinsically, and as far as the philosophic scheme itself alone
is concerned, it was effected by the mixed policy and
bonhomie with which the author contrived to retain in his
celebrated work whatever the system possesses of soothing
for the indolence, and of flattering for the vanit}’*, of men’s
average understandings: while he kept out of sight all its
darker features which outrage the instinctive faith and moral
feelings of mankind . . . Great at all times, and almost [xm]
incalculable, are the influences of party spirit in exaggerating
contemporary reputation; but never perhaps from the first
syllable of recorded time were they exerted under such a
concurrence and conjunction of fortunate accidents, of help¬
ing and furthering events and circumstances, as in the
instance of Mr. Locke.

I am most fully persuaded that the principles both of
taste, morals and religion, taught in our most popular
compendia of moral and political philosophy, natural theology
evidences of Christianity, and the like, are false, injurious
and debasing. But I am likewise not less deeply convinced
that all the well-meant attacks on the wTitinus of modern"

infidels and heretics, in support either of the miracles or of
the mysteries of the Christian religion can be of no permanent
utility while the authors themselves join in the vulgar appeal
to common-sense as the one infallible judge . , . Many of the [xsidi]
most specious arguments in proof of the imperfection and
injustice of the present constitution of our legislature will be
found, on closer examination, to pre-suppose the truth of

103

MATURITY

certain principles, from which the adducers of these argu¬
ments loudly profess their dissent. In political changes no
permanence can be hoped for in the edifice without consist-
[xxjiiil ency in the founuations. . . .

The Articles of our Church and the true principles of
government and social order will never be effectually
and consistently maintained against their antagonists till
the champions have themselves ceased to worship the same
Baal with their enemies . . . While all parties agree in their
abjuration of Plato and Aristotle, and in their contemptuous
neglect of the Schoolmen and the scholastic logic . . , while
all alike pre-assume with Mr. Locke that the mind contains
only the reliques of the senses, and therefore proceed with
him to explain the substance from the shadow, the voice
from the echo, — they can but detect each other’s inconsisten¬
cies .. . Lastly, the godless materialist, as the only consistent
because the only consequent reasoner, will secretly laugh at
fzxKivl both.

(^cj MECHANIC AND VITAL PHILOSOPHY

CONTRASTED

My system, if I may venture to give it so fine a name, is
the only attempt, I know, ever made to reduce all knowledges
into harmony. It opposes no other system, but shows what
was true in each; and how that which was true in the parti¬
cular, in each of them became error, because it was only half
the truth. I have endeavoured to unite the insulated frag¬
ments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror ... I
wish, in short, to connect by a moral copula natural history
with political history; or, in other words, to make history

104

PHILOSOPHY

■>>

scientific and science historical — to take from history

Qripn rp ifc:

The pith of my system is to make the senses out of the
mind — not the mind out of the senses, as Locke did . . . [
The result of my system will be to show that, so far from
the world being a goddess in petticoats, it is the Devil in a
strait waistcoat. [

\JVordswQrtJi s purpose in ^The Prelude^ was"\ to infer and
reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man
and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive
process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all
the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration.
Something of this sort was, I think, agreed on. It is, in
substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system
of philosophy.

The leading differences between mechanic and vital
philosophy may all be drawn from one point; namely, that
the former, demanding for every mode and act of existence
real or possible visibility, knows only of distance and near¬
ness, composition (or rather juxtaposition) and decomposi¬
tion, in short, the relations of unproductive particles to each
other; so that in every instance the result is the exact sum of
the component quantities, as in arithmetical addition. This
is the philosophy of death, and only of a dead nature can it
hold good. In life, much more in spirit, and in a living and
spiritual philosophy, the two component counter-powers

XXXVl

X2XV11

XXXVlll

xxxix]

M AU R I T Y

actually interpenetrate each other and generate a higher
thirdj including both the former^ ita tamen ut sit alia at
[d] major, , . .

(d) THE REASON AND THE UNDERSTANDING

Until you have mastered the fundamental difference^ in
kind, between the reason and the understanding as faculties
of the human mind, you cannot escape a thousand difficulties
in philosophy. It is pre-eminently the Gradus ad Philoso-
[Yii] phiaTfi.

The English public is not yet ripe to comprehend the
essential difference betw^een the reason and the understand¬
ing—between a principle and a maxim —an eternal truth
and a mere conclusion generalized from a great number of
facts. A man, having seen a million moss roses all red, con¬
cludes from his own experience that all moss roses are red.
That is a maxim with him — the greatest amount of his know¬
ledge upon the subject. But it is only true until some
gardener has produced a white moss rose — after which
the maxim is good for nothing , . . Now compare this in its
highest degree with the assurance wffiich you have that the
two sides of any triangle are together greater than the
third. This, demonstrated of one triangle, is seen to be
eternally true of all imaginable triangles. This is a truth
perceived at once by the intuitive reason, independently of
experience. It is and must ever be so, multiply and vary
[xlii] the shapes and sizes of the triangles as you may.

I affirm that reason is the knowledge of the laws of the
whole considered as one: and, as such, it is contra-distin¬
guished from the understanding, which concerns itself

io6

PHILOSOPHY

exclusively with the quantities^ qualities and relations of par¬
ticulars in time and space. The understanding, therefore, is
the science of phenomena^ and of their subsumption under
distinct kinds and sorts {^genera and species). Its functions
supply the rules and constitute the possibility of experience;
but remain mere logical forms, except as far as materials are
given by the senses or sensations. . . .

Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the under¬

standing; the faculty of judging by the senses. He was a
conceptualist, and never could raise himself into that higher
state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to others,
in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and,
as it were, looked down upon from the throne of actual ideas,
or living, inborn, essential truths . , . Every man is born
an Aristotelian or a Platonist. , . .

Pantagruel is the Reason; Panurge the Understanding, —
the pollarded man, the man with every faculty except the
reason. I scarcely know an example more illustrative of

All that is good is in the reason, not in the understanding
which is proved by the malignity of those who lose their
reason. When a man is said to be out of his wits, we do not
mean that he has lost his reason but only his understanding,
or his power of choosing his means or perceiving their fitness
to the end . . . Well and truly has the understanding been [xlvi]
defined; Facidtas ynediata et mediorum\ — the faculty of
means to m.edial ends, that is to Purposes or such ends as are
themselves but means to some ulterior end , . , Don Quixote
is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the imagin¬
ation and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him
disregard the evidence of sense when it opposed their con¬
clusions. Sancho is the common-sense of the social man-

107

M A T U R I T Y

animal, unenlightened and unsanctified by the reason. You
see how he reverences his master at the very time he is
yAvili] cheating him.

The eye is not more inappropriate to sound than the mere
understanding to the modes and laws of spiritual existence
... I assert that the understanding or experiential faculty,
unirradiated by the reason and the spirit, has no appropriate
object but the material world in relation to our worldly
interests ... It must not, however, be overlooked, that this
insulation of the understanding is our own act and deed.
The man of healthful and undivided intellect uses his
understanding in this state of abstraction only as a tool or
organ; even as the arithmetician uses numbers, that is, as
[ziix] the means, not the end, of knowledge. . . .

Man of understanding, canst thou command the stone to
lie, canst thou bid the flower to bloom, where thou hast
placed it in thy classification? ... If to mint and remember
names delight thee, still arrange and classify and pore and
pull to pieces, and peep into death to look for life, as mon¬
keys put their hands behind a looking-glass! Yet, consider
in the first sabbath which thou imposest on the busy dis-
cursion of thought, that all this is, at best, little more than
[1] a technical memory. . . .

[T/ie Understanding was placed as a ward of honour in the
courts of faith and reason; but it chose to live alone and be¬
came a harlot by the wayside. The commercial spirit, and
the ascendancy of the experimental philosophy which took
place at the close of the seventeenth century, though both
good and beneficial in their own kinds, combined to foster
its corruption. Flattered and dazzled by the real or supposed
discoveries which it had made, the more the understanding
was enriched, the more did it become debased; till science

io8

PHILOSOPHY

itself put on a selfish and sensual character, and immediate
utility . . . was imposed as the test of all intellectual powers
and pursuits. Worth was degraded into a lazy synonym of
value; and value was exclusively attached to the interest of
the senses. But though the growing alienation and self-
sufficiency of the understanding was perceptible at an
earlier period, yet it seems to have been about the middle of
the last century, under the influence of Voltaire, D’Alembert,
Diderot, say generally of the so-called Encyclopedists, and
alas! — of their crowned proselytes and disciples, Frederick,
Joseph and Catherine, — that the human understanding, and
this too in the narrowest form, was tempted to throw off all
show of reverence to the spiritual and even to the moral
powers and impulses of the soul; and usurping the name of
reason, openly joined the banners of Anti-Christ, at once
the pander and the prostitute of sensuality, and whether in
the cabinet, laboratory, the dissecting-room or the brothel,
alike busy in the schemes of vice and irreligion. [li]

3 POLITICS

(a) CRITICISM OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
RESULTING FROM MECHANIC PHILOSOPHY

(i) Hohbes

Hobbes . . . living in an age of tumult, amid the fumes
and fermentations of that process which ended in bringing
the elements of our Constitution to their present happy
equipoise, and being himself of a timorous nature and recluse,

109

MATURITY

manifest. For hence it follows, as an inevitable consequence^
that all which is said in the contrat social of that sovereign
will, to which the right of universal legislation appertains,
applies to no one human being, to no society or assemblage
of human beings, and least of all to the mixed multitude
that makes up the people; but entirely and exclusively to
reason itself, which, it is true, dwells in every man poten¬
tially, but actually and in perfect purity is found in no man
and in no body of men. . . .

Luther lived long enough to see the consequences of the
doctrines into which indignant pity and abstract ideas of
right had hurried him — to see, to retract, and to oppose
them. If the same had been the lot of Rousseau, I doubt
not that his conduct would have been the same. In his
wFole system there is beyond controversy much that is true
and well reasoned, if only its application be not extended
further than the nature of the case permits. But then we
shall find that little or nothing is won by it for the institu¬
tions of society; and least of all for the constitution of govern¬
ments, the theory of which it was his wish to ground on it.
Apply his principles to any case in which the sacred and
inviolable laws of morality are immediately interested, all
becomes just and pertinent. No power on earth can oblige
me to act against my conscience. No magistrate, no
monarch, no legislature, can without tyranny compel me to
do anything which the acknowledged laws of God have
forbidden me to do. So act that thou mayest be able, without
involving any contradiction, to will that the maxim of thy
conduct should be the law of all intelligent beings — is the
one universal and sufficient principle and guide of morality.
And why? Because the object of morality is not the outward
act, but the internal maxim of our actions. And so far it is

ii6

POLITICS

individuai in the state of nature^ and the social state must
have only recognized, not introduced or constituted, the
rights and duties of its component members. [iv]

(ii) Rousseau

On the grounds of government as laid exclusively in the
pure reason . . . viz., the theory of Rousseau and the French
Economists.

The system commences with an undeniable truth, and an
important deduction therefrom equally undeniable. All
voluntary actions, say they, having for their objects good or
evil, are moral actions. But all morality is grounded in the
reason. Every man is born with the faculty of reason . . .
Again: as the faculty of reason implies free agency, morality'
(i.e. the dictate of reason) gives to every rational being the
right of acting as a free agent and of finally determining his
conduct by his own will, according to his own conscience;
and this right is inalienable ... In respect of their reason all
men are equal. The measure of the understanding, and of
all other faculties of man, is different in different persons;
but reason is not susceptible of degree. . . .

Thrice blessed faculty of reason! . . . To thee, who being
one art the same in all, we owe the privilege, that of all we
can become one, a living whole, that we have a country!
Who, then, shall dare prescribe a law of moral action for any
rational being, which does not flow immediately from that
reason which is the fountain of all morality.?. . .

By the application of these principles to the social state
there arises the following system, which, as far as respects its
first grounds, is developed the most fully by J. J. Rousseau
in his work Du Contrat Social, If, then, no individuai
possesses the right of prescribing anything to another

113

respect of tKe inws-rci religion in the individiis-i s own Hesrt^
the only religion according to him which a wise man has
anything to do with. The outward forms of religion, the
choice of sacred books, public creeds, church discipline,
and ecclesiastical revenues and rights, he subjects wholly
and utterly to the supreme Magistrate, nay, and ventures
to denounce every innovation in the forms and tenets of
the Church unauthorized by the monarch, not only as
high treason, meriting death here, but as blasphemy to be
punished hereafter.

The reader will agree with me that the kettle is not the
better for the tinkering. At the present day the bare state¬
ment of the system sulBces for its confutation. The merest
initiate in reasoning will reply that, by the necessity of human
nature, to suppress all outward, audible, and visible mani¬
festations of our inward convictions and feelings, is, cer¬
tainly, though gradually, to destroy these feelings and con¬
victions themselves, that the same law therefore which
obliges me to retain, must likewise oblige me to express and
communicate my faith. And how can that be my duty to¬
wards myself which is not at the same time my duty towards
my children.^ It will be detected, too, that the system
contains its own confutation: for by what obligation can a
people, united by common grievances, be withheld from
reclaiming from the monarch the power which had been
delegated, but which never was or could be actually trans¬
ferred, any more than it is possible for ten men six foot high
to make one among them sixty foot.^ By virtue of the con¬
tract.^ Then there must exist a moral obligation to observe a
contract, prior to, and independent of, the fear of the mon¬
arch. By the fear of the Almhghty? But this fear was present,
as an equal source of obligation, to all men and to each

MATURITY

individmij the rule of which is not contained in their com¬
mon reason, society, which is but an aggregate of individuals,
can communicate this right to no one. It cannot possibly
make that ria:htful which the higher and inviolable law of
human nature declares contradictory and unjust. But con¬
cerning right and wrong, the reason of each and every man
is the competent judge; for how else could he be an amenable
being, or the proper subject of any law? This reason, there¬
fore, in any one man, cannot even in the social state be right¬
fully subjugated to the reason of any other. Neither an
individual, nor yet the whole multitude which constitutes
the state, can possess the right of compelling him to do any¬
thing of which it cannot be demonstrated that his own
reason must join in prescribing it. If therefore society is to be
under a rightful constitution of government, and one that
can impose on rational beings a true and moral obligation to
obey it, it must be framed on such principles that every
individual follows his own reason while he obeys the laws of
the constitution, and performs the will of the state while he
follows the dictates of his own reason.

This is expressly asserted by Rousseau, who states the
problem of a perfect constitution of government in the
following words: ‘Trouver une forme d'Association, par
laquelle chacun s'unissant a tons, n’obeisse pourtant qu’a
lui-meme, et reste aussi libre qu’auparavant.’ ... The right
of the individual to retain his whole natural independence,
even in the social state, is absolutely inalienable. . . .

Law^s obligatory on the conscience can only therefore
proceed from that reason which remains always one and the
same, whether it speaks through this or that person . . . The
individuals, indeed, are subject to errors and passions, and
each man has his own defects. But when men are assembled

114

MATURITY

manifest. For hence it follows, as an inevitable consequeiiccj
that all which is said in the contrat social of that sovereign
will, to which the right of universal legislation appertains,
applies to no one human being, to no society or assemblage
of human beings, and least of all to the mixed multitude
that makes up the people; but entirely and exclusively to
reason itself, which, it is true, dwells in every man poten¬
tially, but actually and in perfect purity is found in no man
and in no body of men. . . .

ii6

POLITICS

infallible. But with what show of reason can we pretendj
from a principle by which we are to determine the purity
of our motives, to deduce the form and matter of a rightful
government, the main office of which is to regulate the
outv^ard actions of particular bodies of men, according to
their particular circumstances? Can we hope better of
constitutions framed by ourselves than of that which was
given by Almighty Wisdom itself?

[The] principle on which the whole system rests is, that
reason is not susceptible of degree. Nothing, therefore,
which subsists wholly in degrees, the changes of which
do not obey any necessary law, can be subjects of pure
science or determinable by mere reason. For these things
we must rely on our understandings, enlightened by past
experience and immediate observation, and determining
our choice by comparisons of expediency . . . From reason
alone can we derive the principles which our under¬
standings are to apply, the ideal to which by means of our
understandings we should endeavour to approximate.
This, however, gives no proof that reason alone ought to
govern and direct human beings, either as individuals or as
states. It ought not to do this, because it cannot. The
laws of reason are unable to satisfy the first conditions of
human society. . . .

The chief object for which men first formed themselves
into a state was not the protection of their lives but of their
property. Where the nature of the soil and climate precludes
all property but personal, and permits that only in its simplest
forms, as in Greenland, men remain in the domestic state
and form neighbourhoods but not governments. And in
North America the chiefs appear to exercise government in
those tribes only which possess individual landed property

117

M A T U R I T Y

... To propertyj therefore, and to its inequalities, all human
laws directly or indirectly relate, which would not be
equally laws in the state of nature. Now it is impossible to
deduce the right of property from pure reason (1 mean,
practically, and with the inequalities inseparable from the
actual existence of property. Abstractedly, the right to
property is deducible from the free-agency of man. If to
act freely be a right, a sphere of action must be so, too)
... In the same manner, the moral laws of the intellectual
world, as far as they are deducible from pure intellect,^are
never perfectly applicable to our mixed and sensitive nature,
because man is something besides reason; because his
reason never acts by itself but must clothe itself in the
substance of individual understanding and specific inclina¬
tion, in order to become a reality and an object of con-

[v] sciousness and experience.

(iii) Jacohlmsm: or rights before duties

The priests and prophets of Jacobinism . . . find no
object co-extensive with their wisdom, but persons and the
inherencies of personal dues. The v/eal and woe of the
universal individuality of the moral world form the direct
end, the primary object, of their constitution codes, the very
axioms of their legislative geometry . . . Counting where they
should weigh, and with true vulgar envy affecting to despise
as null or even suspicious, the wealth and rank which are
our best attainable securities for (an average at least of)
integrity and knowledge, they would reform and perfect
society on principles preclusive of all society but that of

[vi] fiends and angels. . . .

There are two possible modes of unity in a state: one by
absolute co-ordination of each to all, and of all to each;

118

POLITICS

the other by subordination of classes and office. Now I
maintain that there never was an instance of the first, nor
can there be, without slavery as its condition and accompani¬
ment, as in Athens. The poor Swiss cantons are no excep¬
tion. The mistake lies in confounding a state which must
be based on classes and unequal property, with a church,
which is founded on the person and has no qualification
but personal merit. . . . ^rrii]

Citizens of the world, and teachers oi physiocratic science,
the demagogues of this ^enlightened age’ . . . co77i?ne/tced by
worshipping the sanctity of abstraction man, in the divinity
of that other abstraction, the people. But alas! the scheme
concludes by mortising and compacting the scattered and
sooty fragments of the Populace into one living and
‘multitudinous idoF, a blind but hundred-armed g-iant. of
fearful power, to undermine the foundations of the social
edifice, and finally perchance to pull down the all-sheltering
roof on its own head, the victim of its own madness! Thus,
in order to sacrifice the natural state to persons, they must
concorporate persons into one unnatural the deluded

subjects of which soon find themselves under a dominion
ten-fold more oppressive and vexatious than that to which
the laws of god and nature had attached them, and whose
punitive vengeance they first alarm by sedition, then provoke
by riot, and brave at last as open rebels. Shut up in a
labyrinthine prison of forms and by-laws, of engagements
by oath and contributions by compulsion, they move in
slavish files beneath a jealous and ever-neighbouring
control, which despotizes in detail; in which every man is
made his brother’s keeper; and which, arming the hand and
fixing the eye of all against each, merges the free-will of
the individual in the merciless tyranny of the confederation, [viii]

119

M A T U R I T Y

Many and strangely various are the shapes which the
spirit of Jacobinism can assume. Now it is philosophy,
contending for indifference to all positive institutions under
the pretexts of liberality and toleration . . . Now it appears
as refined sensibility and philanthropy, declaiming piteously
concerning the wrongs and wretchedness of the oppressed
many, and in play and novel amending the faulty and partial
schemes of Providence by assigning every vice and folly to
the rich and noble and all the virtues ... to the poor and
ig;norant . . . These are its shapes and dresses when the
spirit of Jacobinism travels incognito, and in which it
prepares and announces its approaching public entry! . . .
Let it not be objected . . . that from mere caprice I have
applied the opprobrious name of Jacobinism to various
and discordant forms of folly and might. They are all one,
or at least of one family, all united or at least confraternized
by the same marked and distinct characters. In all alike the
cry is evermore of Rights, never of Duties; in all alike the
scheme consists of abstract reason, which, belonging only
to beings equable and unchanging, are above man; while
the materials implements and agency of its realization are
found in terror, secrecy, falsehood, cupidity, and all the
[ix] passions and practices which are, or ought to be, below man.

(iv) Major Cartwright and Universal Suffrage

Major Cartwright, in his deduction of the rights of the
subject from principles Tot susceptible of proof, being self-
evident . . d affirms b . . that a power which ought never to be
used ought never to exist’. Again, he affirms that 'Laws to
bind all must be assented to by all, and consequently every
man, even the poorest, has an equal right to suffrage’: and
this for an additional reason, because 'all without exception

120

POLITICS

are capable of feeling happiness or itiisery, accordingly
as they are well or ill governed’. But ^te they not, then,
capable of feeling happiness or misery accordingly as they
do or do not possess the means of a comfortable subsistence r
and who is the judge, what is a comfortable subsistence,
but the man himself? Might not, thon, on the same or
equivalent principles, a leveller construct a right to equal
property? The inhabitants of this country without property
form, doubtless, a great majority; each of these has a right
to a-suffrage, and the richest man to no more: and the object
of this suffrage is that each individual may secure himself a
true efticient representative of his will. Here then is a legal
power of abolishing or equalizing property; and according
to the Major himself, a power which ought never to be used
ought not to exist.

Therefore, unless he carries his system to the whole
length of common labour and common possession, a right
to universal suffrage cannot exist: but if not to universal
suffrage, there can exist no natural right to suffrage at all.
In whatever way he would obviate this objection, he must
admit expedience founded on experience and particular
circumstances, which will vary in every different nation
at different times, as the maxim of all legislation and the
ground of all legislative power. For his universal principles,
as far as they are principles and universal, necessarily
suppose uniform and perfect subjects, which are to be found
in the ideas of pure geometry and (I trust) in the realities
of Heaven, but never, never, in creatures of flesh and blood.

(v) Utilitarian Ethics

[Coleridge "5 references to this subject being scattered^
mentary^ and perhaps not entirely free from inconsistency^ it has

MATURITY

seemed best to put together the relevant excerpts without any
attempt to connect them^ hut with the addition — where possible
— of datesl^

I doubt not thatj supposing mankind enlightened as to
their true good, the best for the whole world would be
the best for the individual. Both roads lead to the same goal,
but the latter road is more neighboured by false roads, is a
right road through a labyrinth. [Undated note on Works of

[xi] Algernon SidneylJ

It is a matter of infinite difficulty, but fortunately of
comparative indifference, to determine what a man’s
motive may have been for this or that particular action.
Rather seek to learn what his objects in general are. What
does he in general wish, habitually pursue? and thence
deduce his impulses, which are commonly the true efficient
causes of men’s conduct; and without which the motive

[xii] itself would not have become a motive. [1812]

‘Oh! that God,’ says Carey in his journal in Hindostan,
‘would make the Gospel successful among them! That
would undoubtedly make them honest men . . .’ Now this is
a fact spite of infidels and philosophizing Christians, a
fact. A perfect explanation of it would require and would
show the psychology of faith the distance between the
whole soul’s modifying an action, and an act enforced by
modifications of the soul amid prudential motives or favour-
[xiii] ing impulses. [1809-1816]

reflection that [a certain] course of action will
purchase heaven for me, for my soul, involves a thought of
and for all men who pursue the same course . . . That
selfishness which includes, of necessity, the selves of all my

122

POLITICS

fellow-creatures^ is assuredly a social and generous principle
. . , Blessed be God! that which makes us capable of vicious
self-interestedness capacitates us also for disinterestedness, [dv]
[1809-1816]

[0/] all the most numerous are the men who have ever¬
more their own dearliest beloved self as the only or main goal
or butt of their endeavours straight and steady before their
eyes, and whose whole inner world turns on the great axis
of Self-interest. These form the majority, if not of mankind,
yet of those by whom the business of life is carried on; and
most expedient it is that so it should be; nor can we imagine
anything better contrived for the advantage of society.

For these are the most industrious, orderly and circumspect
portion of society, and the actions governed by this principle,
with the results, are the only materials on which either the
statesman or individuals can safely calculate. . . .

There is in the heart of all men a working principle —
call it ambition, or vanity, or desire of distinction, the
inseparable adjunct of our individuality and personal
nature, and flowing from the same source as language — the
instinct and necessity in each man of declaring his particular
existence, and thus of singling or singularizing himself , . .
Though selfish in its origin, it yet tends to elevate the
individual from selfishness into self-love, under a softer
and perhaps better form than that of self-interest, the form
of self-respect. Whatever other objects the man may be
pursuing, and with whatever other inclinations, he is still
by this principle compelled to pass out of himself in
imagination, and to survey himself at a sufficient distance,
in order to judge what figure he is likely to make in the
eyes of his fellow-men. But in thus taking his station as at

123

MATURITY

the apex of a triangle, while the self is at one angle of the
base, he makes it possible at least that the image of his
neighbour may appear at the other, whether by spontaneous
association, or placed there for the purposes of comparison;
and so both be contemplated at equal distance. But this is
the first step towards disinterestedness; and though it
should never be reached, the advantage of the appearance
is soon learnt, and the necessity of avoiding the appearance
of the contrary. But appearances cannot be long sustained
without some touch of the reality. At all events there
results a control over our actions; some good may be pro¬
duced, and many a poisonous or offensive fruit will be
prevented. Courtesy, urbanity, gallantry, munificence; the
outward influence of the law shall I call it? or rather fashion
of honour? —- these are the handsome hypocrisies that
spring from the desire of distinction.

A pagan might be as orthodox as Paul on the doctrine
of works. First — set aside the large portion of them that
have their source in the constitutional temperament — the
merit of which, if any, belongs to nature, not to the
individual agent; and of the remaining number of good
works, nine are derived from vices for one that has its origin
in virtue. I have often, in looking at the waterworks and
complex machinery of our manufactories, indulged a
humorous mood by fancying that the hammers, cogs, fly-
wheels, etc. were each actuated by some appetite or passion
— hate, rage, revenge, vanity, cupidity, etc. — while the
general result was most benignant, and the machine, taken
as a whole, the product of power, knowledge and
benevolence! Such a machine does the moral world, the
[xv] world of human nature, appear. . , . [1809-1816]

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It IS difficult to conceive a more unhappy and perplexed
creature than man would be if he possessed no other guide
for his actions than his own previous calculation of their
consequences. Unhappy he must needs be from the
limited sphere and uncertainty of his foresight even when
it exists in its utmost perfection, and still more so through
the obliquities caused in it by his passions. The interven¬
tion of accidents ‘between the cup and the lip' is the subject
of a hundred proverbs in all languages, and our incapacity
fof praying wisely for any particular object of our desire
among the primary articles of all rational religions. Nor
would his unhappiness be greater than his perplexity, and
the inevitable result of both would be the abandonment of
the faculty itself, or the exertion of it for the exclusive
purposes of an immediate and brutal selfishness.

For in such calculation of consequences, how far are
we to proceed? Is it to include our children and our
particular friends? Is it to be confined to these? or is it to
embrace the interests of our country and mankind? If the
latter, the result of our calculations must depend altogether
on the nature of our convictions concerning the final causes
of the world. For if our actions derive their sole value
from the sum-total of their consequences to the optimist^
all actions must be equally good; while to him who thinks
the world controlled by a malignant destiny, or by chance,
all actions would be evil in the one case, and in the other
indifferent, that is, as likely to be good as bad; and vice
versa; or, would we confine the calculations to our own
persons and times, the same difficulties will present them¬
selves — whether, for instance, we are to calculate for the
whole number of years which it is possible we may live, or
for some shorter period: till, the circle of selfishness narrow-

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.MATURITY

ing at every round, our forethought would at length fall into
the present hour as to its natural centre; and we should
sink into the position of brutes. . . ,

What other result, indeed, could we expect when a
creature, valuing its own understanding beyond the wisdom
of its creator, deranges and inverts the natural order of its
faculties, and substitutes for the dictates of its own con¬
science the conjectures of that 'prudence which deserves its
name then only when it is employed as the agent and organ
of a nobler faculty? It may be objected that prudence itself,
enlightened by experience and proceeding on the injurious
general consequences of regulating our conduct, universally
and exclusively, by a previous calculation of particular
consequences, does itself command an implicit faith in the
clear and positive determinations of the conscience; nay,
justifies even an occasional surrender of the soul to that
high enthusiasm which acknowledges no other necessity
than that of acting justly and generously, be the consequences
what they may. For these persons cannot blind them¬
selves to the fact that without this enthusiasm nothing pre¬
eminently great or advantageous has been obtained for
mankind, either as the members of a particular state, or as
citizens of the world. But surely . . . these reasoners are not
aware of the contradiction involved in making that the
principle and primate of all morality, the first dictate of
which is that itself should sometimes be suspended, and
always obeyed in subordination to some other principle.
It is no doubt most true, that the actions of an adequately
enlightened self-love will in general (perhaps always) coincide
with the precepts of the moral law. Where then lies the
difference? In that , . . (which) is worth all the rest told ten
times over, in the worth and essential character of the agents !

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Need I add the inherent unfitness, as well as the direful
consequences, of making virtue, by the possession of which
the weal and woe of all men are ultimately determined . . .
depend on talenty a gift so unequally dispensed by nature,
the degrees in which it is given being indeed different in
every person, and the development and cultivation of which
are effected by all the inequalities of fortune? This is one
proof . . . among many, that there is a natural affinity
between despotism and modern philosophy, notwithstanding
the‘ proud pretensions of the latter as the emancipator of the
human race, that their present connection therefore is not a
mere accident, and that the genuine spirit of liberty and
equality is exclusively derivable from the acknowledgment
of the existence and absolute supremacy of a law in the mind
'Whose service is perfect freedom'; of a law common to
all men, and to all men equally evident, those only excepted
who have them.selves wilfully obscured it through pride or
depraved inclinations. The aristocracy of talent is, therefore,
no unmeaning phrase in itself, execrable as was its purport
in the minds of its first framers: it exists . : . wherever
the understanding, or calculating faculty, which is properly
the executive branch of self-government, has usurped that
supreme legislative power which belongs jure divino to our
moral [^809] [xvi]

O.P.Q. in the Morning Post is a clever fellow. He is for
the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible
number, and for the longest possible time. So am I; so are
you, and every one of us, I will venture to say, round the
tea-table. First, however, what does O.P.Q. mean by the
word happiness'^ and secondly, how does he propose to make
other persons agree in his definition of the term? Don't you

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MATURITY

see the ridiculous absurdity of setting up that as a principle
or motive of action, which is, in fact, a necessary and
essential instinct of our very nature — an inborn and indis¬
tinguishable desire? How can creatures susceptible of
pleasure and pain do otherwise than desire happiness? But,
^zvhat happiness? That is the question. The American
savage, in scalping his fallen enemy, pursues his happiness
naturally and adequately. A Chickasaw, or Pawnee
Bentham, or O.P.Q., would necessarily hope for the most
frequent opportunities possible of scalping the greatest
possible number of savages for the longest possible time.
There is no escaping this absurdity, unless you come back
to a standard of reason and duty, imperative upon our merely
pleasurable sensations. Oh! but, says O.P.Q., I am for the
happiness of othersl Of others! Are you, indeed? Well,
I happen to be one of those others^ so far as I can judge
from what you show me of your habits and views, I would
rather be excused from your banquet of happiness. Your
mode of happiness would make me miserable. To go about
doing as much good as possible to as many men as possible,
is, indeed, an excellent object for a man to propose to
himself; but then, in order that you may not sacrifice the
real good and happiness of others to your particular views,
which may be quite different from your neighbour’s, you
must do that good to others which the reason, common to
all, pronounces to be good for all. In this sense your fine
[xvii] maxim is so very true as to be a mere truism. [1831]

So you object, with old Hobbes, that I do good actions
jor the pleasure of a good conscience; and so, after all,

I am only a refined sensualist! Heaven bless you, and mend
your logic! Don’t you see that if conscience, which is in

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POLITICS

its nature a consequence, were thus anticipated and made an
antecedent — a party instead of a judge — it would dis¬
honour your draft upon it — it would not pay on demand?
Don’t you see that, in truth, the very fact of acting with this
motive properly and logically destroys all claim upon
conscience to give you any pleasure at all? [1831] [sviii

The sum total of moral philosophy is found in this one
question. Is Good a superfluous word, or mere lazy synonym
for -the pleasurable and its causes; at most, a mere modifica¬
tion to express degree and comparative duration of pleasure?

Or the question may be more unanswerably stated thus. Is
good superfluous as a word exponent of a kind'? If it be, then
moral philosophy is but a sub-division of physics. If not,
then the writings of Paley and all his predecessors and
disciples are false and most pernicious; and there is an
emphatic propriety in the superlative, and in a sense which
of itself would supply and exemplify the difference between
most zndi very. [1832] [xix]

I deem it safer to say that in all the outward relations of
this life, in all our outward conduct and actions, both in
what we should do and in what we should abstain from.

the dictates of virtue are the very same with those of self-
interest, tending to^ though they do not proceed from^ the
same point. For the outward object of virtue being the
greatest producible sum of happiness of all men, it must
needs include the object of an intelligent self-love, which is
the greatest possible happiness of one individual; for what is
true of all must be true of each. Hence, you cannot become
better (that is, more virtuous), but you will become happier:
and you cannot become worse (that is, more vicious), with-

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MATURITY

out an increase of misery (or at the best a proportional loss
of enjoyment) as the consequence. . . .

If then the time has not yet come for anything higher^ act
on the maxim of seeking the most pleasure with the least
pain: and, if only you do not seek where you yourself know
it will not be found, this very pleasure and this freedom
from the disquietude of pain may produce in you a state of
being directly and indirectly favourable to the germination
and up-spring of a nobler seed. . . .

Pleasure (and happiness in its proper sense is but -the
continuity and sum-total of the pleasure which is allotted
or happens to a man . . .) pleasure, I say, consists in the
harmony between the specific excitability of a living
creature, and the exciting causes correspondent thereto.
Considered therefore exclusively in and for itself, the only
question is, quantum^ not quale} How much on the whole?
the contrary, that is, the painful and disagreeable having
been subtracted. The quality is a matter of taste\ et de
gustihus non est disputandum. No man can judge for another.

[xx] [1825]

Happiness in general may be defined, not the aggregate
of pleasurable sensations — for that is either a dangerous
error and the creed of sensualists, or else a mere translation
or wordy paraphrase — but the state of that person who, in
order to enjoy his nature in the highest manifestation of
conscious feelings has no need of doing wrong, and who, in
order to do right, is under no necessity of abstaining from

[xxi] enjoyment. [1805]

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(b) THE IDEALIST METHOD

There are three ways of investigating a subject:

1. In the first mode, you begin with a definition, and
that definition is necessarily assumed as the truth. As the
argument proceeds, the conclusion from the first proposi¬
tion becomes the base of the second, and so on. Now, it is
quite impossible that you can be sure that you have included
all the necessary, and none but the necessary, terms in your
definition; as, therefore, you proceed, the original speck of
error is multiplied at every remove; the same infirmity of
knowledge besetting each successive definition. Hence you
may set out, like Spinoza, with all but the truth, and end
with a conclusion which is altogether monstrous . • . The
chief use of this first mode of discussion is to sharpen the
wit, for which purpose it is the best exercitation,

2 . The historical mode is a very common one: in it the
author professes to find out the truth by collecting the facts
of the case and tracing them downwards; but this mode is
worse than the other. Suppose the question is as to the
true essence and character of the English constitution.
First, where wdll you begin your collection of facts? Where
will you end it? What facts will you select, and how do you
know that the class of facts which you select are necessary
terms in the premisses, and that other classes of facts, which
you neglect, are not necessary? And how do you distinguish
phenomena which proceed from disease or accident, from
those which are the genuine fruits of the essence of the
constitution? What can be more striking, in illustration of
the utter inadequacy of this line of investigation, than the
political treatises and constitutional histories which we have
in every library? A Whig proves his case convincingly to

MATURITY

the reader who knows nothing beyond his author: then
comes an old Tory (Carte, for instance) and ferrets up a
hamperful of conflicting documents and notices, which
proves his case fer contra, A takes this class of facts; B takes
that class: each proves something true, neither proves the
truth, or anything like the truth; that is, the whole truth.

3. You must, therefore, commence with the philosophic
idea of the thing, the true nature of which you wish to find
out and manifest. You must carry your rule ready-made if
you wish to measure aright. If you ask me how I can know
that this idea — my own invention — is the truth, by which
the phenomena of history are to be explained, I answer:
in the same way exactly that you know that your eyes were
made to see with; and that it is because you do see with
them. If I propose to you an idea, or self-realizing theory,
of the constitution, which shall manifest itself as in existence
from the earliest times to the present — which shall com¬
prehend within it all the facts which history has preserved,
and shall give them a meaning as interchangeably causals
or effects; —- if I show you that such an event or reign was
an obliquity to the right hand, and how produced, and such
other event an obliquity to the left, and whence originating,
— that the growth was stopped here, accelerated there, —
that such a tendency is, and always has been, corroborative,
and such other tendency destructive, of the main progress
of the idea towards realization; — if this idea, not only like
a kaleidoscope, shall reduce all the miscellaneous fragments
into order, but shall also minister strength and knowledge
and light to the true patriot and statesman for working out
the bright thought, and bringing the glorious embryo to a
perfect birth; — then, I think, I have a right to say that the
idea which led to this is not only true, but the truth, the

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POLITICS

only truth. To set up for a statesman upon historical
knowledge only, is as about as wise as to set up for a musician
by the purchase of some score flutes, fiddles and horns.

In order to make music, you must know how to play;
in order to make your facts speak truth, you must know
what the truth is which ought to be proved, — the ideal truth,
the truth which was consciously or unconsciously, strongly
or weakly, wisely or blindly, intended at all times. [xxii]

The commanding knowledge, the power of truth, given
or obtained by contemplating the subject in the frontal
mirror of the Idea, is in Scripture ordinarily expressed by
vision . . . And of the many political ground-truths contained
in the Old Testament, I cannot recall one more worthy
to be selected as the Moral and L’Envoy of a Universal
History, than the text in Proverbs, where no vision is,

THE PEOPLE PERISHETH. . . . [xxxiii]

By the idea^ I mean . . . that conception of a thing which
is not abstracted from any particular state,'form or mode, in
which the thing may happen to exist at this or at that time;
nor yet generalized from any number or succession of such
forms or modes; but which is given by the knowledge of
its ultimate aim. [mv]

A conception consists in a conscious act of the under¬
standing, bringing any given object or impression into the
same class with any number or other objects or impressions,
by means of some character or characters common to them
all. Concifimus^ id est^ capimus hoc cum illo^ — we take hold
of both at once, we comprehend a thing, when we have learnt
to comprise it in a known class. On the other hand, it is the
privilege of the few to possess an idea: of the generality of
men, it might be more truly affirmed that they are possessed
by it.

133

MATURITY

By way of illustration take the following. Every reader of
Rousseauj or of Hume’s Essays^ will understand me when
I refer to the Original Social Contract, assumed by Rousseau,
and by other and wiser men before him, as the basis of all
legitimate government. Now, if this be taken as the assertion
of an historical fact, or as the application of a conception,
generalized from ordinary compacts between man and man,
or nation and nation, to an actual occurrence in the first ages
of the world; namely, the formation of the first contract in
which men covenanted with each other to associate, orUn
which a multitude entered into a compact with a few, the
one to be governed and the other to govern, under certain
declared conditions; I shall run little hazard at this time of
day in declaring the pretended fact a pure fiction, and the
conception of such a fact an idle fancy. It is at once false and
foolish. For what if an original contract had actually been
entered into and formally recorded? Still I cannot see what
addition of moral force would be gained by the fact. The
same sense of moral obligation which binds us to keep it
must have pre-existed in the same force and in relation to the
same duties, impelling our ancestors to make it. For what
could it do more than bind the contracting parties to act for
the general good, according to their best lights and oppor¬
tunities? It is evident that no specific scheme or constitution
can derive any other claim to our reverence than that which
the presumption of its necessity or fitness for the general
good shall give it; and which claim of course ceases, or
rather is reversed, as soon as this general presumption of its
utility had given place to as general a conviction of the
contrary. It is true, indeed, that from duties anterior to the
formation of the contract, because they arise out of the very
constitution of our humanity, which supposes the social

^34

POLITICS

state — it is true, that in order to a rightful removal of the
institution, or law, thus agreed on, it is required that the
conviction of its expediency shall be as general as the
presumption of its fitness was at the time of its establish¬
ment. This, the first of the two great paramount interests of
the social state demands, namely, that of permanence; but
to attribute more than this to any fundamental articles,
passed into law by any assembly of individuals, is an injus¬
tice to their successors, and a high offence against the other
great interest of the social state, namely — its progressive
improvement. The conception, therefore, of an original
contract, is, we repeat, incapable of historic proof as a fact,
and it is senseless as a theory.

But if instead of the conception or theory of an original
social contract, you say the idea of an ever-originating social
contract, this is so certain and so indispensable, that it
constitutes the whole ground of the difference between
subject and serf, between a commonwealth and a slave-
plantation ... [// /V] a very natural and significant mode of [xsv]
expressing the reciprocal duties of subject and sovereign . . .
if there be any difference between a government and a band
of robbers, an act of consent must be supposed on the part of
the people governed ... And this again is evolved out of the [xzvi]
yet higher idea oi person^ in contra-distinction from thing —
all social law and justice being grounded on the principle
that a person can never, but by his own fault, become a
things or, without grievous wrong be treated as such: and
the distinction consisting in this, that a thing may be used
altogether and merely as the means to an end; but the person
must always be included in the end\ his interest must form
a part of the object, a means to which he, by consent, i.e.
by his own act, makes himself. . . .

^35

MATURITY

Now, notwithstanding the late wonderful spread of learn¬
ing throughout the community, and though the school¬
master and the lecturer are abroad, the hind and the wood¬
man may very conceivably pass from cradle to coffin without
having once contemplated this idea so as to be conscious
of the same. And there would be even an improbability
that they possessed the power of presenting this Idea to the
minds of others, or even to their own thoughts, verbally, as
a distinct proposition. But no man who has ever listened to
labourers of this rank in any alehouse, over the Saturday
night’s jug of beer, discussing the injustice of the present
rate of wages, and the iniquity of their being paid in part
out of the parish poor-rates, will doubt for a moment that
they are fully possessed by the idea.

In close, though not perhaps obvious connection, with
this, is the idea of moral freedom, as the ground of our
proper responsibility. Speak to a young Liberal ... he will
perhaps . . , proceed to assure you that the liberty of the will
is an impossible conception, a contradictioyi ut terms .
Converse on the same subject with a plain, single-minded,
yet reflecting neighbour, and he may probably say (as St.
Augustine had said long before him, in reply to the question,
"Vv'hat is Time?) I know it well enough when you do not ask
me. But alike with both the supposed parties, the self-
complacent student just as certainly as with your less positive
neighbour — attend to their actions, their feelings, and even
to their words: and you w’lll be in ill luck if ten minutes pass
without affording you full and satisfactory proof that the
ideci of man s moral freedom possesses and modifies their
whole practical being, m all they say, in all they feel, in all
they do and are done to: even as the spirit of life, which is
contained in no vessel, because it permeates all.

136

POLITICS

Just so is it with the constitution. Ask any of our politi¬
cians what is meant by the constitution^ and it is ten to one
that he will give you a false explanation, ex. gr. that it is the
body of our laws, or that it is the Bill of Rights; or perhaps,
if he have read Tom Payne, he may tell you that we have not
yet got one; and yet not an hour may have elapsed since you
heard the same individual denouncing, and possibly with
good reason, this or that code of laws, the excise and revenue
laws, or those for including pheasants or those for excluding
Catholics, as altogether unconstitutional: and such and such
acts of parliament as gross outrages on the constitution. . . .

But a Constitution is an idea arising out of the idea of a
state; and because our whole history from Alfred onwards
demonstrates the continued influence of such an idea, or
ultimate aim, on the minds of our forefathers, in their
characters and functions as public men; alike in what they
resisted and in what they claimed; in the institutions and
forms of polity which they established, and with regard to
those against which they more or less successfully contended;
and because the result has been a progressive, though not
always a direct or equable advance in the gradual realization
of the idea; and that it is actually, though even because it
is an idea it cannot be adequately^ represented in a corre¬
spondent scheme of means really existing; we speak, and
have a right to speak, of the idea itself, as actually existing,
i.e. as 2.prrnciple^ existing in the only way in which a principle
can exist — in the minds and consciences of the persons
whose duties it prescribes and whose rights it determines
. . . As no bridge ever did or can possess the demonstrable
perfections of the mathematical arch, so can no existing
state adequately correspond to the idea of a state ... In the
same sense that the sciences of arithmetic and of geometry,

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MATURITY

that mindj that life itself, have reality; the constitution has
real existence, and does not the less exist in reality because
it both is^ and exists as^ an idea.

There is yet another ground for the affirmation of its
reality; that, as the fundamental idea, it is at the same time
the final criterion by which all particular frames of govern¬
ment must be tried: for here only can we find the great
constructive principles of our representative system (I use
the term in its widest sense, in which the crown itself is in¬
cluded as representing the unity of the people, the true and
primary sense of the word majesty); those principles, I say,
in the light of which it can alone be ascertained what are
excrescences, symptoms of distemperature and marks of
degeneration; and what are native growths, or changes
naturally attendant on the progressive development of the
original germ, symptoms of immaturity perhaps, but not of
disease; or at worst, modifications of the growth by the
defective or faulty, but remediless, or only gradually
remediable, qualities of the soil and surrounding elements.

There are two other characters distinguishing the class of
substantive truths, or truth-powers, here spoken of ... The
first is, that in distinction from the conception of a thing, which
being abstracted or generalized from one or more particular
states or modes, is necessarily posterior in order of thought
to the thing thus conceived, — as an idea, on the contrary,
is in order of thought always and of necessity contemplated
as antecedent. In the idea or principle. Life, for instance —
the vital functions are the result of the organization; but this
organization supposes and pre-supposes the vitzlprinciple ,,..

This is the first. The other distinctive mark may be most
conveniently given in the form of a caution. We should be
made more aware, namely, that the particular form, con-

138

POLITICS

struction or model that may be best fitted to render the idea
intelligible, and most effectually serve the purpose of an
instructive diagram^ is not necessarily the mode or form in
which it actually arrives at realization. . , . [xxvii]

In my judgment, no man can rightly apprehend an abuse
till he has first mastered the idea of the use of an institution.

How fine, for example, is the idea of the unhired magistracy
of England, taking in and linking together the duke to the
country gentleman in the primary distribution of justice, or
in the preservation of order and execution of law at least
throughout the country! Yet some men never seem to have
thought of it for one moment, but as connected with brewers
and barristers and tyrannical Squire Westerns . . . The [xxviii]
corruptions of a system can be duly appreciated by those
only who have contemplated the system in that ideal state of
perfection exhibited by the reason; the nearest possible
approximation to which under existing circumstances it is
the business of the prudential understanding to realize.

Those, on the other hand, who commence the examination
of a system by identifying it with its abuses or imperfec¬
tions, degrade their understanding into the pander of their
passions, and are sure to prescribe remedies more dangerous
than the disease. ., . [xxix]

(i) The State as an organism

It would be difficult in the whole compass of language to
find a metaphor so commensurate, so pregnant, or suggest¬
ing so many points of elucidation, as that of Body Politic^ as
the exponent of a State or Realm . . . The correspondence

139

MATURITY

beUveen the Body Politic and the Body Natural holds even
[sxx] in the detail of application . . . The perfect frame of a man
is the perfect frame of a State; and in the light of this idea we
[xxxi] must read Plato's Republic . . . The integral parts, classes or
orders, are so balanced or interdependent as to constitute,
[xxxii] more or less, an organic whole.

The difference between an inorganic and an organic
body lies in this: In the first — a sheaf of corn — the whole
is nothing more than a collection of the individual parts or
phenomena. In the second — a man — the whole is' the
effect of, or results from, the parts; it — the whole — is every¬
thing, and the parts are nothing. A State is an idea inter¬
mediate between the two ~ the whole being a result from,
and not a mere total of, the parts, and yet not so merging
the constituent parts in the result, but that the individual
fxxxiii] exists integrally within it. . . .

The true patriot . , . will reverence not only whatever
tends to make the component individuals more happy, and
more worthy of happiness; but likewise whatever tends to
bind them more closely together as a people; that as a
multitude of parts and functions make up one human body,
so the whole multitude of his countrymen may, by the
visible and invisible influences of religion, language, laws,
customs, and the reciprocal dependence and reaction of
trade and agriculture, be organized into one body politic.
But much as he desires to see all become a whole, he places
limits even to this wish, and abhors that system of policy
which would blend men into a state by the dissolution of all
those virtues which make them happy and estimable as
individuals. . . .

The sect of economists . . . worship a kind of non-entity
under the different words, ‘the state’, ‘the whole’, ‘the

140

POLITICS

society^ etc,, and to this idol they make bloodier sacrifices
than ever the Mexicans did to Tescalipoca. Ail, that is,
each and every sentient being in a given tract, are made
diseased and vicious, in order that each may become useful
to all, or the state, or the society, — that is, to the word ‘alF,
the word ‘state’, or the word ‘society’ . , , What is this
‘society’, this ‘whole’, this ‘state’? is it anything else but a
word of convenience to express at once the aggregate of
confederated individuals living in a certain district?

And think you it possible that ten thousand happy human
beings can exist together without increasing each other’s
happiness, or that it will not overflow into countless channels,
and diffuse itself through the rest of society? [sxxiv'

Unlike a million of tigers, a million of men is very differ¬
ent from one man. Each man in a numerous society is not
only co-existent with, but virtually organized into, the
multitude of which he is an integral part. His idem is modi¬
fied by the alter. And there arise impulses and objects from
this synthesis of the alter et idem^ myself and my neighbour.

This again is strictly analogous to what takes place in the
vital organization of the individual man. [xxxv]

It is high time that the subjects of Christian Governments
should be taught that neither historically or morally, in fact
or by right, have men made the State; but that the State,
and that alone, makes them men . . . that human faculties
cannot be fully developed but by society, and a man far se
is a contradiction; he is only potentially a man, not actually
. . . that the flux of individuals in any one moment of existence
is there for the sake of the State, far more than the State for
them, though both positions are true proportionally , . . that
in all political revolutions, whether for the weal or chastise¬
ment of a nation, the people are but the sprigs and boughs in

T41

MATURITY

a forest, tossed against each other, or moved all in the same
direction, by an agency in which their own will has the least
[xxxvi] share.

(ii) The Spirit of a Nation

That there is an invisible spirit that breathes through a
whole people, is participated in by all, though not by all
alike; a spirit which gives a colour and character to their
virtues and vices, so that the same actions . . . are yet not
the same in a Spaniard as they would be in a Frenchmaii, I
hold for an undeniable truth, without the admission of which
all history would be riddle. I hold likewise that the difference
of nations, their relative grandeur and meanness, all, in
short, which they are or do . , . all in which they persevere as a
nation, through successions of changing individuals, are the
[xxxvii] result of this spirit.

(iii) Patriotism the basis of Internationalism

I, for one, do not call the sod beneath my feet my country.
But language, religion, laws, government, blood — identity
[xxxviii] in these makes men of one country. , . .

LINES WRITTEN IN THE HART2 FOREST, 1799

. . . My native land!

Filled with the thought of thee this heart was proud,
Yea, mine eye swam with tears; that all the view
From sovran Brocken, woods and woody hills,
Floated away, like a departing dream,

Feeble and dim! Stranger, these impulses
Blame thou not lightly; nor will I profane,

With hasty judgment or injurious doubt,

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That man’s sublimer spirit, who can feel
That God is everywhere! The God who framed
Mankind to be one mighty family,

Himself our Father, and the World our Home. [xxsis]

, , . But, O dear Britain! O my Mother Isle 1
Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy
To me, a son, a brother, and a friend,

A husband and a father! who revere

All bonds of natural love, and find them all

Within the limits of thy rocky shores.

O native Britain! O my Mother Isle!

How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy
To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-rills.

Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas.

Have drunk in all my intellectual life.

All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts,

All adoration of the God in nature,

All lovely and all honourable things.

Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel
The joy and greatness of its future being?

There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul
Unborrowed from my country! O divine
And beauteous island! thou hast been my sole
And most magnificent temple, in the which
I walk with awe, and sing my stately songs,

Loving the God that made me!

(Fears IN Solitude, 1798) [xl]

In two points of view I reverence man; first, as a citizen,
a part of, or in order to, a nation; and, secondly, as a Chris¬
tian. If men are neither the one nor the other, but a mere
aggregation of individual bipeds, who acknowledge no

MATURITY

national unity, nor believe with me in Christ, I have no
more personal sympathy with them than with the dust be-

[sli] neath my feet.

The cosmopolitanism which does not spring out of, and
blossom upon, the deep-rooted stem of nationality, is a

[xLii] spurious and rotten growth.

The objects of the patriot are, that his countrymen should,
as far as circumstances permit, enjoy what the Creator
designed for the enjoyment of animals endowed with reason,
and of course develop those faculties which were given them
to be developed. He would do his best that every one of his
countrymen should possess what all men may and should
possess, and that a sufficient number should be enabled and
encouraged to acquire those excellencies which, though not
necessary or possibleybrall men, are yet to all men useful and
honourable. He knows that patriotism itself is a necessary
link in the golden chain of our affections and virtues, and
turns away with indignant scorn from the false philosophy
or mistaken religion which would persuade him that cosmo¬
politanism is nobler than nationality, and the human race a
subiimer object of love than a people; that Plato, Luther,
Newton, and their equals, formed themselves neither in the
market nor the senate, but in the world, and for all men of all
ages. True! But where, and among whom, are these giant
exceptions produced? In the wide empires of Asia, where
millions of human beings acknowledge no other bond but
that of a common slavery, and are distinguished on the map
but by a name which themselves perhaps never heard, or
hearing abhor? No! In a circle defined by human affections,
the first firm sod within which becomes sacred beneath the
quickened step of the returning citizen — here, where the
powers and interests of men spread without confusion

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through a common sphere, like the vibrations propagated in
the air by a single voice, distinct yet coherent, and all uniting
to express one thought and the same feeling! . . .

Here, from within this circle defined, as light by shade,
or rather as light within light, by its intensity, here alone,
and only within these magic circles, rise up the awful spirits
whose words are oracles for mankind, whose love embraces
all countries, and whose voice sounds through all ages!

Here, and here only, may we confidently expect those mighty
miiids to be reared and ripened, whose names are naturalized
in foreign lands, the sure fellow-travellers of civilization!
and yet render their own country dearer and more proudly
dear to their own countrymen. This is indeed cosmopolitan¬
ism, at once the nurse and nursling of patriotic affection!

This, and this alone, is genuine philanthropy, which, like the
olive tree, sacred to concord and to wisdom, fattens not
exhausts the soil from which it sprang and in which it remains
rooted. It is feebleness only which cannot be generous with¬
out injustice, or just without ceasing to be generous, . . . [sliii]

If then in order to be men we must be patriots, and patriot¬
ism cannot exist without national independence we need no
new or particular code of morals to justify us in placing and
preserving our country in that relative situation which is
most favourable to its independence. But the true patriot
is aware that this object is not to be accomplished by a system
of general conquest, such as was pursued by Philip of Mace-
don and his son, nor yet by the political annihilation of the
one state which happens to be its most formidable rival . . .
for rivalry between two nations conduces to the independence
of both, calls forth or fosters all the virtues by which
national security is maintained. Still less by the former; for
the victor nation itself must at length, by the very extension

MATURITY

of its own conquests, sink into a mere province; nay, it will
most probably become the most abject portion of the empire,
and the most cruelly oppressed, both because it will be more
feared and suspected by the common tyrant, and because it
will be the sink and centre of his luxury and corruption.
Even in cases of actual injury and just alarm the patriot sets
bounds to the reprisal of national vengeance, and contents
himself with such securities as are compatible with the wel¬
fare, though not with the ambitious projects, of the nation
whose aggressions had given the provocation; for, as patriot¬
ism inspires no super-human faculties, neither can it dictate
any conduct which would require such. He is too conscious
of his own ignorance of the future, to dare extend his cal¬
culations into remote periods; nor, because he is a statesman,
arrogates to himself the cares of Providence and the govern¬
ment of the world. How does he know but that the very
independence and consequent virtues of the nation which, in
the anger of cowardice, he would fain reduce to absolute
insignificance, and rob even of its ancient name, may in some
future emergency be the destined guardians of his own coun¬
try; and that the power which now alarms, may hereafter
protect and preserve it? The experience of history author¬
izes not only the possibility, but even the probability, of such
an event . . .

Without local attachment, without national honour, we
shall resemble a swarm of insects that settle on the fruits of
the earth to corrupt and consume them, rather than men who
[xliv] love and cleave to the land of their forefathers.

(iv) The Law of Nations

It were absurd to suppose that individuals should be under
a law of moral obligation, and yet that a million of the same

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individualsj acting collectively or through representatives^
should be exempt from all law; for morality is no accident
of human nature, but its essential characteristic; a being
absolutely without morality is either a beast or a fiend,
according as we conceive this want of conscience to be
natural or self-produced; or , , . according as the being
is conceived without the law, or in unceasing and irretriev¬
able rebellion to it. Yet, were it possible to conceive a man
wholly immoral, it would remain impossible to conceive him
without a moral obligation to be otherwise; and none but a
madman will imagine that the essential qualities of anything
can be altered by its becoming part of an aggregate; that a
grain of corn, for instance, shall cease to contain flour as soon
as it is part of a peck or bushel. It is therefore grounded in
the nature of the thing, and not by a mere fiction of the mind,
that wise men who have written on the law of nations have
always considered the several states of the civilized world as
so many individuals, and equally with the latter under a
moral obligation to exercise their free agency within such
bounds as render it compatible with the existence of free
agency in others. . . .

But in all morality, though the principle, which is the
abiding spirit of the law, remains perpetual and unaltered,
even as that Supreme Reason in whom and from whom it
has its being, yet the letter of the law, that is the application
of it to particular instances, and the mode of realizing it in
actual practice, must be modified by the existing circum¬
stances. What we should desire to do, the conscience alone
will inform us; but how and when we are to make the attempt
and to what extent it is in our power to accomplish it, are
questions for the judgment, and require an acquaintance
with facts and their bearings on each other. . . .

147

M A T U R I T Y

As the circumstances^ theuj under which men act as states¬
men, are different from those under which they act as in¬
dividuals, a proportionate difference must be expected in the
practical rules by which their public conduct is to be deter¬
mined, Let me not be misunderstood: I speak of a differ¬
ence in the practical rules, not in the moral law itself which
these rules point out, the means of administering in particular
cases, and under given circumstances. The spirit continues
one and the same, though it may vary its form according
to the element into which it is transported. This difference,
with its grounds and consequences, it is the province of
the philosophical juspublicist to discover and display; and
exactly in this point (I speak with unfeigned diffidence) it
appears to me that the writers on the law of nations whose
works I have had the opportunity of studying, have been
least successful.

In what does the law of nations differ from the laws enacted
by a particular state for its own subjects? The solution is
evident. The law of nations, considered apart from the
common principle of all morality, is not fixed or positive in
itself, nor supplied with any regular means of being enforced.
Like those duties in private life which, for the same reasons,
moralists have entitled imperfect duties . . . the law of
nations appeals only to the conscience and prudence of the
parties concerned. Wherein then does it differ from the
moral laws which the reason, considered as conscience,
dictates for the conduct of individuals? This is a more
difficult question; but my answer would be determined by,
and grounded on, the obvious differences of the circum-
[xlv] stances in the two cases ... In what, then, does the law
between state and state differ from that between man and
man? . . . The law of nations is the law of common honesty,

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modified by the circumstances in which states differ from
individuals , . . The differences may be reduced to this one
point; that the influence of example in any extraordinary
case, as the possible occasion of an action apparently like,
though in reality very different, is of considerable impor¬
tance in the moral calculations of an individual; but of little,
if any, in the case of a nation ... In extraordinary cases it is
ridiculous to suppose that the conduct of states will be
determined by example. We know that they neither will,
nor in the nature of things can, be determined by any other
consideration but that of the imperious circumstances which
render a particular measure advisable . . . Individuals are
and must be under positive laws . . . But states neither are,
nor can be, under positive laws. The only fixed part of the
law of nations is the spirit; the letter of the law consists
wholly in the circumstances to which the spirit of the law is
applied. It is mere puerile declamation to rail against a
country, as having imitated the very measures for which it
had most blamed its ambitious enemy, if that enemy had
previously changed all the relative circumstances which had
existed for him, and therefore rendered his conduct iniquit¬
ous; but which, having been removed, however iniquitously,
cannot without absurdity be supposed any longer to control
the measures of an innocent nation, necessitated to struggle
for its own safety; especially when the measures in question
were adopted for the very purpose of restoring those circum¬
stances. . . . [xlvi]

Till states are in that self-standingness which admits of
reciprocal action, the epoch of international morality is not
yet come, the records do not as yet belong to the World of
Freedom, and we read of these things Wars and conquests as
of the most interesting parts of Natural History. None but

MATURITY

the Vulgar felt about Napoleon as they do about Alexander
the Great. Napoleon was an ape. The difference in char¬
acter in the conflicting nations was wanting. Not Greeks
and PersianSj but a wanton^ wicked civil war of a depraved
knot of Co-Europeans against men of the same arts^ sciences^
and habits. France as a State obtaining no additional means
of perfecting herself^ it was no expansion required in order to
self-development, and therefore no expansion at all. War
at present ought to be spoken of by all men of genius as con¬
temptible, vulgar, the dotage of second childhood, the lechery
[ilvii] of Barrenness.

FIRE, FAMINE AND SLAUGHTER
(a WAR eclogue)

1798

Slaughter: He came by stealth and unlocked my den.
And I have drunk the blood since then
Of thrice three hundred thousand men.

Famine: Thanks, sister, thanks! The men have bled,
Their wives and their children faint for bread.

I stood in a swampy field of battle;

With bones and skulls I made a rattle.

To frighten the wolf and carrion-crow
And the homeless dog — but they would not go.

So off I flew: for how could I bear
To see them gorge their dainty fare?

I heard a groan and a peevish squall.

And through the chink of a cottage-wall . . .

A baby beat its dying mother:

I had starved the one and was starving the other!

150

9 • »

POLITICS

Fire: Sisters! I from Ireland camel
Hedge and corn-fields all aflame^

I triumphed o'er the setting sun!

And all the while the work was done^

On as I strode with my huge strides,

I flung back my head and I held my sides.

xlviii]

FEARS IN SOLITUDE

1798

• • ■ • ®

. . , Secure from actual warfare, we have loved
To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war!

Alas! for ages ignorant of all
Its ghastlier workings (famine or blue plague.
Battle, or siege, or flight through wintery snows,)
We, this whole people, have been clamorous
For war and bloodshed; animating sports,

The which we pay for as a thing to talk of,
Spectators and not combatants! . . .

We send our mandates for the certain death
Of thousands and ten thousands! Boys and girls,
And women, that would groan to see a child
Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war.

The best amusement for our morning meal!

The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayers
From curses, who knows scarcely words enough
To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father,
Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute
And technical in victories and defeats,

And all our daily terms for fratricide;

Terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues

M A T U R I T Y

Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which
We join no feeling and attach no form!

. . , Therefore, evil days
Are coming on us, O my countrymen!

And what if all-avenging Providence,

Strong and retributive, should make us know
The meaning of our words, force us to feel
The desolation and the agony
[xlix] Of our fierce doings? . . .

(v) Purposes of the State

The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose
to himself in the government of a nation are: (i) Security to
[1] possessors; (2) Facility to acquirers; and (3) Hope to all.
Let us suppose the negative ends of a State already
attained, namely, its own safety by means of its own strength,
and the protection of person and property for all its members.
There will then remain its positive ends: i. To make the
means of subsistence more easy to each individual, 2, to
secure to each of its members the hope of bettering his own
condition and that of his children, 3. the development of
those faculties which are essential to his humanity, that is,
to his rational and moral being. Under the last head I do
not mean those degrees of intellectual cultivation which
distinguish man from man in the same civilized society, but
those only that raise the civilized man above the barbarian,
the savage and the brute. I require, however, on the part of
the State, in behalf of all its members, not only the outward
means of knowing their essential duties and dignities as men
and free men, but likewise, and more especially, the dis¬
couragement of all such tenures and relations as must in the
very nature of things render this knowledge inert and cause

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the good seed to perish as it falls. Such at least is the appointed
aim of a state: and at whatever distance from the ideal mark
the existing circumstances of a nation may unhappily place
the actual statesmen, still every movement ought to be in
this direction. But the negative merit of not forwarding —
the exemption from the crime of necessitating — the debase¬
ment and virtual disfranchisement of any class of the com¬
munity, may be demanded of every State under all circum¬
stances: and the Government that pleads difficulties in
repulse or demur of this claim impeaches its own wisdom
and fortitude.

Nothing more can be asked of the State, no other duty is
imposed on it, than to withhold or retract all extrinsic or
artificial aids to an injurious system: or, at the utmost, to
invalidate in extreme cases such claims as have arisen
indirectly from the letter or unforeseen operations of parti¬
cular statutes: claims that instead of being contained in the
rights of its proprietary trustees are encroachments on its
own rights, and a destructive trespass on a part of its own
inalienable and untransferable property — I mean the health,
strength, honesty, and filial love of its children. An injurious
system, the connivance at which we scarcely dare more than
regret in the Cabinet or Senate of an Empire, may justify an
earnest reprobation in the management of private estates:
provided always that the system only be denounced and the
pleadings confined to the court of conscience. For from this
court only can the redress be awarded. All reformer innova¬
tion not won from the free agent by the presentation of juster
views and nobler interests, and which does not leave the
merit of having affected it sacred to the individual proprietor,
it were folly to propose and worse than folly to attempt.

I have no faith in Act of Parliament reform. All the great

[fi]

M ATURITY

— the permanently great — things that have been achieved
in the world have been so achieved by individuals, working
from the instinct of genius or of goodness. The rage nowa¬
days is all the other way: the individual is supposed capable
of nothing; there must be organization, classification,
machinery, etc., as if the capital of national morality could be
[lii] increased by making a joint-stock of it.

(vi) The State in relation to the Church

A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State
regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes,
not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property,
birth, etc. But a Church does the reverse of this, and
disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as indivi¬
dual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as
greater or less wisdom, learning and holiness ought to
confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure
democracy. The Church, so considered, and the State
exclusively of the Church, constitute together the idea of a
[liii] State in its largest sense.

A democracy, according to the prescript of pure reason,
would in fact be a Church. There would be focal points in
[liv] it, but no superior ... In it, persons are alone considered,
[Iv] and one person a priori is equal to another person.

The State, with respect to the different sects of religion
under its protection, should resemble a well-drawn portrait.
Let there be half a score individuals looking at it, every one
sees its eyes and its benignant smile directed towards
[Ivi] himself.

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POLITICS

(d) THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION

[Excerpts from 'The Church and State according to the Idea
of each\ 1830.]

(i) Permanence and Progression

A Constitution is the attribute of a state, i.e. of a body
politic, having the principle of its unity within itself,
whether by concentration of its forces, as a constitutional
pure monarchy, which, however, has hitherto continued to
be ens rationale^ unknown to history . . . or, -- with which we
are alone concerned — by equipoise and interdependency:
the lex equilibrii^ the principle prescribing the means and
conditions by and under which this balance is to be estab-
lished and preserved, being the constitution of the state. It
is the chief of many blessings derived from the insular
character and circumstances of our country, that our social
institutions have formed themselves out of our proper needs
and interests that long and fierce as the birth-struggle and
the growing pains have been, the antagonist powers have
been of our own system, and have been allowed to work out
their final balance with less disturbance from external forces,
than was possible in the Continental states. . . .

Now in every country of civilized men, acknowledging
the rights of property, and by means of determined bounda¬
ries and common laws united into one people or nation, the
two antagonist powers, or opposite interests, of the state,
under which all other state interests are comprised, are those

of PERMANENCE and of PROGRESSION.

It will not be necessary to enumerate the several causes
that combine to connect the permanence of a state with the
land and the landed property. To found a family, and to

155

M A T U R I T Y

convert his wealth into land, are twdn thoughts^ births of the
same moment, in the mind of the opulent merchant when
he thinks of reposing from his labours. From the class of
the Novi Horabies he redeems himiself by becoming the
staple ring of the chain by wFich the present will become
connected with the past; and the test and evidency of per¬
manence afforded. To the same principle appertain primo¬
geniture and hereditary titles, and the influence which these
exert in accumulating large masses of property, and in
counteracting the antagonist and dispersive forces which the
follies, the vices, and the misfortunes of individuals can
scarcely fail to supply. To this, likewise, tends the prover¬
bial obduracy of prejudices characteristic of the humbler
tillers of the soil, and their aversion even to benefits that are
offered in the form of innovations. But why need I attempt
to explain a fact which no thinking man will deny, and
where the admission of the fact is all that my argument

On the other hand, with as little chance of contradiction,
I may assert that the progression of a state in the arts and
comforts of life, in the diffusion of the information and
knowdedge useful or necessary for all; in short, all advances
in civilization, and the rights and privileges of citizens, are
especially connected with, and derived from the four
classes of the mercantile, the manufacturing, the distributive
and the professional. , . .

Naly^ where Austrian and Spanish overlords have
degraded the professio?i of trade^ and where agriculture thrives^
enjoys every gift of God — except freedom?^

We have thus divided the subjects of the state into two
orders, the agricultural or possessors of the land: and the
merchant, manufacturer, the distributive, and the profes-

156

POLITICS

sional bodies5 under the common name of citizens. And we
have now to add that by the nature of things common to
every civilized country^ at all events by the course of events
in this country, the first is subdivided into two classes,
which, in imitation of our old law books, we may intitle the
Major and Minor Barons; both these, either by their inter¬
ests or by the very effect of their situation, circumstances,
and the nature of their employment, vitally connected with
the permanency of the state, its institutions, rights, customs,
manners, privileges — and as such, opposed to the inhabi¬
tants of ports, towns and cities, who are imlike manner and
from like causes more especially connected wdth its progres¬
sion. I scarcely need say that in a very advanced stage of
civilization the two orders of society will more and more
modify and leaven each other, yet never so completely but
that the distinct character remains legible, and, to use the
words of the Roman Emperor, even in what is struck out
the erasure is manifest. At all times, the lower of the twm
ranks of which the first order consists, or the Franklins, will
in their political sympathies draw more nearly to the antagon¬
ist order than the first rank. On these facts, which must at
all times have existed, though in very different degrees of
prominence or maturity, the principle of our constitution
was established.

The total interests of the country, the interests of the
STATE, were entrusted to a great council or parliament,
composed of two Houses. The first consisting exclusively of
the Major Barons, who at once stood as the guardians and
sentinels of their several estates and privileges, and the
representatives of the common weal. The Minor Barons, or
Franklins, too numerous, and yet individually too weak, to
sit and maintain their rights in person, were to choose among

157

A T U R I T Y

the worthiest of their own body representativesj and these
in such number as to form an important though minor pro¬
portion of a second House — the majority of which was
formed by the representatives chosen by the cities, ports and
boroughs; which representatives ought on principle to have
been elected not only by, but from among, the members of
the manufacturing, mercantile, distributive and professional
classes. These four classes, by an arbitrary but convenient
use of the phrase, I will designate by the name of the Personal
Interest, as the exponent of all moveable and personal posses¬
sions, including skill and acquired knowledge, the moral and
intellectual stock in trade of the professional man and the
artist, no less than the raw materials, and the means of elabor¬
ating, transporting and distributing them.

Thus in the theory of the constitution it was provided
that even though both divisions of the Landed Interest
should combine in any legislative attempt to encroach on the
rights and privileges of the Personal Interest, yet the repre¬
sentatives of the latter forming the clear and effectual
majority of the lower House, the attempt must be abortive:
the majority of votes in both Houses being indispensable in
order to the presentation of a bill for the Completory Act—
that is, to make it a law of the land. By force of the same
mechanism must every attack be baffled that should be made
by the representatives of the minor landowners in concert
with the burgesses on the existing rights and privileges of the
peerage, and of the hereditary aristocracy, of which the
peerage is the summit and the natural protector. Lastly,
should the nobles join to invade the rights and franchises of
the Franklins and the Yeomanry, the sympathy of interest
by which the inhabitants of cities, towns and sea-ports are
linked to the great body of the agricultural fellow-commoners

158

POLITICS

who supply their markets and form their principal customers^
could not fail to secure a united and successful resistance.
Nor would this affinity of interest find a slight support in the
sympathy of feeling between the burgess senators and the
county representativeSj as members of the same House, and
in the consciousness which the former have of the dignity
conferred on them by the latter. For the notion of superior
dignity will always be attached in the minds of men to that
kind of property with which they have most associated
the idea of permanence: and the land is the synonym of
country.

That the burgesses were not bound to elect representa¬
tives from among their own order, individuals bo 7 ta fide
belonging to one or other of the four divisions above enumer¬
ated; that the elective franchise of the towns, ports, etc., first
invested with borough-rights, was not made conditional, and
to a certain extent at least dependent on their retaining the
same comparative wealth and independence, and rendered
subject to a periodical revisal and re-adjustment; that in
consequence of these and other causes, the very weights
intended for the effectual counterpoise of the great land¬
holders have in the course of events been shifted into the
opposite scale; that they now constitute a large proportion
of the political power and influence of the very class whose
personal cupidity, and whose partial views of the landed
interest at large they were meant to keep in check; these are
no part of the constitution, no essential ingredients in the
idea, but apparent defects and imperfections in its realiza¬
tion — which, however, we will neither regret nor set about
amending, till we have seen whether an equivalent force had
not arisen to supply the deficiency — a force great enough to
have destroyed the equilibrium, had not such a transfer

159

IV'I A T U R I T Y

taken place previously to, or at the same time with, the oper¬
ation of the new forces. Roads, canals, machinery, the press,
the periodical and daily press, the might of public opinion,
the consequent increasing desire of popularity among public
men and functionaries of every description, and the in¬
creasing necessity of public character as a means or condition
of political influence — I need but mention these to stand
acquitted of having started a vague and naked possibility in
extenuation of an evident and palpable abuse.

But ivhether this conjecture be w^ell or ill grounded, the
principle of the constitution remains the same. That harmo¬
nious balance of the tv 70 great correspondent, at once sup¬
porting and counterpoising, interests of the state, its per¬
manence and its progression: that balance of the landed and
the personal interests w^as to be secured by a Legislature of
two Houses; the first consisting wholly of barons or land¬
holders, permanent and hereditary senators; the second of
the knights or minor barons, elected by, and as the repre¬
sentatives of, the remaining landed community, together
with the burgesses, the representatives of the commercial,
manufacturing, distributive and professional classes — the
latter (the elective burgesses) constituting the major number.
The king, meanwhile, in vrhom the executive power is
vested, it will suffice at present to consider as the beam of the
constitutional scales. A more comprehensive view of the
kingly office must be deferred till the remaining problem
(the idea of a national church) has been solved.

I must here entreat the reader to bear in mind what I have
before endeavoured to impress on him, that I am not giving
an historical account of the legislative body; nor can I be
supposed to assert that such was the earliest mode or form
in which the national council was constructed. My assertion

i6o

POLITICS

is simply this^ that its formation has advanced in this direc¬
tion. The line of evolutioHj however sinuouSj has tended to
this point, sometimes with, sometimes without, not seldom,
perhaps against, the intention of the individual actors, but
always as if a power greater and better than the men them¬
selves had intended it for them. Nor let it be forgotten that
every new growth, every power and privilege, bought or
extorted, has uniformly been ciaimxed by an antecedent
right; not acknowledged as a boon conferred, but both

demanded and received as what had alwavs belono-cd to

them, though withheld by violence and the inpury of the times.
This, too, in cases where, if documents and historical records
or even consistent traditions, had been required in evidence,
the monarch would have had the better of the argument.

But, in truth, it wus no more than 3. practical way of saying:
this or that is contained in the idea of our government, and
it is a consequence of the 'Lex, Mater Legum’ which, in the
very first law of state ever promulgated in the land, was pre¬
supposed as the ground of that first law.

Before I conclude this part of my subject, I must press on
your attention that the preceding is offered only as the con¬
stitutional idea of the State. In order to correct views re¬
specting the constitution in the more enlarged sense of the
term, viz, the constitution of the Nation.^ we must, in addition
to a grounded knowledge of the State.^ have the right idea of
the National Church. These are two poles of the same magnet;
the magnet itself, which is constituted by them, is the con¬
stitution of the nation. [Ivii]

(ii) Property as a Public Trust

It was , . . common to all the primitive races, that in taking
possession of a new country, and in the division of the land

161

M A T U R I T Y

into heritable estates among the individual warriors or heads
of families, a reserve should be made for the nation itself.
The sum total of these heritable portions, appropriated each
to an individual lineage, I beg leave to name the pro¬
priety; and to call the reserve above-mentioned the
nationality; and likewise to employ the term wealth
in that primary and wide sense which it retains in the term
Commonwealth, In the establishment, then, of the landed
proprieties^ a tiationalty was at the same time constituted:
as a wealth not consisting of lands, but yet derivative from
the land and rightfully inseparable from the same. These,
the Pf^opriety and the Nationalty\ were the two constituent
factors, the opposite, but correspondent and reciprocally
supporting counterweights of the commonwealth\t]it existence
of the one being the condition, and the perfecting, of the
rightfulness of the other . . . The wealth appropriated was
not so entirely a property as not to remain, to a certain
extent, national; nor was the wealth reserved so exclusively
[Iviii] national as not to admit of individual tenure. . . .

With the Celtic, Gothic and Scandinavian, equally with
the Hebrew^ tribes. Property by absolute right existed only
in a tolerated alien; and there was everywhere a prejudice
against the occupation expressly directed to its acquirement,
viz., the trafficking with the current representatives of
wealth. Even in that species of possession in which the
right of the individual was the prominent relative character,
the institution of the Jubilee provided against its degeneracy
into the merely personal; reclaimed it for the state — that is,
for the line^ the heritage, as one of the permanent units or
integral parts, the aggregate of which constitutes the
STATE in that narrower and especial sense in which it has
been distinguished from the nation. And to these permanent

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unitSj the calculating and governing 7nind of the state
directs its attention, even as it is the depths, breadths, bays
and windings or reaches of a river, that are the subject of
the hydrographer, not the water-drops that at any moment
constitute the stream. And on this point the greatest stress
should be laid; this should be deeply impressed, carefully
borne in mind, that the abiding interests, the estates and
ostensible properties, not the persons as persons^ are the
proper subjects of the parliament or supreme council, as the
representatives and plenipotentiaries of the state, i,e. of the
PROPRIETY, and in distinction from the common-wealth,
in which I comprise both the Propriety and the Nationalty. ... [lix]
It was in the character of the King, as the majesty or
symbolic unity of the whole nation, both of the state and of
the persons; it was in the name of the ki^g, in whom both
the propriety and the national^ ideally centred, and from
whom as from a fountain they are ideally supposed to flow —
it was in the name of the king that the proclamation
throughout the land, by sound of the trumpet, was made to
all possessors: 'The land is not yours, saith the Lord, the
land is mine. To you I lent it.’ The voice of the trumpets is
not, indeed, heard in this country. But no less intelligibly is
it declared by the spirit and history of our laws, that the
possession of a property not connected with especial duties,
a property not fiduciary or official, but arbitrary and un¬
conditional, was in the light of our forefathers the brand of a
Jew and an alien; not the distinction, not the right, or
honour, of an English baron or gentleman. [lx]

When shall we return to a sound conception of the right
to property — namely, as being official, implying and de¬
manding the performance of commensurate duties! No¬
thing but the most horrible perversion of humanity and

163

MATURITY

moral justice, under the specious name of political economy,
could have blinded men to this truth as to the possession of
land — the law of God having connected indissolubly the
cultivation of every rood of earth with the maintenence and
watchful labour of man. But money, stock, riches by credit,
transferable and convertible at will, are under no such
obligations; and, unhappily, it is from the selfish, autocratic
possession of such property, that our landowners have learnt
their present theory of trading with that which was never
[ki] meant to be an object of commerce.

(iii) The National Church

In relation to the National Church, Christianity or the
Church of Christ, is a blessed accident, a providential boon
... As the olive tree is said in its growth to fertilize the sur¬
rounding soil; to invigorate the roots of the vines in its
immediate neighbourhood, and to improve the strength and
flavour of the wines ~ such is the relation of the Christian
and the National Church. But as the olive is not the same
plant with the vine . . . even so is Christianity, and a fortiori
any particular scheme of Theology derived and supposed
(by its partizans) to be deduced from Christianity, no essential
part of the Being of the National Church, however conducive
[Ixii] or even indispensable it may be to its well-being. . . .

After these introductory preparations, I can have no
difficulty in setting forth the right idea of a national church,
in the language of Elizabeth, the third great venerable estate
of the realm . . . There remains for the third estate only that
interest which is the ground, the necessary antecedent con¬
ditions of both the former. Now these depend on a contin¬
uing and progressive civilization. But civilization is itself
but a mixed good, if not far more a corrupting influence, the

164

POLITICS

hectic of diseasCj not the bloom of health, and the nation so
distinguished more fitly to be called a varnished than a
polished people; where this civilization is not grounded in
cultivation^ in the harmonious development of those qualities
and faculties that characterize our humanity. We must be
men in order to be citizens.

The Nationalty, therefore, was reserved for the support
and maintenance of a nermanent class or order, with the
following duties. A certain smaller number were to remain
at the fountain-heads of the humanities, in cultivating and
enlarging the knowdedge already possessed, and in wutching
over the interests of physical and moral science; being like¬
wise the instructors of such as constituted, or were to con¬

stitute, the remaining more numerous classes of the order.
This latter and far more numerous bodv w^ere to be distributed
throughout the country, so as not to leave the smallest
integral part or division wfithout a resident guide, guardian,
and instructor; the objects and final intention of the whole
order being these — to preserve the stores, to guard the
treasures, of past civilization, and thus to bind the present
with the past; to perfect and add to the same, and thus to
connect the present with the future; but especially to diffuse
through the wffole community, and to every native entitled
to its law^s and rights, that quantity and quality of knowledge

rights and for the performance of the duties correspondent.
Finally, to secure for the nation, if not a superiority over
the neighbouring states, yet an equality at least, in that
character of general civilization, wffich equally with, or
rather more than, fleets, armies and revenue, forms the
ground of its defensive and offensive power. The obj ect of the
two former estates of the realm, which conjointly form the

165

M A T U R I T Y

sTATEj was to reconcile the interests of permanence with
that of progression — law with liberty. The object of the
National Church, the third remaining estate of the realm,
was to secure and improve that civilization without which
the nation could be neither permanent nor progressive. . . .

In the spiritual sense of the word, and as understood in
reference to a future state, and to the abiding essential
interest of the individual as a person, and not as the citizen,
neighbour or subject, religion may be an indispensable ally,
but is not the essential constitutive end of that national
institute which is unfortunately, at least improperly, styled a
church — a name which, in its best sense, is exclusively
appropriate to the Church of Christ. If this latter be ecciesia,
the communion of such as are called out of the world, i.e. in
reference to the especial ends and purposes of that communion
this other might more expressively have been entitled
enclesia^ or an order of men, chosen in and of the realm, and
constituting an estate of that realm. And, in fact, such was the
the original and proper sense of the more appropriately
named clergy. It comprehended the learned of all
names, and the clerk was the synonym of the man of

THE CLERisY of the nation, or national church, in its
primary acceptation and original intention, comprehended
the learned of ail denominations; — the sages and professors
of the law and jurisprudence; of medicine and physiology;
of music; of military and civil architecture; of the physical
sciences; with the mathematical as the common organ of the
preceding; in short, all the so-called liberal arts and sciences,
the possession and application of which constitute the civiliza¬
tion of a country, as well as the Theological. The last was,
indeed, placed at the head of all; and of good right did it

i66

POLITICS

claim the precedence. But why? Because under the name
of Theology, or Divinity, vtere contained the intert)retation
of languages; the conservation and tradition of past events;
the momentous epochs and revolutions of the race and
nation; the continuation of the records; logic, ethics, and the
determination of ethical science, in application to the rights
and duties of men in all their various relations, social and
civil; and lastly, the ground-knowledge, frima scie^ituz
as it was named — philosophy, or the doctrine and
discinline of Ideas,

Theology formed only a part of the objects, the Theolo¬
gians form.ed only a portion of the clerks or clergy, oi the
national church. The theological order had precedency,
indeed, and deservedly; but not because its miembers were
priests whose othce was to conciliate the invisible powers
and to superintend the interests that survive the grave; not
as being exclusively, or even principally, sacerdotal or tem¬
plar . . . No! The Theologians took the lead because the
SCIENCE of Theolog’X^ was the root and trunk of the know^-
ledges that civilized man, because it gave unity and the
circulating sap of life to all other sciences, by virtue of which
alone they could be contemplated as forming collectively the
living tree of knowledge. It had the precedency because
under the name theoloew w^ere comprised all the main

aids, instruments, and materials of national education,
the /usis formativus of the body politic, the shaping and in¬
forming spirit, wNich, educhig i.e. eliciting, the latent man
in all the natives of the soil, trains them up to be citizens of the
country, free subjects of the realm. And lastly, because to
divinity belong those fundamental truths which are the
comimon groundwork of our civil and religious duties, not
less indispensable to a right view of our temporal concerns

167

.MATURITY

than to a rational faith respecting our immortal well-being.
(Not without celestial observations can even terrestial charts
be accurately constructed.) And of especial importance is it
to the objects here contemplated that, only by the vital
warmth diffused by these truths throughout the many,
and by the guiding light from the philosophy, which is the
basis of di^inity^ possessed by the few, can either the
community or its rulers fully comprehend, or rightly
appreciate, the perm.anent distinction^ and the occasional
contrasty between cultivation and civilization; or be made to
understand this most valuable of the lessons taught by
history, and exemplified alike in her oldest and her most
recent records — that a nation can never be a too cultivated,
[kiii] but may easily become an over-civilized race.

(iv) Functions of the National Church

The mercantile and commercial class, in which I here
comprise all the four classes that I have put in antithesis to
the Landed Order, the guardian and depository of the
Permanence of the Realm, as most characteristically conspir¬
ing to the interests of its progression, improvement and
general freedom of the country — this class did, as I have
already remarked, in the earlier stages of the constitution,
exist as but in the bud. But during all this period of potential
existence, or what we may call the minority of the burgess
order, the National Church was the substitute for the most
important national benefits resulting from the same. The
National Church presented the breathing-hole of hope. The
church alone relaxed the iron fate by which feudal depend¬
ency, primogeniture and entail would otherwise have pre¬
destined every native of the realm to be lord or vassal. To
the church alone could the nation look for the benefits of

i68

POLITICS

existing knowledge and for the means of future civilization.
Lastly, let it never be forgotten that under the fostering
wing of the church the class of free citizens and burghers
were reared. To the feudal system we owe the formsy to the
church the substance, of our libertx^. We mention onL two

^ j j

of many facts that would form the proof and comment of the
above; first, the origin of towns and cities in the privileges

attached to the viciniU'" of churches and monasteries, and
which, preparing an asylum for the fugitive VTssal and
oppressed Franklin, thus laid the first foundation of a class
of freemen detached from the land. Secondiv, the Hoiv War
which the national clergy, in this instance faithful to their
national duties, waged against slavery and villeinage, and
with such success that in the rei^n of Charles II the law
which declared every native of the realm free by birth
merely to sanction an opus jam consurnmatur/i.

[Ixiv]

the earlier epochs of the constitution only existed, as it were,
potentially and in the bud; the students and possessors of
those sons of learning, the use and necessity of which were
indeed constant and perpetual to the nation^ but only acciden¬
tal and occasional to individuals^ gradually detached them¬
selves from the nationalty and the national clergy, and
passed to the order with the growth and thriving condition
of which their emoluments were found to increase in equal
proportion. Rather, perhaps, it should be said that under
the common name of professional, the learned in the depart¬
ments of law, medicine, etc., formed an intermediate link
between the established clergy and the burgesses.

This circumstance, however, can in no way affect the
principle, nor alter the tenure, nor annul the rights of those

169

M A T U R I T Y

who remained, and who, as members of the permanent
learned class, were planted throughout the realm, each in
his appointed place, as the immediate agents and instru¬
ments in the great and indispensable work of perpetuating,
promoting, and increasing the civilization of the nation,
and wh.0 thus fulfilling the purposes for which the deter¬
minate portion of the total w'eaith from the land had been
reserved, are entitled to remain its trustees and usufructuary-
proprietors. But, remember, I do not assert that the pro¬
ceeds from the nationalty cannot be rightfully vested except
in what we now mean by clergymen and the established
clergy. I have everywhere implied the contrary. But I do
assert that the nationalty cannot rightfully be, and that with¬
out foul wrong to the nation it never has been, alienated from
its original purposes. I assert that those who, being duly
elected and appointed thereto, exercise the functions and
perform the duties attached to the nationalty — that these
collectively possess an inalienable, indefeasible title to the
same — and this by a Jure Divinio to which the thunders
from Mount Sinai might give additional authority but not
additional evidence.

. . . During the dark times \t}ie Middle Ag€s\ . . . large
masses were alienated from the heritable properties of the
realm and confounded with the Nationalty under the
common name of Church Property. Had every rood, every
pepper-corn, every stone, brick and beam been re-trans¬
ferred and made heritable at the Reformation, no right
would have been invaded, no principle of justice violated.
What the state by law ■— that is, by the collective will of its
functionaries at any one time assembled — can do or suffer
to be done; that the state can, by law, undo or inhibit. And
in 'principle such bequests and donations were vitious ab

170

initio^ implying in the donor an absolute property in land un¬
known to the constitution of the realm and in defeasance of
that immmtable reason which, in the namx of the nation and
the national majesty, proclaims: — ‘^The land is not yours;
it was vested in your lineage in trust for the nation/

^ o

ne name of Henry VIII would outshine that of

Alfred . . . had he retained the will and possessed the power
of effecting that in part he promised and proposed to do — it
he had availed himiself of the wealth and landed masses that
had been unconstitutionally alienated from the state, i.e.
transferred from the scale of heritable lands and revenues, to
purchase and win back whatever had been alienated fromi the
opposite scale of the nationalty. JVro/tgjuUy alienated: for ii
was a possession in which every free subject in the nation
has a living interest, a permanent, and likewise a possible
personal and reversionary interest! Sacrilegiously alienated:
for it had been consecrated ... to the potential divinity in
every man, which is the ground and condition of his cissil
existence, that without which a man can be neither free nor
obliged, and by which alone, therefore, he is capable of being
a free subject — a citizen.

If, having thus righted the balance on both sides,
HENRY had then directed the nationalty to its true national
purposes . . . [// would have beefi] distributed in propor¬
tionate channels to the maintenance:

1. Of universities and the great schools of liberal learning,

2 . Of a pastor, presbyter, or parson in every parish. . . .
That to every parish throughout the kingdom there is trans¬
planted a germ of civilization: that in the remotest villages
there is a nucleus round which the capabilities of the place
may crystallize and brighten; a model sufnciently superior
to excite, yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate

MATURITY

imitation; this unobtrusive^ continuous agency of a Protest¬
ant Church Establishment, this it is which the patriot and

who would fain unite the love of peace
with the faith in the progressive amelioration of mankind,
cannot estimate at too high a price . . . The clergyman is
with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the
cloistered cell nor in the wilderness, but a neighbour and
family-man, wTose education and rank admit him to the
mansion of the rich landholder, while his duties make him
[kvii] the frequent visitor of the farmhouse and the cottage.

3. Of a school-master in every parish, who, in due time
and under condition of a faithful performance of his arduous
duties, should succeed to the pastorate; so that both should
be labourers in different compartments of the same field,
workuien engaged in different stages of the same process,
with such difference of rank as might be suggested in the
names pastor and sub-pastor, or as now exists between
curate and rector, deacon and elder. Both alike, I say,
members and ministers of the national clerisy or church,
working to the same end ... to form and train up the people
of the country to obedient, free, useful, organizable subjects,
citizens and patriots, living to the benefit of the state and
prepared to die for its defence. The proper object and end of
the National Church is civilization with freedom; and the
duty of its ministers, could they be contemplated merely and
exclusively as officiaries of the National Church, would be
fulfilled in the communication of that degree and kind of
knowledge to all, the possession of which is necessary for all
in order to their civility. By civility I mean all the
qualities essential to a citizen, and devoid of which no people
or class of the people can be calculated on by the rulers and
leaders of the state for the conservation or promotion of its

172

POLITICS

essential interests. It follows, therefore, that in regard of the
grounds and principles of action and conduct, the State has a
right to demand of the National Church that its instructions
should be fitted to diffuse throughout the people legality^
that is, the obligations of a well-calculated self-interest,
under the conditions of a common interest determined by
common laws. Uxv

4. Of the maintenance of the proper, that is, the infirm

poor, whether from age or sickness: one of the original pur¬
poses of the national Reserve being the alleviation of those
evils which in the best forms of worldly states must arise and
must have been foreseen as arising from the institution or
individual properties and primogeniture. If these duties
were efficiently performed, and these purposes adequately

very increase of the population (which w

however, by these very means have been prevented from
becoming a vicious population) would have more than
counterbalanced those savings in the expenditure of the
nationalt}" occasioned by the detachment of the practitioners
of law, medicine, etc., from the national clergy.

That this transfer of the national reserve from what had
become national evils to its original and inherent purpose
of national benefits, instead of the sacrilegious alienation
which actually took place — that this was impracticable, is
historically true; but no less true is it philosophically that
this impracticability arising wholly from moral causes —
that is, from loose manners and corrupt principles — does
not rescue this wholesale sacrilege from deserving the char¬
acter of the first and deadliest wound inflicted on the con¬
stitution of the kingdom: wTich term 'Constitution', in the
body politic, as in bodies natural, expresses not only what
has been actually evolved, but likewise whatever is poten-

r J

MATURITY

tially contained in the seminal principle of the particular body,
and would in its due time have appeared but for emascula-
[kix] tion or disease. . . .

Among the primary ends of the state (in that highest
sense of the word in which it is equivalent to the nation,
considered as one body politic, and therefore includes the
National Church) there are two of which the National
Church (according to its idea) is the especial and constitu¬
tional organ and means. The one is, to secure to the subjects
of the realm generally the hope, the chance, of bettering
their own or their children's condition. And though during
the last three or four centuries the National Church has
found a most powerful surrogate and ally for the effectuation
of this great purpose in her former wards and foster-children,
i.e. in trade, commerce, free industry and the arts — yet
still the nationalty, under all defalcations, continues to feed
the higher ranks by drawing up whatever is worthiest from
below, and thus maintains the principle of Hope in the
humblest families, while it secures the possessions of the
rich and noble. Our Maker has distinguished man from
the brute that perishes by making hope first an instinct of
his nature; and secondly an indispensable condition of his
moral and intellectual progression . . . But a natural
instinct constitutes a right, as far as its gratification is
compatible with the equal rights of others. And this
principle we may expand, and apply to the idea of the
National Church . . . This is one of the two ends.

The other is to develop in every native of the country
those faculties, and to provide for every native that know¬
ledge and those attainments, which are necessary to qualify
him for a member of the state, the free subject of a civilized
realm. We do not mean those degrees of moral and intel-

174

POLITICS

lectual cultivation which distinguish man from man in the
same civilized society, much less those that separate the
Christian from the this-worldian; but those onlv that con-
stitute the civilized man in contra-distinction from the [Ixx]
barbarian, the savage and the animal

v) Conditions of the health of the Body Politic

The first . . . required in order to a sound constitution
the Body Politic is a due proportion of the free and per¬
meative life and energy of the Nation to the organized
powers brought within containing channels. What those
vital forces that seem to bear an analogy to the imponderable
agents, magnetic or galvanic, in bodies inorganic (if indeed

thev are not the same in a higher energw and under a different
law of action), what these, I say, are in the living body in
distinction from the fluids in the o-lands and vessels —^ the

same, or at least a like relation, do the indeterminable but
yet actual influences of intellect, information, prevailing
principles and tendencies (to which we must add the
influence of property or income where it exists without
right of suffrage attached thereto), hold to the regular,
definite and legally recognized Powers in the Body Politic.
But as no simile runs on all four legs {nihil simile est idemf
so here the difference in respect of the Body Politic is, that
in sundry instances of the former, i.e. the permeative,
species of force is capable of being converted into the
latter, of being as it were organized and rendered a part
of the vascular system by attaching a measured and deter¬
minate political right or privilege thereto.

What the exact proportion, however, of the two kinds of
force should be it is impossible to pre-determine. But the
existence of a disproportion is sure to be detected sooner or

^75

MATURITY

later by the effects. Thus, the ancient Greek democracies,
the hot-beds of Art, Science, Genius and Civilization, fell
into dissolution from the excess of the former, the
permeative power deranging the functions, and by explosions
shattering the organic structures they should have enlivened.
On the contrary, the Republic of Venice fell by the contrary
extremes. All political power was confined to the deter¬
minate vessels, and these, becoming more and more rigid,
even to an ossification of the arteries, the State, in which the
people were nothing, lost all power of resistance ad extra\
Under this head, in short, there are three possible sorts of
malformation to be noticed, namely — The adjunction or
concession of direct political power to 'personal force and
influence, w^hether physical or intellectual, existing in
classes or aggregates of individuals without those fixed or
tangible possessions, freehold, copyhold or leasehold, in
land, house or stock. The power resulting from the acquisi¬
tion of knowledge or skill, and from the superior develop¬
ment of the understanding is, doubtless, of a far nobler kind
than mere physical strength and fierceness, the one being
peculiar to the animal Man^ the other common to him with
the Bear, the Buffalo and the Mastiff. And if superior
talents and the mere possession of knowledges such as
can be learnt at Mechanics’ Institutions were regularly
accompanied with a Will in harmony with the Reason, and a
consequent subordination of the appetites and passions to
the ultimate ends of our Being: if intellectual gifts and
attainments were infallible signs of wisdom and goodness
in the same proportion, and the knowing, clever and
talented (a vile word!) were always rational^ if the mere facts
of science conferred or superseded the softening, humanizing
influences of the moral world, that habitual presence of the

176

POLITICS

beautiful or the seemly, and that exemption from :
familiarity with the gross, the mean and the disorderlv.

whether in look or language or in the surrounding obiects,
in which the main efficacy of a liberal education exists; and
these acquirements and powers of the under-
i be shared euuallv bv the whole class, and
V a necessity of nature then ever must do, fall
to the lot of two or three in each several groun, club o

not, as

neighbourhood; — then, indeed, by an enlargement of the
Chinese system, political power might not unvrisely be
conferred as the honorarium or privilege on having passed
through ail the forms in the National Schools, without the
security of ooliticai ties, without those fastenings and
radical fibres of a collective and registerable property, by
which the Citizen inheres in and belongs to the Common-
wealth, as a constituent part either of the Proorietage or of
the Nationalty; either of the State or of the National
Church. But as the contrary of all these supnositions may
be more safely assumed, the practical conclusion will be —
not that the requisite means of inteilectuai development
and growth should be withheld from any native of the soil,
which it was at all times wicked to wish and which it would
be now silly to attempt; but — that the gifts of the under¬
standing, whether the boon of a genial nature or the reward
of more persistent application, should be allowed fair play
in the acquiring of that proprietorship to which a certain
portion of political power belongs as its proper function.
For, in this way there is at least a strong probability that
intellectual power will be armed with political power only
where it has previously been combined with and guarded
by the moral qualities of prudence, industry and self-
control. And this is the first of the three kinds of mal-

7 ' 7 '^

- / /

MATURITY

organization in a state: viz. direct political power without
cognizable possession.

The second is: the exclusion of any class or numerous
body of individuals who have notoriously risen into posses¬
sion, and the influence inevitably connected with known
possession, under pretence of impediments that do not
directly or essentially affect the character of the individuals
as citizens, or absolutely disqualify them for the performance
of civic duties. Imperfect, yet oppressive and irritating
ligatures that peril the trunk whose circulating current
they would withhold, even more than the limb which they
would fain excommunicate!

The third and last is; a gross incorrespondency of the
proportion of the antagonist interests of the Body Politic in
the representative body — i.e. (in relation to our own
country), in the two Houses of Parliament — to the actual
proportion of the same interests, and of the public influence
exerted by the same in the Nation at large. Whether in
consequence of the gradual revolution which has transferred
to the Magnates of the Landed Interest so large a proportion
of that Borough Representation which was to have been its
counter-balance; whether the same causes which have
deranged the equilibrium of the Landed and the Monied
Interests in the Legislature have not likewise deranged the
balance between the two unequal divisions of the Landed
Interest itself, viz., the Major Barons, or great Land-
owners, with or without title, and the great body of the
Agricultural Community, and thus giving to the real or
imagined interests of the comparatively few the imposing
name of the Interest of the whole — the landed Interest! —
these are questions to which the obdurate adherence to the
jail-crowding Game Laws (which, during the reading of our

178

Chlircli Litany. I have sometimes been temnied to include

by a sort or sub rntelhge m the petitions ■— trom enmy natre
and malice, and all uncharitableness; from battle, murder
and sudden death, Good Lord deliver us!'), to which the
Corn Laws, the exclusion of the produce of our own
colonies from our distilleries, etc., during the war, against
the earnest recommendation of the government, the reten¬
tion of the Statutes against LLury, and other points of
minor importance or of less safe handling, may seem at a
first view to suggest an answer in the afSrmative; but which,
for reasons before assigned, I shall leave unresolved, content
if only I have made the Principle itself intelligible, , . .

So much in explanation of the first ot the tvto Conditions

of the health and vigour of a Body Politic . . . The Second
Condition is —

A due proportion of the 'potential (latent, dormant) to the
actual power. In the first condition, both powers are alike
awake and in act. The Balance is produced by tht polariza¬
tion of the Actual Power, i.e, the opposition of the Actual
Power organized, to the Actual Power free and permeating
the organs. In the Second, the Actual Power in totOy is

It has been frequently and truly observed that in England,

government is a monarchy at once buttressed and limited
bv the Aristocracy (the assertions of its popular character
finding a better support in the harangues and theories of
popular men than in state-documents and the records of
clear History), a far greater degree of liberty is, and long
has been, enjoyed, than ever existed in the ostensibly freest,
that is, most democratic, Commonwealths of ancient or of
modern times — greater indeed, and with a more decisive

179

MATURITY

predominance of the Spirit of Freedom, than the wisest and
most philanthropic statesmen of antiquity, or than the great
Commonwealth’s-men (the stars of that narrow interspace
of blue sky between the black clouds of the first and second
Charles's reigns), believed compatible, the one with the
safety of the State, the other with the interests of Morality.
Yes! For little less than a century and a half, Englishmen
have collectively and individually lived and acted with fewer
restraints on their free-agency than the citizens of any known
Republic past or present. The fact is certain. It has been
often boasted of, but never, I think, clearly explained.
The solution of the phenomenon must, it is obvious, be
sought for in the combination of circumstances to which we
owe the insular privilege of a self-evolving Constitution;
and the following will, I think, be found the main cause of
the fact in question.

Extremes meet — an adage of inexhaustible exemplifica¬
tion. A democratic Republic and an Absolute Monarchy
agree in this; that in both alike the Nation or People
delegates its whole power. Nothing is left obscure, nothing
suffered to remain in the Idea, unevolved and only acknow¬
ledged as an existing, yet interminable, Right. A Constitu¬
tion such states can scarcely be said to possess. The whole
Will of the Body Politic is in act at every moment. But in
the Constitution of England according to the Idea . . . the
Nation had delegated its power, not without measure and
circumscription, whether in respect of the duration of the
[kxii] Trust, or of the particular interests entrusted.

The Omnipotence of Parliament, in the mouth of a
lawyer, and understood exclusively of the restraints and
remedies within the competence of our Law-courts, is
objectionable only as bombast. It is but a puffing, pompous

18o

POLITICS

way of stating a plain matter of fact , . . But if the strutting
phrase be taken^ as from sundry recent speeches respecting
the fundamental institutions of the realm it may be reasonably
inferred that it has been taken, i.e. absolutely, and in
reference not to our Courts of Law exclusively but to the
Nation, to England with all her venerable heir-looms and
with ail her germs of reversionary wealth — thus used and
understood, the Omnipotence of Parliament is an hyperbole
that would contain mischief in it were it only that it tends
to* provoke a detailed analysis of the materials of the joint-
stock company to w^hich so terrific an attribute belongs,
and the competence of the shareholders in this earthly
omnipotence to exercise the same , . . The degree and sort
of knowledge, talent, probity and prescience which, it would
be only too easy, were it not too invidious, to prove from
acts and measures presented by the history of the last half
century, are but scam measure . , . this portion of moral and
mental endowment, placed by the side of the plusquam-
gigantic height and amplitude of power implied in the
unqualified use of the phrase ‘Omnipotence of Parliament’,
and with its dwarfdom exaggerated by the contrast, would
threaten to distort the countenance of truth itself with the
sardonic laugh of irony. . . .

The principle itself. . . might seem to many fitter matter
for verse than for sober argument, I will, by way of
compromise, and for the amusement of the reader, sum up
in the rhyming prose of an old Puritan Poet . . .

‘Let not your King and Parliament in 07 ie^

Much less apart, mistake themselves for that
Which is most worthy to be thought upon:

Nor think they are, essentially, the state.

« « 9 • «

i8i

[kxiiij

M A T U R I T Y

^But let them know, hwas for a deeper life.

Which they but represent —

That there’s on earth a yet auguster Thing,

[kxiv] Veil’d tho’ it be, than Parliament and King.’

It is only to a limited extent that laws can be wiser
[Ixxv] than the nation for which they are enacted.

4, HIS OWN TIMES

(a) THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS (1817)

(i) An appeal to the higher and middle classes

Fellow-countrymen! You I mean, who fill the higher
and middle stations of society! The comforts, perchance the
splendours, that surround you, designate your rank, but
cannot constitute your moral and personal fitness for it , . ,
by what mark shall you stand accredited to your own
consciences as its worthy — possessors? . . . The mark in
question must be so far common, that we may be entitled
to look for it in you from the mere circumstances of your
station, and so far distinctive that it must be such as cannot
be expected generally from the inferior classes . . . The least
that can be demanded of the least favoured among you is an
earnest endeavour to walk in the light of your own know¬
ledge; and not, as the mass of mankind, by laying hold on
the skirts of custom . . . Your habits of reflection should at
least be equal to your opportunities of leisure, and to that
which is itself a species of leisure — your immunity from

182

HIS OWN T I M E S

bodily labour ... If you possess more than is necessary for
your own wants, more than your own wants ought to be
felt by you as your own interests. You are pacing on a
smooth terrace which you owe to the happy instifetions of
your country — a terrace on the mountain’s breast. To
what purpose, by what moral right, if you continue to gaze
only on the sod beneath your feet?

(ii) England's advantages

Tt would furnish grounds both for humility towards
Providence and for increased attachment to our countmy

it -

if each individual could but see and feel how^ large a part of
his innocence he owes to his birth, breeding and residence in

Great Britain. The administration of the laws; the almost
continual teaching of moral prudence; the pressure of our
ranks on each other, wdth the consequent reserve and
watchfulness of demeanoui in the superior ranks, and the
emulation in the subordinate; the vast depth, expansion and
systematic movements of our trade; and the consequent
interdependence, the arterial or nerve-like network of
property, which make every deviation from outward

iilLCt^iiLV d. L.d,iL.U.ldUiC iUbb LU LiiC UiiV iUU-d,! ililii-

self from its mere effects, as obstruction and irregularity;
and lastly the naturalness of doing as others do: — these and
the like influences, peculiar, some in the kind and all in the
degree, to this privileged island, are the buttresses on which
our foundationless well-doing is upholden even as a house
of cards, the architecture of our infancy, in which each is
supported by all. . . .

The splendour of our exploits during the late war is less
honourable to us than the magnanimity of our view^s and our
generous confidence in the victory of the better cause.

183

MATURITY

Accordingly, we have obtained a good name, so that the
nations around us have displayed a disposition to follow
our example and imitate our institutions; too often, I fear,
even in parts where, from the difference of our relative
circumstances, the imitation had little chance of proving
more than mimicry. But it will be far more glorious, and to
our neighbours incomparably more instructive, if in dis¬
tresses to which all counties are liable, we bestir ourselves
on remedial and preventive arrangements which all nations
may more or less adopt; inasmuch as they are grounded
on principles intelligible to all rational, and obligatory on
all moral, beings; inasmuch as, having been taught by God's
word, exampled by God's providence, commanded by God’s
law, and recommended by promises of God’s grace, they

[ii] alone can form the foundation of a Christian community. . . .

(ill) Immediate occasion of the discontents

The ultimate causes of the present distress and stagnation
are in my opinion complex and deeply seated; but the
immediate occasion is too obvious to be over-looked but by
eyes at once red and dim through the intoxication of factious
prejudice. . . .

It is demonstrable that taxes, the product of which is
circulated in the country from which they are raised, can
never injure a country by the mere amount; but either from
the time or circumstances under which they are raised, or
from the injudicious mode in which they are levied, or from

[iii] the improper objects to which they are applied . . . For
taxation is itself a part of commerce, and the government
may be fairly considered as a great manufacturing house,
carrying on in different places, by means of its partners and
overseers, the trades of the ship-builder, the clothier, the

184

HIS OWN TIMES

iron-founder, and the like. As long as the balance is pre¬
served between the receipts and the returpxS of Government
in their amount, quickness and degree of dispersion; as long
as the due proportion obtains in the sums levied to the mass
in productive circulation, so long does the V7eaith and cir¬
cumstantial prosperity of the nation (its wealth, I say, not
its real welfare; its outward prosperity, but not necessarily
its happiness) — remain unaffected, or rather they will
appear to increase in consequence of the additional stimulus
given to the circulation itself by the reproductive action of
all large capitals, and through the check which taxation in
its own nature gives to the indolence of the wealthy in its
continual transfer of property to the industrious and enter¬

prising. It was one among the many anomalies of the late [iv‘
war that it acted, after a few years, as a universal stimulant.
We almost monopolized the commerce of the world. The
high wages of our artisans and the high prices of agricultural
produce intercirculated. Leases of unusual length not
seldom enabled the provident and thrifty farmer to purchase
the estate he had rented. Everywhere might be seen roads,
railways, docks, canals, made, making and projected;
villages swelling into towms, while the metropolis surrounded
itself, and became (as it were) set with new cities. Finally,
in spite of all the waste and havoc of a twenty years' war,
the population of the empire was increased by more than
two millions. The efforts and war expenditure of the
nation, and the yearly revenue, were augmented in the same
proportion: and to all this we must add a fact of the utmost
importance in the present question, that the war did not,
as was usually the case, die away into a long-expected peace
by e:radnal exhaustion and weariness on both sides, but
plunged to its conclusion by a concentration, we might

MATURITY

almost say, by a spasm of energy, and consequently by an
anticipation of our resources. We conquered by compelling
reversionary power into alliance with our existing and natural
strength. The first intoxication of triumph having passed
over, this our agony of glory was succeeded of course by a
general stiffness and relaxation. The antagonist passions
came into play; financial solicitude was blended with
constitutional and political jealousies, and both alas! were
exacerbated by personal imprudences, the chief injury of
which consisted in their own tendency to disgust and alienate
the public feeling. And with all this, the financial errors
and prejudices even of the more educated classes, in short,
the general want or imperfection of clear views and a
scientific insight into the true effects and influences of taxa¬
tion and the mode of its operation, became now a real mis¬
fortune, and opened an additional source of temporary
embarrassment. Retrenchment could no longer proceed by
cautious and calculated steps; but was compelled to hurry
forward, like one who crossing the sands at too late an hour
finds himself threatened by the inrush of the tide. Neverthe¬
less, it was a truth susceptible of little less than mathe¬
matical demonstration, that the more, and the more
suddenly, the revenue was diminished by the abandonment
of the war-taxes, the greater would be the disturbance of
the balance: so that the agriculturist, the manufacturer or
the tradesman — (all, in short, but annuitants and fixed
stipendiaries) — who during the war having paid as five
had fifteen left behind, would shortly have less than ten
after having paid but two and a half. What then the pressure
on the country must be, when we add to the above the return
to cash payments, without any change made in the intrinsic
value of the coin, and so as in effect to re-impose the

186

HIS OWN TIMES

amount of taxes nominally remitted, may be easily under-

there is yet another circumstance which 1 must not
pass by unnoticed. In the best of times — or w'hat the
calls such — the spirit
fluctuations, some falling; while others rise, and therefore

commerce wi

occasion great

times

be a larue sum of individual distress.

Trades likewise have their seasons, consequently even in the

most

re will be a very consul

number of artificers who are not employed on the average
more than seven or eight months in the year; and the
distress from this cause is great or small in proportion to
the greater or lesser degree of dissipation and improvidence
prevailing among them. But besides this, that artificial life
and vigour of trade and agriculture which was produced or
occasioned by the direct or indirect influences of the late
war, proved by no means innoxious in its effects. Habit,
and the familiarity with outward advantages, which takes
off their dazzle; sense of character; and, above all, the
counterpoise of intellectual pursuits and resources; are all
necessan--" preventives and antidotes to the dangerous
properties of wealth and potver wdth the great majority of
mankind. It is a painful subject: and I leave to your own
experience and recollection the assemblage of folly, pre¬
sumption and extravagance, that followed in the procession
of our late unprecedented prosperity; and the blind practices
and blending passions of speculation in the commercial
worlds with the shoal of ostentatious fooleries and sensual
vices which the sudden influx of wealth let in on our farmers

and yeomanry. . . .

Within the last sixty years or perhaps a somewhat larger
period . . . there have occurred at intervals of about twelve

187

MATURITY

or thirteen years each, certain periodical revolutions of
credit. Yet revolution is not the precise word. To state the
thing as it is, I ought to have said, certain gradual expansions
of credit ending in sudden contractions, or, with equal
propriety, ascensions to a certain utmost possible height,
which has been different in each successive instance; but in
every instance the attainment of this its ne 'plus ultra has
been instantly announced by a rapid series of explosions
(in mercantile language, a crash) and a consequent precipita¬
tion of the general system ... I am not ignorant that 'the
power and circumstantial prosperity of the nation has been
increasing during the same period with an accelerated force
unprecedented in any country the population of which
bears the same proportion to its productive soil; and partly,
perhaps, even in consequence of this system. By facilitating
the means of enterprise, it must have called into activity a
multitude of enterprising individuals and a variety of talent
that would otherwise have lain dormant: while by the same
ready supply of excitements to labour, together with its
materials and instruments, even an unsound credit has been
able within a short time to substantiate itself. I shall
perhaps be told, too, that the very evils of this system, even
the periodical crash itself, are to be regarded but as so much
superfluous steam ejected by the escape-pipes and safety-
valves of a self-regulating machine: and lastly that in a free
and trading country all things find their level, . . .

Much I still concede to the arguments for the present
scheme of things as adduced in the preceding para¬
graph: but I likewise see, and always have seen, much
that needs winnowing. Thus, instead of the position that
all things find, it would be less equivocal and far more
descriptive of the fact to say that things are always finding,

i88

HIS OWN TIMES

their level: which might be taken as the paraphrase or
ironical definition of a storm. But persons are not things —
but man does not find his level. Neither in bodv nor in soul
does the man find his level. After a hard and caiamitoTas
season, during which the thousand wheels of some vast
manufactory had remained silent as a frozen waterfall, be it
that plenty has returned and that trade has once miore
becomie brisk and stirring: go, ask the overseer, and question
the parish doctor, whether the workman's health and
teihperance with the staid and respectful mianners best
taught hv the inward dignity of conscious self-support, have
found their level auain? Alas! I have more than once seen

a group of children in Dorsetshire, during the heat of the
dog-days, each with its little shoulders up to its ears, and its
chest pinched inward, the very habit and fixtures, as it were,
that had been imxpressed on their frames by the former ill-
fed, ill-clothed and unfuelled winters. But as with the body,
so or still worse with the mind. Nor is the effect confined
to the labouring classes, whom, by an ominous but too
appropriate change in our phraseology, we are now accus¬
tomed to call the labouring poor. I cannot persuade myself
that the frequency of failures, with all the disgraceful secrets
of fraud and folly, of unprincipled vanity in expending and
desperate speculation in retrieving, can be familiarized to
the thoughts and experience of men as matters of daily
occurrence without serious injury to the moral sense . . .
Name to me any revolution recorded in historp that was not
followed by a depravation of the national miorals. The
Rom*an character under the Triumvirate and under Tiberius;
the reign of Charles II, and Paris at the present moment
(1817) — are obvious instances. What is the main causer
The sense of insecurity. On what ground, then, may we

1S9

MATURITY

hope that with the same accompaniment commercial
revolutions should not produce the same effect propor¬
tion to the extent of their sphere?

But these blessings. . . ? Dare we unpack the bales and
cases so marked and look at the articles, one by one?
Increase of human life and increase of the means of life are,
it is true, reciprocally cause and effect: and the genius of
commerce and manufacture has been the cause of both to a
degree that may well excite our wonder. But do the last
results justify our expectations likewise? Human life, alks!
is but the malleable metal out of which the thievish pick-
lock, the slave’s collar and the assassin’s stiletto are formed
as well as the clearing axe, the feeding ploughshare, the
defensive sword and the mechanic tool. But the subject is a
painful one: and fortunately the labour of others, with the
communications of medical men concerning the state of the
manufacturing poor, have rendered it unnecessary. I will
rather . . . relate a speech made to me near Fort Augustus,
as I was travelling on foot through the Highlands of
Scotland, The speaker was an elderly and respectable
widow . , . After an affecting account of her own wrongs
and ejectment . . . she made a movement with her hand in a
circle, directing my eye meanwhile to various objects as
marking its outline; and then observed with a deep sigh
and a suppressed and slow voice which she suddenly raised
and quickened after the first drop or cadence: ‘Within this
space — how short a time back ■— there lived a hundred and
seventy-three persons: and now there is only one shepherd
and an underling or two . . . Instead of us all, there is one
shepherd man, and it may be a pair of small lads — and
many, many sheep! And do you think, Sir! that God
allows of such proceedings?’

190

HIS OWN TIMES

Some days before this conversation, and while I was on
the shores of Loch Katrine, I had heard of a sad counter¬
part to the widow’s tale, and told with a far fiercer indigna¬
tion, of a 'Laird who had raised a company from the
country round about, for the love that was borne to his
name, and who gained high preferment in consequence:
and that it was but a small part of those than he took away
whom he brought back again. And what were the thanks

w'hich the folks had, both for those

that had come back with

him, some blind, and more in danger of blindness; and for
those that had perished in the hospitals, and for those that
fell in battle . . . Why, that their fathers were all turned out
of their farms before the year was over, and sent to wander
like so many gipsies, unless thev would consent to shed their
grey hairs at ten-pence a day over the new canals. Had there
been a price set upon his head, and his enemies had been
coming upon him, he needed but have whistled, and a
hundred brave lads would have made a w^ali of flame round
about him with the flash of their broadswords! Now if the
French should come ammng us, as (it is said) they will, let
him whistle to his sheep and see if they will fight for him!’
The frequency with which I heard . . . confident expecta¬
tions of the kind expressed in his concluding words — nay,
far too often eager hopes mingled with vindictive resolves —
I spoke of with complaint and regret to an elderly man,
whom by his dress and way of speaking I took to be a
schoolmaster. Long shall I recollect his reply: ‘O Sir, it
kills a man’s love for his country, the hardships of life
coming by change and with injustice!’ I was sometime

the mysteries of political economy, and was therefore
entitled to be listened to, 'that more food was produced in

191

MATURITY

consequence of this revolution, that the mutton must be eaten
somewhere, and what difference where? If three were fed
at Manchester instead of two at Glencoe or the Trossachs,
the balance of human enjoyment was in favour of the
former'. I have passed through many a manufacturing
town since then, and have watched many a group of old
and young, male and female, going to, or returning from,
many a factory, but I could never yet persuade myself to be
of his opinion. Men, I still think, ought to be weighed, not
counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their
value. . . .

Retrace the progress of things from 1792 to 1813, when
the tide was at its height, and then as far as its rapidity will
permit, the ebb from its first turn to the dead low-water
mark of the last quarter. Then see whether the remainder
may not be generalized under the following heads. Fluctua¬
tion in the wages of labour, alternate privation and excess
(not in all at the same time, but successively in each),
consequent improvidence, and over all, discontent and a
system of factious confederacy: these form the history of the
mechanics and lower ranks of our cities and towns. In the
country, a peasantry sinking into pauperism, step for step
with the rise of the farmer’s profits and indulgencies. On the
side of the landlord and his compeers we shall find the
presence of the same causes attested by answerable effects.
Great as their almost magical effects were on the increase of
prices in the necessaries of life, they were still greater, dis¬
proportionately greater, in all articles of show and luxury.
With few exceptions, it soon became difficult and at length
impracticable, for the gentry of the land for the possessors of
fixed property, to retain the rank of their ancestors, or their
own former establishments,without joinin g in the general com-

192

HIS OWN TIMES

petition under the influence of the same trading spirit. . . .

We see in every promiscuous public meeting the effect
produced by the bold assertion that the present hardships
of all classes are owing to the number and amount of
pensions and sinecures. Yet from the unprecedented zeal
and activity in the education of the poor, of the thousands
that are inflamed by, and therefore give credit to, these
statements, there are few without a child at home who could
not prove their impossibility by the first and simplest rules
of arithmetic; there is not one, perhaps, w'ho, taken by him¬
self and in a cooler mood, would stand out against the
simple question — whether it was not folly to suppose that
the lowness of his wages or his want of emiployment could be
occasioned by the circumstance that a sum (the whole of
which, as far as it is raised by taxation, cannot take a yearly
penny from him) was returned and dispersed into the general
circulation by annuitants of the Treasury instead of annui¬
tants of the Bank, by John instead of Peter; however
blameable the regulation might be in other respects? What
then? The hypothesis allows a continual reference to persons,
and to all the uneasy and malignant passions which per¬
sonalities are of all means the best fitted to awaken. The
grief itself, however grinding it may be, is of no avail to this
end; it must first be converted into a grievance. Were the
audience composed chiefly of the lower farmers and the
peasantry, the same circumstance would for the same
reason have been attributed wholly to the clergy and the
system of tithes; as if the corn would be more plentiful
if the farmers paid their whole rent to one man, instead of
paying nine parts to the landlord and the tenth to the tithe-
owner! But let the meeting be composed of the manufac¬
turing poor, and then it is the machinery of their employers

193

MATURITY

that is devoted to destruction: though it would not exceed
the truth if I affirmed that to the use and perfection of this
very machinery the majority of the poor deluded destroyers
owe their very existence, owe to it that they ever beheld the
light of heaven!

Even so it is with the capitalists and store-keepers, who,
by spreading the dearness of provisions over a larger space
and time, prevent scarcity from becoming real famine, the
frightful lot at certain and not distant intervals of our less
commercial forefathers. These men, by the mere instinct
of self-interest, are not alone birds of warning that prevent
waste; but, as the raven of Elijah, they bring supplies from
afar. . . .

(iv) Ultimate causes of the discontents

The Immediate occasions of the existing distress may be
correctly given with no greater difficulty than would attend
any other series of known historic facts; but towards the
discovery of its true seat and sources I can offer but a humble
contribution. They appear to me, however, resolvable into
the overbalance of the commercial spirit in consequence of the
absence or weakness of the counter-weights \ this overbalance
considered as displaying itself — i, in the commercial world
itself; 2, in the agricultural; 3, in the Government; and 4,
in the combined influence of all three on the more numerous
and labouring classes.

I entreat attention to the word 'overbalance’. My
opinions would be greatly misinterpreted if I were supposed
to think hostilely of the spirit of commerce, to which I
attribute the largest proportion of our actual freedom, and
at least as large a share of our virtues as of our vices. Still
more anxiously would I guard against the suspicion of a

194

HIS OWN TIAIES

design to inculpate any member or class of individuals.
It is not in the power of a minister or a cabinet to say to the
current of national tendency: 'Stay hereT or 'Flow there'f
The excess can only be remedied by the slow progress of
intellect, the influences of religion, the irresistible events
guided by Providence. In the points even which I have
presumed to blame, by the word Government I intend all
the directors of political power, that is, the great estates of
the realmi, temporal and spiritual, and not only the Parlia¬

ment, but all the elements of

the natural counter-torces to the irripetus of trade, the
first that presents itself to the mind is the ancient feeling of

rank and ancestry, compared with our present selt-com-
placent triumph over these supposed prejudices. Not that
titles and the rig-hts of precedence are pursued by us with

•O' J. jk, J

less eagerness than they were pursued by our lorefathers.
The contrary is the case: and for this very cause, because
they inspire less reverence. In the olden times they 'were
valued by the possessors and revered by the people as
distinctions of nature, which the Crown itself could only
ornament, but not give. Like the stars in heaven, their
influence w'as wider and more general because, for the mass
of mankind, there was no hope of reaching, and therefore
no desire to appropriate, them. That many evils as well as
advantages accompanied this state of things I am well
aware: and likewise that many of the latter have become
incompatible with far more important blessings. It wmuid
therefore be sickly affectation to suspend the thankfulness
due for our immunity from the one in an idle regret for the
loss of the other. But however true this mav be, and whether
the good or the evil preponderated, still, this reverence for
ancientry in families acted as a counterpoise to the grosser

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MAT U RrrY

superstitions of wealth. Of the cfRcicucy of this counter¬
poise I can offer negative proof only: anci for this we need-
only look back on the deplorable state of 1 lolland in respect
of patriotism and public spirit at and before the conunence-
ment of the French Revolution.

Under this head I include the general luylect of all the
maturer studies: the long and ominous eclipse of philosophy;
the usurpation of that venerable name by physical aiul
psychological empiricism; and the non-existence of a learned
and philosophic public, which is perhaps the only iiuioxidus
form of an imperium in hnperio^ but at the same time the
only form which is not directly or indirectly encouraged. . .

I must not permit myself to say more on this subject,
desirous as I am of showing the importance of a philosojduc
class, and of evincing that it is of vital utility, and even an
essential element, in the composition of a civilized com¬
munity. It must suffice that it has been explained in what
respect the pursuit of truth for its own sake, and the
reverence yielded to its professors, has a tendency to calm
or to counteract the pursuit of wealth; and that therefore a
counterforce is wanting wherever philosophy is degraded
in the estimation of society. . . .

There is a third influence, alternatively our spur and our
curb, without which all the pursuits and desires of men must
either exceed or fall short of their just measure. Need I add
that I mean the influence of religion.^ I S[Kvak of that
sincere, that entire, interest in the undivided faith of Christ
which demands the flrstfruits of the whole man, his afFcc-
tions no less than his outward acts, his understanding
equally with his feelings ... In the present day we hear
much, and from men of various creeds, of the plainness and
simplicity of the Christian religion: and a strange abuse has

196

HIS OWN TIMES

been made of these words, often indeed with no ill intention,
but still oftener by men who would fain transform the
ncc.essity of believing in Christ into a recommendation to
believe in him . . . Religion and politics, they tell us,
require but the ajiplication of common sense, which every
man ])ossesscs, to a subject in which every man is concerned
. . . To abstain from acts of wrong and violence, to be more¬
over industrious, useful, and of seemly bearing, arc qualities
nrc-su]-)poscd in the Cospel code as the preliminary
conditions, rather thair the j)ropcr and peculiar effects of
Christianity. But they are likewise qualities so palpably
indispcjisable to the temporal interests of mankind that, if
we except the brief frenzies of revolutionary riot, there never
was a time in which the world did not profess to reverence
them: nor can we state any period in which a more than
ordinary character for assiduity, regularity and charitable¬
ness did not secure the world’s praise and favour, and were
not calculated to advance the. individual’s own worldly
interests: provided only that his manners and professed
tenets were those of some known :md allowed body of
men.

.[ ask then, what is the fact.? We arc — and, till its good
purposes, which are many, have been all achieved, and we
can become something better, long may we continue such!
— a busy, enterjn-ising and commercial nation. The habits
attached to this character must, if there exist no adequate
counterpoise, inevitably lead us under the specious names of
utility, jiractical knowledge and so forth, to look at all things
through the, medium of the. market and to estimate the worth
of all pursuits and attainments by their marketable value.
In this docs the spirit of trade consist. Now, would this
general experience bear us out in the assertion that amid the

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atu Rrr y

absence or declension of all other antagonist forces, there is
found in the veiy circle of the trading and opulent them¬
selves, in the increase, namely, of religious proiessors
among them, a spirit of resistance to the excess of the

commercial impetus^ from the impressive example of their
unworthy feelings evidenced by tlreir moderation in worldly
pursuits? ^ I fear that we may anticipate the answer wherever
the religious zeal of such professors does not likewise
manifest itself by the glad devotion of as large a portion ot
their time and industry, as the duty of providing a fair
competence for themselves and their families leaves at their
ow^n disposal, to the comprehension of those inspired
writings and the evolution of those pregnant truths which
are proposed foi our earnest and sedulous research in order
that by occupying our understandings they may more and
more assimilate our affections. I fear that the inquiring
traveller would more often hear of zealous religionists who
have read (and as a duty, too, and with all due acquiescence)
the prophetic: Woe to them that join house to house and lay
field to fields that they may he alone in the landP — and yet find
no object deform the beauty of the prospect from their
windnw or even from their castle turrets so annoyingly, as a
meadow not their own, or a field under ploughing with the
beam-end of the plough in the hands of its humble owner!

I fear that he must too often make report of men lawful
m their dea mgs, Scriptural in their language, almsgivcrs,
and patrons of Sunday Schools, who are yet resistless and
overawing bidders at all land auctions in their neighbour-
00 , w 0 ive m the centre of farms without leases and
tenants without attachments! Or, if his way should he
through our great towns and manufacturing districts,
instances wou grow cheap with him of wealthy religious

II 1 s () w N i M i^: s

practitioners who never travel ior orders without cards of
edification in prose and verse^ and sniaJl tracts of admonition
and instruction, all 'plain and easy, and suited to
meanest capacities'; who pray daily as the first act of
mornin^c;' and the last of the evening: Lead us not into tempta¬
tion; blit deliver us from evil! and employ all the interval with
an edge ot appetite keen as the scythe of death in the
pursuit of yet tuore a.nd yet more ot a temptation so perilous^
that (as they have full often read, and licard read without the
least cpiestioning or whisper ot doubt) no power short of
omnipotence could make their deliverance from it credible
or conceivable.

Of all denominations ot Christians, there is not one in
existence or on record whose whole system ot faith and
worship was so expressly trained for the one purpose of
spiritualiydng the mind a.nd ot abstracting it from the vanities
of the world, as the Society ot h'riends . . . If the occasion
permitted, I could dilate with pleasure on their decent
manners and decorous morals, as individuals, and their
exemplary and truly illustrious [diilanthropic efforts as a
Society. From all the gay and tinsel vanities of the world
their discipline has preserved them, and the English
character owes to their example some part of its manly
plainness in externals. But my argument is confined to the
question whether religion in its jwesent state and under the
present conceptions of its demands and purposes, docs, even
among the most religious, exert any sufheient control over
the commercial spirit, the excess of which we have
attributed not to the extent and magnitude of the commerce
itself, but to the absence or imperfection of its appointed
checks and counter-agents. Now, as the system of the
Friends in its first intention is of all others most hostile

199

M A1' U R 1V

to worldly-mindcdness on the one liand; and us, on the
other, the adherents of this system both in confession and
practice confine Christiatiity to fcclino’^ and motives; they
may be selected as representatives of the strict, but un¬
studied and uninquiring, religionists of every denoitunation.
Their characteristic propensities will supply, tlicrefore, no
unfair test for the degree of resistance which our present
Christianity is capable of oj^posing to the cupidity of a
trading people. That species of Christianity, I mean,
which, as far as knowledge and the facultic.s of thougiit arc
concerned, — which as far as the growth and grandeur of the
intellectual man is in question, — is to be learnt cxlcmporc,
A Christianity poured in on the catechunicn ail and all at
once, as from a shower-bath; and which, whatever it may be
in the heart, yet for the understanding and the reason, is
from boyhood onward a thing past and perfected. If the
almost universal opinion be tolerably correct, the question
is answered. . . .

Thus, then, of the three most approved antagonists to the
spirit of barter, and the accompanying disposition to over¬
value riches with all the means and tokens thereof ■— of tlie

three fittest and most likely checks to this tendency, namely,
the feeling of ancient birth and the respect paid to it by the
community at large; a genuine intellectual philosophy with
an accredited, learned and philosophic class; and lastly
religion; we have found the first declining, the second not
existing, and the third efficient indeed in many respects and
to many excellent purposes, only not in this particular
direction: the religion here spoken of having long since
parted company with that inquisitive and bookish theology
which tends to defraud the student of his worldly wisdom,
inasmuch as it diverts his mind from the accumulation of

200

H I S () WN r M, K S

wealth by puvoc.ciit^yhi^' his thoughts in the acquisition of
knowledge, hor the religion of best rc[)utc among us holds
all the truths of Scripture atid all the doctrines of Chris™
tianity so very transcendentj or so very easy, a,s to make
study or research citlua’ vain or ticcdless. It professes,
therefore, to hunger and thirst alter righteousness alone,
and the rewards of the righteous; and thus, habitually
taking for granted all truths of sihritual import, leaves the
understanding vaeaiit and at leisure for a thorough insight
into present and temporal interests: whieh, doubtless, is the
true reason why its followers arc in general such shrewd,
knowing, wary, welhlnformcd, tlirilty and thriving mcii of
business. But this is likewise the reason why it neither docs
nor can check or circumscribe the spirit ol barter; and to the
consequent monopoly which this commercial spirit possesses
must its over-balance be attributed, not the extent or magni¬
tude of the commerce itscll. . . .

1 low, it wall be objcx'ted, does all this ajq)ly to the present
times in particular? When was the industrious part of
mankind not attached to the pursuits most like to reward
their industry? Was the wish to make a fortune, or, if you
prefer an invidious phrase, the lust of lucre, less natural to
our forefathers than to their descendants? If you say that
though a not less frecjucnt, nor less powerful passion with
them than with us, it yet met with a more frequent and more
powerful check, a strongca- and more advanced boundary-
line in the religion of old times, and in the faith, fashion,
habits, and authority of the religious: in what did this
difference consist? a,nd in what way did these points of
difference act? If indeed the antidote in question once
possessed virtaics which it no longer possesses, or not in the
same degree, what is the ingredient, cither added, omitted,

201

MATURITY

or diminisliedj since that time, which can have rendered it
less efficacious now than then? . . ,

». . It might ... be a sufficient answer to this objection,
that as the commerce of the country, and with it the spirit
of commerce, has increased fifty-fold since the conunence-
ment of the latter period, it is not enough that the counter¬
weight should be as great as it was in the former period: to
remain the same in its effect, it ought to have become very
much greater . . . \And\ in order to produce a similar effect
it must act in a similar way: it must reign in the thoughts
of a man and in the powers akin to thought, as well as
exercise an admitted influence over his hopes and fears, and
through these on his deliberate and individual acts . . .
It is my full conviction that in any half dozen sermons of
Donne or Taylor, there are more thoughts, more facts and
images, more excitements to inquiry and intellectual effort,
than are presented to the congregations of the present day
in as many churches or meetings during twice as many
months . . . The very length of the discourses with which
these rich souls of wit and knowledge fixed the eyes, cars
and hearts of their crowded congregations, are a source of
wonder nowadays, and we may add, of self-congratulation, to
many a sober Christian who forgets with what delight he hirn-

selfhaslistenedtoatwohours'harangueonaloanor a tax. . . .

The last point to which I shall appeal is the warmth and
frequency of the religious controversies during the former
of the two periods . . . The fact is introduced, not for its
own sake, but as a symptom of the general state of mcn^s
feelings and as evidence of the direction ajid main channel
in which the thoughts and interests of men were then
flowing ... I shall believe our present religious toleration
to proceed from the abundance of our charity and good

202

II I S OWN I'IMKS

sense when I can see proofs that we are equally cool and fore¬
bearing as litigators and political partisans. And I must
again entreat my reader to recollect that the present
argument is exclusively concerned with the requisite
correctives of the commercial spirit, and with religion there¬
fore no otherwise than as a counter-charm to the sorcery of
wealth: and my main position is that neither by reasons
drawn from the nature of the human mind nor by facts of
actual experience are we justified in expecting this from a
religion which does not employ and actuate the under¬
standings of men, and combine their affections with it as a
system of truth gradually and progressively manifesting itself
to the intellect; no less than as a system of motives and moral
commands learnt as soon as heard, and containing nothing
but what is plain and easy to the lowest capacities. . , .

[// has hemne and at length impracticable for the

gentry of the land, for the possessors of fixed property, to
retain the rank of their ancestors, or their own former
establishments, without joining in the general competition
under the influence of the same trading spirit . . . That
agriculture requires principles essentially different from
those of trade; that a gentleman ought not to regard his
estate as a merchant his cargo or a shop-keeper his stock —
admits of an easy proof from the different tenure of landed
property, and from the purposes of agriculture itself, which
ultimately arc the sajuc as those of the State of which it is the
offspring ... As the specific ends of agriculture arc the
maintenance, strength and security of the State, so (I
repeat) must its ultimate ends be the same as those of the
State: even as the ultimate end of the spring and wheels of a
watch must be the same as that of a watch. . . .

It would border on an affront to the understandings of

203

MATURITY

the members of our Landed Interest were I to explain in
detail what the plan and conduct of a gentleman would be;
if, as the result of his own free conviction the marketable
produce of his estates were made a subordinate considera¬
tion to the living and moral growth that is to remain on the
land —I mean a healthful, callous-handed but high-and-
warm-hearted tenantry, twice the number of the present
landless, parish-paid labourers, and ready to march off at
the first call of their country with a Son of the 1 louse at
their head, because under no apprehension of being (forgive
the lowness of the expression) marched off at the whisper of
a land-taster: — if the admitted rule, the paramount sclf-
commandment, were comprised in the fixed resolve — I will
improve my estate to the utmost; and my rent-roll 1 will
raise as much as, but no more than, is compatible with the
three great ends (before enumerated) which, being those of
my country, must be mine inclusively: this, I repeat, it
would be more than superfluous to particularize. It is a
problem the solution of which may be safely entrusted to
the common sense of everyone who has the hardihood to
ask himself the question. But how encouraging even the
approximations to such a system, of what fair promise the
few fragmentary samples are, may be seen in the Report of
the Board of Agriculture for 1816 , p. 11, from the Ivarl of
Winchelsea’s communication, in every paragraph of which
wisdom seems to address us in behalf of goodness.

But the plan of my argument requires the reverse of this
picture. I am to ask what the results would be on the
supposition that agriculture is carried on in the spirit of
trade; and if the necessary answer coincide with the known
general practice, to show the connection of the consequences
with the present state of distress and uneasiness. In trade,

204

HIS OWN IH M E S

from its most innocent form to the abomination ‘ of the
African commerce nominally abolished after a hard-fonght
battle of twenty years^ no distinction is or can be ackhow-
ledged between things and jxa^sons. If the latter are part
of the concern they come under the domination of the
former. Two objects only can be proposed in the manage-
ment of an estate considered as stock in trade — firsg that
the returns shall be the largest, quickest and securest
possible; and secondly, with the least outgoings in the
providing, over-looking and collecting the same . . . Am I
disposing of a bale of goods?. . . The personal worth of those
whom I benefit in the course of the process, or whether the
persons are really benefited or m>, is no concern of mine.
The market and the shop are open to all. To introduce
any other principle into trade but that of obtaining the
highest price with adequate security for articles fairly
described would be tantamount to the position that trade
ought not to exist.

If this be admitted, then what as a tradesman I cannot
do, it cannot be my duty as a tradesman to attempt and the
only remaining question in reason or morality is — what are
the proper objects of trade? If my estate be such, my plan
must be to make the most ot it, as 1 would of any other
mode of capital. As my rents will ultimately depend on the
quantity and value of the produce raised and brought into
the best market from my land, I will entrust the latter to
those who, bidding the most, have the largest capital to
employ on it: and this I cannot effect but by dividing it into-
the fewest tenures, as none but extensive farms will be an
object to men of extensive capital and enterprising minds.
I must prefer this system likewise for my own ease and
security. The farmer is of course actuated by the same

205

MATURITY

motives as the landlord: and, provided they are both faithful
to their engagements, the objects of both will be: i, the
utmost produce that can be raised without injuring the
estate; 2, the least possible consumption of the produce on
the estate itself; 3, at the lowest wages; and 4, with the
substitution of machinery for human labour wherever the
former will cost less and do the same work. . . ,

In the only plausible work that I have seen in favour of
our Poor Laws on the present plan, the defence is grounded:
first on the expediency of having labour cheap, and estates
let out in the fewest possible portions — in other words,
large farms and low wages — each as indispensable to the
other, and both conjointly as the only means of drawing
capital to the land. Again, by means of large capitals alone
is the largest surplus attainable for the State; that is, for the
market, or in order that the smallest possible proportion of
the largest possible produce may be consumed by the
raisers and their families; secondly, on the impossibility of
supplying, as we have supplied, all the countries of the
civilized world (India, perhaps, and China, excepted), and
of underselling them even in their own market, if our
working manufacturers were not secured by the State
against the worst consequences of those failures, stagnations
and transfers, to which the different branches of trade are
exposed, in a greater or less degree, beyond all human
prevention; or if the master manufacturers were compelled
to give previous security for the maintenance of those whom
they had, by the known law of human increase, called into
existence.

Let me not be misunderstood. I do not myself admit this
impossibility. I have already denied, and I now repeat
the denial, that these are necessary consequences of our

206

HIS OWN 'riMES

extended commerce. On the contrary, I feel assured that the
spirit of commerce is itself capable of being at once counter¬
acted and enlightened by the spirit of the State, to the
advantage of both. But 1 do assert that they are necessary
consequences of the commercial spirit un-countcr-acted
and un-enlightened, wherever trade has been carried on to
so vast an extent as it has been in luigland. I assert, too, that
historically and as a matter of fact, they have been the
consequences of our commercial system. , . .

But 1 have shown that the same system has gradually
taken possession of our agriculture . . . What have been the
results? ... I find in the agricultural reports that the county
in which I read of nothing but farms of looo, 1500, 2000
and 2500 acres is likewise that in which the poor-rates
are most numerous, the distresses of the poor most grievous,
and the prevalence of revolutionary principles most alarm¬
ing. But if wc consider the subject on the largest scale and
nationally, the consequences arc that the most important
rounds in the social ladder arc broken, and the hope which
above all other things distinguishes the free man from the
slave is extinguished. d?he peasantry, therefore, are eager
to have their children add as early as possible to their
miserable pittances by letting them out to manufactories;
while the youths take every opportunity of escaping to
towns and cities. And if I were questioned as to my opinion
respecting the ultimate cause of our liability to distresses
like the present, the cause of what has been called a vicious
(that is excessive) population, with all the furies that follow
in its train — in short of a state of things so remote from the
simplicity of nature that wc have almost deprived Heaven
itself of the power of blessing us: a state in which without
absurdity, a superabundant harvest can be complained of

207

MATURITY

as an evil, and the recurrence of the same a ruinous calamity^
— I should not hesitate to answer — The vast and dispro¬
portionate number of men who are to be led trom the produce
of the fields on which they do not labour'.

What then is the remedy; —who arc the physicians?
The reply may be anticipated. An evil which has come
upon us gradually, and in the growth of which all men
have more or less conspired, cannot be removed otherwise
than gradually and by the joint efforts of all. If we are a
Christian nation, we must learn to act nationally, as well as
individually, as Christians. We must remove half-truths,
the most dangerous of errors (as those ot the poor visionaries
called Spenceans) by the whole truth. The Government is
employed already in retrenchments: but he who expects
immediate relief from them, or who docs not even know
that if they do anything at all, they must for the time tend
to aggravate the distress, cannot have studied the operation
of public expenditure.

I am persuaded that more good would be done, not only
ultimate and permanent, but immediate, good, by the
abolition of the lotteries accompanied by a public and
Parliamentary declaration of the moral and religious grounds
that had determined the Legislature to this act; of their
humble confidence of the blessing of God on the measure;
and of their hopes that this sacrifice to principle, as being-
more exemplary from the present pressure on the revenue
of the State, would be the more effective in restoring
confidence between man and man; — I am deeply con¬
vinced that more sterling and visible benefits would be
derived from this one solemn proof and pledge of moral
fortitude and national faith than from retrenchments to a
tenfold greater amount. , . .

208

H IS OWN 1' I M Ii: s

Our manufacturers must consent to regulations: our
gentry must concern themselves in the education as well as
in the instruction of their natural clients and dependents^
must regard their estates as secured indeed from all human
interference by every principle of law and policy; but yet
as offices of trust, with duties to be performed in the sight
of God and their country. Let us become a better people,
and the reform of all the public (real or supposed) grievances
which we use as pegs whereon to hang our own errors and
defects, will follow of itself. In short, let every man measure
his eflorts by his power and his sphere of action, and do all
he can do. f.ct him contribute money where he cannot act
personally: but let him act personally and in detail wherever
it is practicable. Let us palliate where wc cannot cure,
comfort where we cannot relieve: and for the rest rely upon
the promise of the King of Kings by the mouth of his
Prophet: Blessed arc ye that sow beside all waters. [G

(b) A L li r 'V K K T O L O R D L I V K R POOL 1 8 I 7

[/;/ I 8 17 , the darkest year of England's post-zvar sufferings.^
zvhen the country seemed on the verge of revolution., Lord
Liverpool the Prime Minister^ received many letters of
admonition and advice from anxious and loyal citizens. In
Mxirch^ the Poet Laureate^ Robert Southey, zvrote to predict
a bcllum servile.* he recommended the curbing of the Press
and the assuramce of the loyalty of the Army and Navy. As it
too late to give them a medal for Algiers, and even for Trafalgar?"
he asked. No man zvho zvears one zmll ever be found in a mob
against the Government." Coleridge, on the other hand, writing
in July, attributed the present discontents to the prevalence of a

209

MATURITY

false 'philosophy. Lord Liverpool endorsed Colcridgeds letter:
'From Mr Coleridge.^ stating that the object of his zinitings has
been to rescue speculative philosophy f 7 vm false ptinciplcs of
reasonings and to place it on that basiSy or give it that tendencys
which wotdd make it best suited to the interests of religion as voell
as of the State; at leasts I believe this is Mr Coleridge's meatiing
but I ca 7 inot well understand him.'

The letter is printed in full in Ton go's Life of Lord
Liverpool, vol. n, pp. 300-7. Our excerpts contain the
less obscure passages. The whole document is perhaps the best
possible example of Coleridge's belief in the inseparable connec¬
tions of philosophys religions science and politics; of his conviction
that contemporary problems should be studied sub specie
aeternitas; of the one-ness of his thought. Therefore it has
seemed best to reprint it {with short omissions') as it standsy
rather than to relegate its sections to those headings of this book
under which they would most appropriately lie.)

My only incurable heresy, if such it be, respects that
meretricious philosophy which was first taken into open
keeping by the courtiers of our second Charles; then,
shifting sides with its factious patron, the Earl of Shaftes¬
bury, and having been drilled and dressed up into matronly
decorum by Mr. Locke, was led to the altar and honourably
espoused to Low Church Protestantism: his former good
old handmaid having been repudiated for supposed
infidelities with pagans and Papists. But what is bred in the
bone, the proverb tells us, will break out in the flesh, and it
did not require the subtlety of Hume’s logic to demonstrate
that no cement can keep together pious conclusions and
atheistic premises. After bestowing a few of her favours
on the semi-Christians at home, the Magdalen eloped to the

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HIS OWN TIMES

anti-Christians of the Continent, the Pallas atyto;(;o? of
the encyclopaedists and the Jacobins’ Goddess of Reason.

I am fully aware, my Lord, that scarcely one in ten
thousand is sufficiently interested in the first problems of
speculative science to give himself any concern about the
truth or falsehood of the solutions, or even to understand

the terms in which they are enunciated. What matters it to
the world, it will be said; of what consequence can it be to
society at large, that the physiology alone taught or tolerated
in the present day sets out with a pure fiction, an ultimate
particle, to wit? . . . What is all this to the world at large?

To an objection so plausible and so obvious, I must have
remained silent, my Lord, if the history of all civilized
nations in all ages had not supplied the decisive answer; if
the recorded experience of mankind had not attested the
important fact, that the taste and character, the whole tone
of manners and feeling, and above all the religious (at least
the theological) and the political tendencies of the public
mind, have ever borne such a close correspondence, so
distinct and evident an analogy to the predominant system

of speculative philosophy, whatever it has chanced to be, as
must remain inexplicable, unless we admit not only a
reaction and interdependence on both sides, but a powerful

though most often indirect of the last on all the former.
The rclicfless surfaces, imprisoned in their wiry outlines,

as so many definitions personified of the Church artists
during the ascendancy of the schoolmen; the coincidence of
the revival of Platonism by Dante and Petrarch, with the

appearance of Giotto, and the six other strong masters
preserved, in part, in the Cemeterio at Pisa, and the
culmination of the ‘divine philosophy’ with Michael
Angelo, Raflhel, Titian and Correggio; the rise and reign

21 I

MATURITY

of the eclectic school, characterized by a nominal, national,
idealess dogmatism, with the Caracci, and the Academic
painters; the usurpation of the name of painters and
statuaries by the layers-on of inveterate likenesses, and the
marble periwig-makers under the common-sense philosophy;
and lastly the marked predilection of Sir J. Reynolds for a
species of semi-Platonism, originating in the impressions
made on his mind in early youth by a Platonist; these are
but the ribs, abutments and sea-marks of a long line of
correspondences in the arts of taste to the opposite coast of
speculative philosophy. Yet even in these the coincidence is
far too regular to be resolved into mere accident.

On religion, which is at all times the centre of gravity in
the machine, and with and through which philosophy acts
on the community in general, the influence is still more
manifest . , . What indeed but the wages of death can be
expected from a doctrine which degrades the Deity into a
blank hypothesis, and that the hypothesis of a clockwork-
maker . . . : a godless nature, and a natureless, abstract God,
now an extramundane Homo Magnus, from whom the
world had its being , . . and now the Sunday (or red-letter)
name of gravitation, whereon the pater omnipolens aether is
not employed instead. One good thing, however, we owe to
this aether; it detects the hollowness of the usual excuse
pretended by the doctors of the corpuscular theory, that their
attraction and repulsion are but fictions in a memoria
technica^ meant to connect, not explain, the phenomena of
which they are the generic exponents. With the truly great
Kepler’s centripetal and centrifugal agencies, this is really
the cause; the terms simply generalize the facts. But the
very terms substituted, and chosen in preference, imply
causative agency; and I will hazard the assertion that there

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is not a single chapter in the works of any modern theorist,
a disciple of Locke, Hartley or Condillac, that will not be
found to contain positions utterly subversive of this pretence.
If anything could have recalled the physics and physiology
of the age to the dyiramic theory of the eldest philosophy, it
must have been the late successful researches of the chemists,
which almost force on the very senses the facts of mutual
penetration and intus-susception, which have supplied a
series of experimental proofs that in all pure phenomena we
behold only the copula, the balance, or indifference, of
opposite energies, 'fhe recent relapse, therefore, of our
chemists to the atomistic scheme, and the almost unanimous

acceptance of Dalton’s theory in bingland and Le Sage’s in
France, determine the intellectual character and tendencies

of the age with the force of an experimentum cruets.

1 reverence the sublime and prosperous application of the
higher geometry to the investigation of the world, as far as
the nature of masses is revealed by quantity, and thus, as it
were, self-submitted to the processes of scientific calculus.

but let it not be forgotten that this is a scion, the one healthy
and iirosperous gift from the Platonic tree. I appreciate at
their true value tire xiseful inventions and brilliant discoveries

of the modern chemistry from Stahl to Davy, but I dare not
overlook that they were made during the suspension of the
mechanic [xhilosophy relatively to chemical theory; and I
know that since the year 1798, every experiment of impor¬
tance had been distinctly pre-announced by the founders or
restorers of the constructive or dynamic doctrine in the
only country in which a man can exercise his understanding
in the light of his reason without being supposed to be out
of his senses; and I persist in the belief (Appendix to the
first Lay Sermon, p. xvii) that ‘a few brilliant inventions

213

MATURITY

have been dearly purchased at the loss of all communion
with life and the spirit of nature’.

Most significantly, my Lord, did the ancients (Greek and
Oriental) name the great object of physiology the genesis,
the the natura reruniy i.e. the birth of things. They

searched after and recorded the acts of the world, and the
self-subsistence yet inter-dependence, the difference yet
identity, of the forms they expressed by the symbol of
begetting. With the moderns, on the contrary, nothing
ever grows, all is made. Growth itself is but a disguised
mode of being made by the superinduction oi jam data on a
jam datum. This habit of thinking permeates the whole mass
of our principles, and it is in spite of ourselves that we are
not like a horde of Americans, a people without a history,
for the historic feeling is evanescent, even in the construction
of history itself. Can it be then the result of accident that
the political dogmata, the principles of which arc notoriously
affirmed and supported in the writings of Locke, that hhe
perilous stuff’ that still weighs on the heart of Europe, and
from which all the dire antidotes of the late Revolution have
not yet 'cleansed the foul bosom’; is it but a sport of chance
that these need only borrow a few terms from the mechanic
philosophy to become a facsimile of its doctrines?

The independent atoms of the state of nature cluster
round a common centre and make a convention; that con¬
vention becomes a constitution of Government; then the
makers and the made make a contract, which ensures to the
former the right of breaking it whenever it shall seem good
to them, and assigns to the governed an indefeasible right
of sovereignty over their governors, which being withstood,
this one-sided compact is dissolved, the compages fall
abroad into the independent atoms aforesaid, which are

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then to dance the Hayes till a new constitution is made for
them. For, as Mr. I.ockc and Major Cartwright sagaciously
observe, an atom is an atom, neither more nor less, and by
the pure attribute of his atom has an equal claim with every
other atom to be constituent and demiurgic on all occasions.
But, as they arc of diverse figures, they are rather apt to
clash, in which case the majority must either keep under or
expel the minority, and the system ends, as it began, in
‘physical force’, as the sovereign people are sure to learn,
where the minority happens to consist of a ruffian at the
head of an army of ruffians. Can it be mere accident, too,
that this precious scheme was first drawn into experiment,
and, as far as it w'as absurdly permitted, first realized by the
very nation among whom our modern philosophy enjoyed
the most exclusive dominion, by the people that of all the
nations of iuirojic were most characterized by the divulsion
and insulation of the sensual jiresent, by the ignorance and
contempt of all that connects it with the past, and the
wanton assaults on all the princi^des and feelings which
constitute its most effective relations to the future?

It is high time. My Ixird, that the subjects of Christian
Governments should be taught that neither historically or
morally, in fact or by right, have men made the State; but
that the State, and that alone, makes them men; a truth that
can be opposed by those only who confound the State with
the few individuals who have taken on themselves the
troublesome and thankless duty of guarding it against any
practical exhibitions of their new statc-craft; that the name
of country is but a sound if it be not true; that the flux of
individuals in any one moment of existence is there for the
sake of the State, far more than the State for them, though
both positions arc true proportionally; that thu jus divinum

21 5

MATURITY

of the supreme magistracy is a tenet that has been dis¬
credited only by a gross perversion of its sense; lastly, that
states and kingdoms grow, and are not to be made; and that
in all political revolutions, whether for the weal or chastise¬
ment of a nation, the people are but the sprigs and boughs
in a forest, tossed against each other, or moved all in the
same direction, by an agency in which their own will has
the least share. As long as the principles of our gentry and
clergy are grounded in a false philosophy, which retains but
the name of logic, and has succeeded in rendering meta¬
physics a term of opprobrium, all the Sunday and national
schools in the world will not preclude schism and Jacobinism
in the middle and lower classes. The predominant philo¬
sophy is the keynote. . . .

conditions: i8i8

[Jny note on Coleridge s attitude to the State and its functions
would he incomplete without some reference to his work in support
of Sir Robert Reeds Bill for the shortenmg of the hours of labour
of children in cotton factories, i8l8. He wrote to Crabb Robin¬
son: Can you furnish me with any other instances in zvhich the
legislature has interfered with what is ironically called ''Free
Labour'', ue., dared to prohibit soul-murder on the part of the
rich and self-slaughter on the part of the poor! . , ,' He composed
two circulars in support of Reel's measure. They were privately
printed, with an introduction by Edmund Gosse, in 1913. The
following excerpts are taken from the first of them.

In answer to the four assertions of the opponents of the bill:

I. That legislative interference with free labour is improper".

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2. 1 hilt it is dangerous to begin a course of innovation tvithout
any certainty at what point it may stop.

3* h. hat the mcasutcs pi oposed are tnadeegtiate to remove the
evil and atc taliitluted to increase discontent by attracting
attention to the same and exciting hopes that are incom¬
patible with ‘the present state of society and the indispensable
conditiom of a commercial and manufacturing nation .

4- rhat the tetnedy should be left to the manufacturers them¬
selves., the humane spirit of this enlightened age., and the

consequent growth and increasing influence of enlightened
self-interest ':

Now, in rci-ily to the first ... we might fairly inquire on
what grounds is this impropriety presumed.? Certainly not
on past experience or the practice of the Jiritish Constitution;
the Statute Books arc (perhaps too much) crowded with
proofs to the contrary. The first institution by law of
Apprenticcshijis was an interference with free labour
The recent regulations of the labour to be required from the
apprentices arc still more unfavourable to the presumption
. . . Whether this is desirable or no, is not the question. Yet
wc live in age the events of which may pardonably suggest
the recollection that the states and countries which have
been most prosperous in trade and commerce, and at the
same time most remarkable for the industry, morality and
public s[,iuit of the inhabitants, as Ct'rca.t Britain, Holland,
the Hanseatic and other free towns of Clcrraany, have been
governed and regulated by a system of law and policy in
almost direct opposition to the so-called physiocratic prin¬
ciples of more modern jxilitical economists . . . But if this
objection to interference in free labour can derive no sanction
from the practice of the Tcgislaturc, still less can it appeal to

317

MATURITY

the principles and spirit of the British Constitution: and
pardon us, if we add, God forbid that it should! Only under
a military despotism, entitled to dispense with it at all times
for its own purposes, could such a principle be even partially
realized; and then only when it was the object of the govern¬
ment to reduce all classes to insignificance but those of
soldiers and agriculturists. The principle of nil constitutional
law is to make the claims of each as much as possible com¬
patible with the claims of all, as individuals, and with those
of the commonweal as a whole; and out of this adjustment,
the claims of the individual first become Rights. Every
Canal Bill proves that there is no species of property which
the legislature does not possess and exercise the right of con¬
trolling and limiting, as soon as the right of the individuals
is shown to be disproportionately injurious to the com¬
munity. And that the contra bonos mot'es^ the subversion of
morals, is deemed in our laws a public injury, it would be
superfluous to demonstrate.

But free Labour! — in what sense, not utterly sophistical,
can the labour of children, extorted from the want of their
parents, ‘their poverty but not their will consenting', be
called free} ... It is our duty to declare aloud, that if the
labour were indeed free, the employer would purchase, and
the labourer sell, what the former had no right to buy, and
the latter no right to dispose of: namely, the labourer's
health, life and well-being. These belong not to himself
dlone^ but to his friends, to his parents, to his King, to his
Country, and to God. If the labour were indeed free, the
contract would approach, on the one side, too near to
suicide, on the other to manslaughter. The objection there¬
fore would far better suit those who maintain the existence
of rights, self-originated and independent of duties, than

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HIS OWN TIMES

English subjects who pretend to no rights that do not refer
to some duty as their origin and true foundation.

To the second objection there needs no better reply than
that of Sir Robert Peel, the more than mere disinterested
originator of the Bill in question. What are these claims,
with an endless succession of which you threaten us, as the
consequence of conceding the present? If they are equally
just ... in God’s name let them be conceded! And if they
are not such, the passing of the present Bill can form no
■precedent. To this plain and manly argument we can add
nothing. . . .

This our reply to the second objection is equally valid as
applied to the third — namely, that the proposed plan is a
mere palliative calculated to excite discontent in the sufferers,
than to cftect any considerable diminution of the evil . . .
Who, wc would ask, arc to be the judges whether the pro¬
posed measures will or will not be a serious diminution of
the sufterings and evils complained of? . . . Surely, cither the
sufferers or their })arcnts and nearest relatives. But the latter
are among the most earnest petitioners for this Bill: and if
the tender age of the former precludes, or would throw
suspicion on, any petition from themselves, we have here too
as in the intrepid assertions of their superior health and
happiness, a safe appeal to common sense. Who does not
know that in a journey too long for the traveller’s strength,
it is the last few miles that torment him by fatigue and injure
him by exhaustion? . . . Substitute a child employed on tasks
the most opposite to all its natural instincts, were it only
from their improgressive and wearying uniformity — in a
heated stifling imjnire atmosphere, fevered by noise and
glare, both limbs and spirits outwearied — and that at the
tenth hour, he has still three, four, or five hours more to

MATURITY

look forward to. Will he^ will the poor little sufferer^ be
brought to believe that these hours are mere trifles — or the
privilege of going home not worth his thanks? Generalities
are apt to deceive us. Individualize the suftcrings which it
is the object of this Bill to remedy, follow up the detail in
some one case with a human sympathy, and the deception
vanishes.

But we hasten to the fourth and last objection, namely,
that the reform of all these grievances may be safely trusted
in these enlightened times to the good sense and humanity
of the masters themselves. This is, doubtless, highly flatter¬
ing to the present age, and still more so to that which is to
follow. It is, however, sufficient for us to have proved that
it remains a mere assertion . . . Nay, it is notorious that
within the last twenty years the time and quantum of the
labour extorted from the children has been increasing. The
growth of the sciences among the few, and the consequent
increase of the conveniences of life among the people at large,
are, however, far from necessarily implying an enlightened
age in that sense which alone applies to the case in question.
There are few who are not enlightened enough to under¬
stand their duties, few but must wink hard not to see the
path laid out for them. Something else is wanted here, the
warmth to impel, and not the knowledge to guide. The age
had been complimented with the epithets of enlightened,
humane, etc., years before the abolition of the Slave Trade.
And was that Trade abolished by the increasing humanity,
the enlightened self-interest, of the slave-owners? As far as
the parties immediately interested are concerned, dare our
Legislators even now trust to these influences? The Bills
passed and the one now before the House, concerning the
Slave Trade, are the best reply.

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Anxiously have we wished to avoid every invidious re¬
mark. But we should be treacherous to the measure of
which we are the earnest, though humble, advocates, if we
left wholly unnoticed the singular coincidence between the
present Bill and that for the abolition of the Slave Trade^
in the order and progress of the arguments adopted by the
opponents of each . . . We, in the present instance, are
appealing to a precedent instead of making one; and . . .
every argument of any force, which the opponents of the
Bill have urged against it, has been declared invalid, as
applied to the continuance of any system admitted to be cruel
and unjust, and solemnly negatived by the British Parlia¬
ment, in the glorious precedent of the Abolition of the
Slave Trade.

(d) POLITICAL ECONOMY

What solemn humbug this modern political economy is!
What is there true of the little that is true in their dogmatic
books, which is not a simple deduction from the moral and
religious credenda and agenda of any good man, and with
which we arc not all previously acquainted, and upon which
every man of common sense instinctively acted? I know
none. . . . [vi]

Is it not lamentable ~ is it not even marvellous — that the
monstrous practical sophism of Malthus should now have
gotten complete possession of the leading men of the King¬
dom! Such an essential lie in morals — such a practical lie
in fact as it is, too! 1 solemnly declare that I do not believe
that all the heresies and sects and factions which the ignorance
and the weakness and the wickedness of man have ever given

23 1

M AT U R II' Y

birth to, were altogether so disgraceful to man as a Christian,
a philosopher, a statesman, or citizen, as this abominable
tenet. It should be exposed by reasoning in the form of
[vii] ridicule, . . ,

The entire tendency of the modern or Malthusian political
economy is to denationalize, and to make the love of our
country a foolish superstition. It would dig up the charcoal
foundations of the temple of Ephesus to burn as fuel for a
[viii] steam-engine.

It is not uncommon for 100,000 operatives (mark this
word, for words in this sense are things) to be out of employ¬
ment at once in the cotton districts (this was in 1820), and,
thrown upon parochial relief, are dependent upon hard¬
hearted taskmasters for food. The Malthusian doctrine
would indeed afford a certain means of relief if this were not
a two-fold question. If, when you say to a man, 'You have
no claim upon me; you have your allotted part to perform
in the world, so have I. In a state of nature, indeed, had I
food, I should offer you a share from syiupathy, from
humanity; but in this advanced and artificial state of society,
I cannot afford you relief; you must starve. You came into
the world when it could not sustain you.' What would be
this man's answer? He would say, 'You disclaim all con¬
nection with me; I have no claims upon you? I can then have
no duties towards you., and this pistol shall put me in possession
of your wealth. You may leave a law behind you which
shall hang me, but what man who saw assured starvation
before him, ever feared hanging?' It is this accursed
practice of ever considering only what seems expedient for
the occasion, disjointed from all principle or enlarged systems
of action, of never listening to the true and unerring impulses
of our better nature, which has led the colder-hearted men

222

MTS OWN 1' I M E S

to the study of political economy, which has turned our
Parliament into a real committee of public safety. In it is all
power vested; and in a few years we shall either be governed
by an aristocracy, or, what is still more likely, by a con¬
temptible dcmocratical oligarchy of glib economists, com¬
pared to which the worst form of aristocracy would be a
blessing. _ _ [ix]

You talk about making this article cheaper by reducing
its price in the market from 8d. to 6d. But suppose, in so
doing, you have rendered your country weaker against a
foreign foe; suppose you have demoralized thousands of
your fellow-countrymen, and have sown discontent between
one class of society and another, your article is tolerably
dear, I take it, after all. Is not its real price enhanced to
every Christian and patriot a hundred-fold.? [x]

\_M.i 5 takefi idea.'; on the education of the ■people\:

(i) That it is dangerous

Our statesman, who survey with jealous dread all plans
for the education of the lower orders, may be thought to
proceed on the system of antagonist muscles; and in the
belief that the closer a nation shuts its eyes the wider it will
open its hands. Or do they act on the principle that the
status belli is the natural relation between the people and the
government, and that it is jirudcnt to secure the result of
the contest by gouging the adversary in the first instance.?
Alas! the policy of the maxim is on a level with its honesty.
The Philistines had put out the eyes of Samson, and thus

2 2 3

MATURITY

as they thought fitted him to drudge and grind . , . But his
darkness added to his fury without diminishing his strength,,
and the very pillars of the temple of oppression . . . 'he
tugged, he shook, till down they came' . . . The error might
be less unpardonable with a statesman of the continent; —
but with Englishmen, who have Ireland in one direction and
Scotland in another: the one in ignorance, sloth and re¬
bellion, — in the other general information, industry and

[xi] loyalty, — verily, it is not error merely, but infatuation.

[The] disposition to think that, as the peace of nations has
been disturbed by the diffusion of a false light, it may be
re-established by excluding the people from all knowledge
and all prospect of amelioration, [is common among the
upfer classes], O! never, never! Reflection and stirrings
of mind, with all their restlessness, and all the errors which
result from their imperfection, from the Too much, because
Too little, are come into the world. The powers that awaken
and foster the spirit of curiosity are to be found in every
village: books are in every hovel. The infant’s cries are
hushed with picture-books: and the cottager’s child sheds
his first bitter tears over pages, which render it impossible
for the man to be treated or governed as a child, liere, as
in so many other cases, the inconveniences that have arisen
from a thing’s having become too general, arc best removed

[xii] by making it universal.

(ii) That reading and writing are education

The other and contrary mistake proceeds from the
assumption that a national education will have been realized
whenever the people at large have been taught to read and
write. Now, among the many means to the desired end, this
is doubtless one, and not the least important. But neither

224.

HIS OWN TIMES

is it the most so. Much less can it be considered education,
which consists in educing the faculties and forming the
habits; the means varying according to the sphere in which
the individuals to be educated are likely to act and become
useful . . . Reading and writing we should place among the [xiii]
means of education instead of regarding it as the end. At no
time, and in no rank of life, can knowledge be made our
prime object without injury to the understanding, and cer¬
tain perversion of those moral institutions to the cultivation
of'which it must be instrumental and subservient, or, vapour
and nothingness as the human intellect is \when\ separated
from that better light which lifts and transpierces it, even
that which it has will be taken away.

The neglect of this truth is the worm at the root of certain
modern improvements in the modes of teaching, in com¬
parison with which we have been called on to despise our
great public schools,

‘In whose halls are hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old,’

and wc have been instructed how to metamorphose children
into prodigies; and prodigies with a vengeance have I known
thus produced, prodigies of self-conceit, shallowness, arro¬
gance and infidelity. Instead of storing the memory, during
the period when the memory is the predominant faculty,
with facts for the after-exercisc of the judgment, and instead
of awakening by the noblest models the fond and unmixed
love and admiration which is the natural and graceful temper
of youth, these nurslings of improved pedagogy are taught
to dispute and deride, to suspect all but their own and their
lecturer’s wisdom, and to hold nothing sacred from their
contempt but their own contemptible arrogance; boy-

F 22

MATURITY

graduates in all the technical and all the dirty passions and
[dv] impudence of anonymous criticism.

(hi) That the Monitorial system is adequate

I do not hesitate to declare, that whether I consider the
nature of the discipline adopted, or the plan of poisoning
the children’s minds with a sort of potential infidelity under
the 'liberal idea’ of teaching those points only of religious
faith in which all denominations agree, I cannot but de¬
nounce the so-called Lancasterian schools as pernicious
beyond all power of compensation by the new acquirement
of reading and writing. But take even Dr. Bell’s original
and unsophisticated plan, which I myself regard as an
especial gift of Providence to the human race; and suppose
this incomparable machine, this vast moral steam-engine,
to have been adopted and in free motion throughout the
Empire; it would yet appear to me a most dangerous de¬
lusion to rely on it as if this of itself formed an efficient
national education. We cannot, I repeat, honour the scheme
too highly as a prominent and necessary part of the great
process; but it will neither supersede, nor can it be sub¬
stituted for, sundry other measures that are at least equally
important. And these are such measures, too, as un¬
fortunately involve the necessity of sacrifices on the side of
the rich and powerful more costly and far more difficult than
the yearly subscription of a few pounds; —such measures
as demand more self-denial than the expenditure of time in
a committee or of eloquence in a public meeting.

Nay, let Dr. Bell’s philanthropic end have been realized,
and the proposed modicum of learning have become universal;
yet, convinced of its insufficiency to stem the strong currents
set in motion from an opposite point, I dare not assume

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HIS OWN TIMES

myself that it may ziot be driven backward by them and
become confluent with the evils which it was intended to

(iv) That Infant Schools ai^c pifcrabh to lottage-

home education'

Is it found that an infant-school child, who has been
bawling all day a column of the znultiplication-table, or a
verse from the Bible, grows up a more dutiful son or
daughter to its parents? Are domestic charities on the
increase amongst families under this system? In a great
town, in our present state of society, perhaps such schools
may be a justifiable expedient— a choice of the lesser evil;
but as for driving these establishments into the country
villages, and breaking up the cottage home education, I
think it one of the most miserable mistakes which the well-
intentioned people of the day have yet made. . . . [xvi]

I am greatly deceived if one preliminary to an efficient
education of the labouring classes be not the recurrence to
a more manly discipline of the intellect on the part of the
learned theniselves, in short, a thorough re-casting of the
moulds in which the minds of our gentry, the characters of
our future land-owners, magistrates and senators, are to
receive their shape and fashion. [xvii]

(/) T n K G R E AT REFORM BILL: I 8 J 2

I have heard but two arguments of any weight adduced
in favour of passing the Oreat Reform Bill, and they are in
substance these: (i) We will blow your brains out if you

227

MATURITY

don*t pass it; (2) We will drag you through a horse-pond if
[xviii] you don't pass it; and there is a good deal of force in both.

It is curious to trace the operation of the moral law of
polarity in the history of politics, religion, etc. When the
maximum of one tendency has been attained, there is no
gradual decrease, but a direct transition to its minimum,
till the opposite tendency has attained its maximum; and
then you see another corresponding revulsion. With the
Restoration came in all at once the mechanico-corpuscular
philosophy, which with the increase of manufactures, trade,
and arts, made everything in philosophy, religion, and
poetry objective; till, at length, attachment to mere external
worldliness and forms got to its maximum, when out burst
the French Revolution; and with it everything became
immediately subjective, without any object at all. The
Rights of Man, the Sovereignty of the People, were subject
and object both. We are now, I think, on the turning-point
again. This Reform [Bill] seems the ne flus ultra of that
tendency of the public mind which substitutes its own un¬
defined notions or passions for real objects and historical
actualities. There is not one of the ministers — except the
one or two revolutionists among them — who has even
given us a hint, throughout this long struggle, as to what
he really does believe will be the product of the Bill; what
sort of House of Commons it will make for the purpose of
governing this Empire soberly and safely. No; they have
actualized for a moment a wish, a fear, a passion, but not an
[xix] idea.

The present ministers have, in my judgment, been guilty
of two things pre-eminently wicked, sensu folitko^ in their
conduct upon this Reform Bill. First, they have endeavoured
to carry a fundamental change in the material and mode of

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HIS OWN TIMES

action of the Government of the country by so exciting the
passions, and playing upon the necessary ignorance of the
numerical majority of the nation, that all freedom and
utility of discussion, by competent heads, in the proper place
should be precluded. In doing this they have used, or
sanctioned the use of, arguments which may be applied with
equal or even greater force to the carrying of any measure
whatever, no matter how atrocious in its character or de¬
structive in its consequences. They have appealed directly
to’the argument of the greater number of voices, no matter
whether the uttcrers were drunk or sober, competent or not
competent; and they have done the utmost in their power
to rase out the sacred principle in politics of a representation
of interests, and to introduce the mad and barbarizing
scheme of a delegation of individuals.

Is the House of Commons to be reconstructed on the
principle of a representation of interests, or of a delegation
of men.? If on the former, we may perhaps see our way; if
on the latter, you can never, in reason, stop short of universal
suffrage; and in that case I am sure that women have as
good a right to vote as men.

The miserable tendency of all is to destroy our nationality,
which consists, in a principal degree, in our representative
government, and to convert it into a degrading delegation
of the populace. There is no unity for a people but in a
representation of national interests a delegation from the
passions or wishes of the individuals themselves is a rope
of sand.

Secondly, they have made the King the prime mover in
all this political wickedness: they have made the King tell
his people that they were deprived of their rights, and, by
direct and necessary implication, that they and their

Z29

MATURITY

ancestors for a century past had been slaves: they have
made the king vilify the memory of his own brother and
[xxiii] father.

Rights! There are no rights whatever without corre¬
sponding duties . . . When the government and the
aristocracy of this country had subordinated persons to
things^ and treated the one like the other^ the poor, with
[xxiv] some reason, learned to set up rights above duties. Look at
the history of the growth of our Constitution, and you will
see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a
ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right
inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parlia¬
mentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights
of Man. No! They were too wise for that. They took good
care to refer their claims to custom and prescription, and
boldly — sometimes very impudently — asserted them upon
traditionary and constitutional grounds. The Bill is bad
enough, God knows; but the arguments of its advocates,
and the manner of their advocacy, are a thousand times
[sxv] worse than the Bill itself, . .

I am afraid the Conservative party see but one half of the
truth. The mere extension of the franchise is not the evil; I
should be glad to see it greatly extended — there is no harm
in that, per se\ the mischief is that the franchise is nominally
extended, but to such classes, and in such a manner, that a
practical disfranchisement of all above, and a discontenting
[xxvi] of all below, a favoured class, are the unavoidable results.

I could not help smiling, in reading the report of Lord
Grey’s speech in the House of Lords, the other night, when
he asked Lord Wicklow whether he seriously believed that
he. Lord Grey, or any of the ministers, intended to subvert
the institutions of the country. Had I been in Lord Wick-

230

HIS OWN TIMES

low’s place, I should have been tempted to answer this
question something in the following way: h . , You have
destroyed the freedom of Parliament; you have done your
best to shut the door of the House of Commons to the pro¬
perty, the birth, the rank, the wisdom, of the people, and
have flung it open to their passions and their follies. You
have disfranchised the gentry, and the real patriotism of the
nation: you have agitated and exasperated the mob, and
thrown the balance of political power into the hands of that
class (the shop-keepers) which, in all countries and in all
ages, has been, is now, and ever will be, the least patriotic
and the least conservative of any. ..." [xx

Government is not founded on property, taken merely as
such, in the abstract; it is founded on unequal property; the
inequality is the essential term in the ])Osition. The phrases —
higher, middle, and lower class, with reference to this
point of representation — are delusive; no such divisions as
classes actually exist in society. There is an indissoluble
blending and interfusion of persons from top to bottom;
and no man can trace a line of separation through them, ex¬
cept such a confessedly unmeaning and unjustifiable line of
political empiricism as f^io householders. 1 cannot discover
a ray of principle in the Government plan — not a hint ot the
effect of the change upon the balance of the estates of the
realm — not a remark on the nature of the constitution of
England and the character of the property of so many
millions of its inhabitants. Half the wealth of this country
is purely artificial ■— existing only in and on the credit given
to it by the integrity and honesty of the nation. This pro¬
perty appears, in many instances, a heavy burden to the
numerical majority of the people, and they believe that it
causes all their distress: and they are now to have the

231

MATURITY

maintenance of this property committed to their good faith
[sxviii] — the lamb to the wolves!

In that imperfect state of society in which our system of
representation began, the interests of the country were pretty
[xxix] exactly commensurate with its municipal divisions . . , The
democracy of England . . . was where it ought to be, in the
[xix] corporations, the vestries, the joint-stock companies . . . The
counties, the towns, and the seaports, accurately enough
represented the only interests then existing; that is to say,
the landed, the shop-keeping or manufacturing, and the
mercantile. But for a century past, at least, this division has
become notoriously imperfect, some of the most vital
interests of the empire being now totally unconnected with
any English localities. Yet now, when the evil and the want
are known, we are to abandon the accommodations which
the necessity of the case had worked out for itself, and begin
again with a rigidly territorial plan of representation! . . .
Undoubtedly it is a great evil that there should be such an
evident discrepancy between the law and the practice of the
constitution in the matter of the representation. Such a
direct, yet clandestine, contravention of solemn resolutions
and established laws is immoral, and greatly injurious to the
cause of legal loyalty and general subordination in the minds
of the people. But then a statesman should consider that
these very contraventions of law in practice point out to him
the places in the body politic which need a remodelling of
the law. You acknowledge a certain necessity for indirect
representation in the present day, and that such representa¬
tion has been instinctively obtained by means contrary to
law; why then do you not approximate the useless law to
the useful practice, instead of abandoning both law and
[xxxi] practice for a completely new system of your own?

232

HIS OWN TIMES

It has never yet been seen, or clearly announced, that
democracy, as such, is no proper element in the constitution
of a State . . . Democracy is the healthful life-blood which
circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports
the system, but which ought never to appear externally, as
the mere blood itself. [xxxii]

‘When the people speak loudly and unanimously it is
from their being strongly impressed by the godhead or the
demon. Only exclude the (by no means extravagant) sup¬
position of a demoniac possession, and then Vox Populi, Vox
Dei.’ So thought Sir Philip Sydney, who, in the great
revolution of the Netherlands, considered the universal and
simultaneous adoption of the same principles as a proof of
the divine presence; and on that belief, and on that alone,
grounded his assurance of its successful Result. [xxxiii]

I never said that the vox populi was, of course, the vox dei.

It may be; but it may be, and with equal probability,
a priori, vox diaholi. That the voice of ten millions of men
calling for the same thing is a spirit, I believe; but whether
that be a spirit of Heaven or Hell, I can only know by trying
the thing called for by the prescript of reason and God’s
will ... I believe that the feeling of the multitude will, in [xxxiv]
most cases, be in favour of something good; but this it is
which I perceive, that they arc always under the domination
of some one feeling or view; whereas truth, and above all,
practical wisdom, must be the result of a wide comprehen¬
sion of the more and the less, the balance and the counter¬
balance. [xxxv]

MATURITY

(^) PERSONALITIES AND PROBLEMS

The French Revolution: third phase

Let it be remembered by both parties^ and indeed by
controversialists on all subjects, that every speculative error
which boasts a multitude of advocates, has its golden as well
as its dark side; that there is always some truth connected
[sxxvi] with it, . . .

\The system of the French Revolutionaries^ had its golden
side for the noblest minds; and I should act the part of a
coward if I disguised my convictions that the errors of the
aristocratic party were full as gross and far less excusable . , .
The most prudent as well as the most honest mode of de¬
fending the existing arrangements would have been to have
candidly admitted what could not with truth be denied, and
then to have shown that, though the things complained of
were evils, they were necessary evils; or, if they were remov¬
able, yet that the consequences of the heroic medicines
recommended by the revolutionists would be far more
dreadful than the disease. . , .

But instead of this, they precluded the possibility of being
listened to, even by the gentlest and most ingenuous among
the friends of the French Revolution, denying or attempting
to palliate facts that were equally notorious and unjustifiable,
and supplying the lack of brain by an overflow of galL
While they lamented with tragic outcries the injured
monarch and the exiled noble, they displayed the most
disgusting insensibility to the privations, sufferings, and
manifold oppressions of the great mass of the continental
population, and a blindness or callousness still more offensive
to the crimes and unutterable abominations of their oppres¬

sors

Thus, and by their infuriated panegyrics of the

234

« « «

HIS OWN TIMES

former state of France, they played into the hands of their
worst and most dangerous antagonists ... In order to oppose
Jacobinism they imitated it in its worst features . . . They
justified the corruptions of the state in the same spirit of
sophistry, by the same vague arguments of general reason^
and the same disregard of ancient ordinances and established
opinions, with which the state itself had been attacked by
the Jacobins. The wages of state-dependence were repre¬
sented as sacred as the property won by industry or derived
from a long line of ancestors.

It was indeed evident to thinking men that both parties
were playing the same ganae with different counters. If the
Jacobins ran wild with the rights of man, their antagonists
flew off as extravagantly from the sober good sense of our
forefathers, and idolized as mere an abstraction in the rights
of sovereigns. Nor was this confined to sovereigns. They
defended the exemptions and privileges of all privileged
orders on the presumption of their inalienable right to them,
however inexpedient they might have been found, as univer¬
sally and abstractly as if these privileges had been decreed
by the Supreme Wisdom, instead of being the off-spring of
chance or violence, or the inventions of human prudence. . . .

But alas! the panic of property had been struck in the
first instance for party purposes; and when it became general,
its propagators caught it themselves, and ended in believing
their own lie; even as our bulls in Borrowdale sometimes
run mad with the echo of their own bellowing. [xxxvii]

Edmund Burke: three stages of appreciation

1809: It is bad policy to represent a political system as
having no charm but for robbers and assassins, and no
natural origin but in the brains of fools or madmen, when

235

MATURITY

experience has proved that the great danger of the system
consists in the peculiar fascination it is calculated to exert
on noble and imaginative spirits; on all those who^ in the
amiable intoxication of youthful benevolencej are apt to
mistake their own best virtues and choicest powers for the
average qualities and attributes of the human character , . , I
cannot repel the conviction from my mind, that in part to
this error and in part to a certain inconsistency in his funda¬
mental principles, we are to attribute the small number of
converts made by Burke during his life-time.

Let me not be misunderstood. I do not mean that this
great man supported different principles at different eras of
his political life. On the contrary, no man was ever more
like himself! . . . The inconsistency to which I allude is of a
different kind: it is the want of congruity in the principles
appealed to in different parts of the same work, it is an ap¬
parent versatility of the principle with the occasion. If his
opponents are theorists, then everything is to be founded on
prudence, on mere calculation of expediency; and every man
is represented as acting according to the state of his own
immediate self-interest. Are his opponents calculators?
Then calculation itself is represented as a sort of crime.
God has given us feelings and we are to obey them! and the
most absurd prejudices become venerable, to which these
feelings have given consecration,

I have not forgotten that Burke himself defended these
half contradictions, on the pretext of balancing the too much
on the one side by a too much on the other. But never can I
believe but that the straight line must needs be the nearest;
and that where there is the most, and the most unalloyed
truth, there will be the greatest and most permanent power
of persuasion.

236

HIS OWN TIMES

But the fact was that BurkCy in his public character, found
himself, as it were, in a Noah's Ark, with a very few men
and a great many beasts! He felt how much his immediate
power was lessened by the very circumstance of his measure¬
less superiority to those about him: he acted, therefore, under
a perpetual system of compromise. . . . [xxxviii]

1817: Let the scholar , . . refer only to the speeches and
writings of Edmund Burke at the commencement of the
American War and compare them with his speeches and
writings at the commencement of the French Revolution.

He will find the principles exactly the same, and the deduc¬
tions the same; but the practical inferences almost opposite
in the one case from those drawn in the other; yet in both
equally legitimate and in both equally confirmed by the
results. Whence gained he the superiority of foresight? . . .

The satisfactory solution is, that Edmund Burke possessed
and had sedulously sharpened that eye which sees all things,
actions, and events, in relation to the laws that determine
their existence and circumscribe their possibility. He
referred habitually to principles. He was a scientific
statesman; and therefore a seer. Every principle contains
in itself the germs of a prophecy. . . . [xxxix]

1833: There is not one word that I would add or with¬
draw from this, scarcely one which I would substitute. I
can read Burke, and apply everything not merely temporary
to the present most fearful condition of our country. I can¬
not conceive a time or a state of things in which the writings
of Burke will not have the highest value. [xl]

Burke was indeed a great man. No one ever read history
so philosophically as he seems to have done. Yet, until he
could associate his general principles with some sordid
interest, panic of property, Jacobinism, etc. he was a mere

237

M ATU RITY

dinner-bell. Hence you will find so many half-truths in his
speeches and writings. Nevertheless, let us heartily acknow¬
ledge his transcendent greatness. He would have been more
influential if he had less surpassed his contemporaries, Fox
[xli] and Pitt, men of much inferior minds in all respects.

Cobhett

Have you seen Cobbett’s last number? ... he has given
great additional publicity to weighty truths, as, ex. gr., the
hollowness of commercial wealth; and from whatever dirty
corner or straw moppet the ventriloquist Truth causes her
words to proceed, I not only listen, but must bear witness
that it is Truth talking . . . One deep, most deep, impression
of melancholy did Cobbett’s letter to Lord Liverpool leave
on my mind, — the conviction that, wretch as he is, he is an
overmatch in intellect for those, in whose hands Providence,
in its retributive justice, seems to place the destinies of our
country and who yet rise into respectability when we com-
[xlii] pare them with their parliamentary opponents.

The Cobbett is assuredly a strong and battering produc¬
tion throughout, and in the best bad style of this political
rhinoceros, with his coat of armour of dry and wet mud, and
his one horn of brutal strength on the nose of his scorn and
[dm] hate; not to forget the flaying rasp of his tongue. . . .

Lord Liverpool

Lord Liverpool is the single stay of this Ministry, but he
is not a man of a directing mind. He cannot ride on the
whirlwind. He serves as the isthmus to connect one half of
the Cabinet with the other. He always gives you the common

sense of the matter, and in that it is that his strength in
[xliv] debate lies.

238

HIS OWN IHMES

The Duke of WcUmgton

I sometimes fear that the Dukle of Wellington is too much
disposed to imagine that he can govern a great nation by
word of commandj in the same way in which he governed a
highly disciplined army. He seems to be unaccustomed t03
and to despise, the inconsistencies, the weaknesses, the bursts
of heroism followed by prostration and cowardice, which
invariably characterize all popular efforts. He forgets that,
after all, it is from such efforts that all the great and noble
institutions of the world have come; and that, on the other
hand, the discipline and organization of armies have been
only like the flight of the cannon-ball, the object of which is
destruction. ' [xH]

The Anglican Church

The fatal error into which the peculiar character of the
English Reformation threw our Church, has borne bitter
fruit ever since, — I mean that of its clinging to court and
State, instead of cultivating the people. The Church ought
to be a mediator between the people and the Government,
between the ])oor and the rich. As it is, I fear the Church
has let the hearts of the common pcojffe be stolen from it.

See how differently the Church of Rome —wiser in its
generation — has always acted in this particular. For a long
time past the Church of lingland seems to me to have been
blighted with prudence, as it is called. I wish with all my
heart we had a little zealous imprudence. [xlvi]

The present prospects of the Church weigh heavily on
my soul. O! that the words of a statesman-like philosophy
could win their way through the ignorant zealotry and sordid
vulgarity of the leaders of the day! [xlvii]

There seems to me at present to be a curse upon the

239

MATURITY

English Church, and upon the governors of all institutions
connected with the orderly advancement of national piety
and knowledge; it is the curse of prudence, as they miscall it,
— in fact, of fear. Clergymen are now almost afraid to ex¬
plain in their pulpits the grounds of their being Protestants.
They are completely cowed by the vulgar harassings of the
press and of our Hectoring sciolists in Parliament. There
should be no party politics in the pulpit, to be sure; but every
[xlviii] church in England ought to resound with national politics ,..

The Church is the last relic of our nationality. Would'to
God that the bishops and the clergy in general could once
fully understand that the Christian Church and the national
Church are as little to be confounded as divided! I think the
fate of the Reform Bill, in itself, of comparatively minor
importance; the fate of the national Church occupies my
[xlix] mind with greater intensity.

The blessings of commerce and machinery

Commerce has enriched thousands, it has been the cause
of the spread of knowledge and of science, but has it added
one particle of happiness or of moral improvement? Has
it given us a truer insight into our duties, or tended to revive
and sustain in us the better feelings of our nature? No 1 No!
when I consider what the consequences have been, when I
consider that whole districts of men, who would otherwise
have slumbered on in comparatively happy ignorance, are
now little less than brutes in their lives, and something worse
than brutes in their instincts, I could almost wish that the
manufacturing districts were swallowed up as Sodom and
[1] Gomorrah.

The wonderful powers of machinery can, by multiplied
production, render the mere arte facta of life actually

240

cheaper . , . Now the arte facta are sought by the higher
classes of society in a proportion incalculably beyond that
in which they are sought by the lower classes; and therefore
it is that the vast increase of mechanical powers has not
cheapened life and pleasure to the poor as it has done to the
rich. In some respects, no doubt, it has done so, as in giving
cotton dresses to maid-servants, and penny gin to all. A
pretty benefit, truly! [li]

Poor-laws are the inevitable accompaniments of an ex¬
tensive commerce and a manufacturing system . . . The
poor-rates arc the consideration paid by, or on behalf of,
capitalists for having labour at demand. It is the price, and
nothing else. [lii]

Laissez-faire and Art

In this country there is no general reverence for the fine
arts; and the sordid spirit of a money-amassing philosophy
would meet any jn-oposition for the fostering of art, in a
genial and extended sense, with the commercial maxim —

Laissez-jairc. Paganini, indeed, will make a fortune, because
he can actually sell the tones of his fiddle at so much a
scrape; but Mozart himself might have languished in a
garret for anything that would have been done for him here. [Hii]

Sabbatarianism

I sincerely wish to preserve a decent quiet on Sunday, I
would prohibit compulsory labour, and put down operas,
theatres, etc., for this plain reason — that if the rich be
allowed to play the poor will be forced, or, what comes to
the same thing, will be induced, to work. I am not for a
Paris Sunday. But to stop coaches, and let the gentleman’s
carriage run, is monstrous, [hv]

241

M A T U R 1Y

Votes for women

Although it may be allowed to be contrary to decorum
that women should legislate; yet there can be no reason why
women should not choose their representatives to legislate;
and if it be said that they are merged in their husbands, let
it be allowed where the wife has no separate property but
where she has a distinct taxable estate, in which her husband
has no interest, what right can her husband have to choose
for her the person whose vote may affect her separate
'Iv] interest?

Philanthropists

I have never known a trader in philanthropy who was
not wrong in heart somewhere or other. Individuals so
distinguished are usually unhappy in their himily relations —
men not benevolent or beneficent to individuals, but almost
hostile to them, yet lavishing money and labour and time on
>i] the race, the abstract notion.

History

I have read all the famous histories, and, I believe, some
history of every country and nation that is, or ever existed;
but I never did so for the story itself as a story. The only
thing interesting to me was the principles to be evolved from,
and illustrated by, the facts. After I had gotten my prin¬
ciples, I pretty generally left the facts to take care of them-
Ivii] selves.

The United States of America

Can there ever be any thorough national fusion of the
Northern and Southern States? I think not. In fact, the
Union will be shaken almost to dislocation whenever a very

24.2

HIS OWN TIMES

serious question between the States arises. The American
Union has no centre^ and it is impossible now to make one. [Iviii]

hack of reverence

There is now no reverence for anything; and the reason is^
that men possess concej^tions only, and all their knowledge
is conceptional only. Now, as to conceive is a work of the
mere understanding, and as all that can be conceived may
be comprehended, it is impossible that a man should
reVerence that, to which he must always feel something in
himself superior. [lix]

‘ r

243

The following editions of Coleridge’s Works have been used in pre¬
paring this selection. The page references are for these editions only.
In the absence of an accessible standard edition of Coleridge ’s Prose
Works, it has seemed most convenient to use those editions of the
several works which are least difficult to obtain.

The Friend^ a series of essays: Bohn’s Standard Library, 1865.
Originally written and printed for subscribers, 1809-10.
Revised and published in 2 vok, 1818. An excellently
arranged edition of this rambling work was published by
H. N. Coleridge, in 2 vols., London 1863.

Lay Sermons: I. The Statesman’s Manual, ii. Blessed are ye that sow
beside all waters: edited with the author’s last corrections and
notes, by Derwent Coleridge, m.a., 3rd edition, London,
1852. Originally published respectively in the years 1816 and
18x7, these ‘tracts for the times’ have been reprinted fairly
frequently, generally in conjunction with one or other of
Coleridge’s longer works. For example, they were published
with a third edition of his ‘Church and State’, and in 1866
with a reprint of the ‘Biographia Literaria’. The separate
edition by Derwent Coleridge in 1852 seems the best library
edition.

Biographia Literaria: Everyman Edition (xi). Originally published in
1817, and many times reprinted. The Everyman Edition
contains ‘Satyrane’s Letters’ but not the biographical letters of
some earlier editions. These can be conveniently studied in
the early pages of E. H. Coleridge’s edition of the Letters,
1895,

247

BIBLIOGRAPHY

On the Constitution of the Church a 7 id State, according to the Idea of
each\ 2nd edition, 1830. Published 1830, the first edition is
very rare.

Essays on His Own Times: forming a second series of the Friend,
edited by His Daughter, London, 1850, 3 vols.

Notes, Theological, Political and Miscellaneous: Edited by Derwent
Coleridge, m.a., London, 1853. This edition of Coleridge’s
notes has been used because it contains the ‘Essay on Faith’
which is not included with the Oxford edition of the ‘Table
Talk’ (see below), as well as the ‘Omniana’ and all the
published marginalia which seems valuable for Coleridge’s
political thought.

Two Addresses on Sir Robert PeeTs Bill (April 1818): with an
introduction by Edmund Gosse, c.B. Privately printed, 1913.
These addresses are also printed at the end of Lucy Seton-
Watson’s ‘Coleridge at Highgate’.

The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with a note
on Coleridge by Coventry Patmore: Oxford University Press,
1917. A very useful edition, since it contains H. N. Coleridge’s
original preface to the Table Talk, 1835, together with
additional Omniana from Allsop’s ‘Letters, conversations, and
recollections of S.T.C.’ (1836). It omits, however, the ‘Essay
on Faith’.

The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by E. H. Coleridge,
2 vols., London, 1895.

Coleridge^s Poems^ edited by E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols,, Oxford University
Press, 1912.

Aids to Reflection^ Bohn’s Standard Library, 1884. First published
1825, as Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly
Character.

Anima Poetae, ed. E. H. Coleridge, Hcinemann, 1895.

248

R E E E R E N C E S

[iii]

[iv]

[v]

[viJ

[viij

[viiij

[ix]

[xi]

[xii]
[xiii]

[xiv]

[xv]

[xvi]
[xviij
[xviiij
[xix]

[xxij

[xxii]

[xxiii]

I N 1 ' R O D U C T I O N

Keith Foiling, Sketches in Nineteenth Century Biography^
Loudon, 1930, pp. 87-105.

Quoted by J. H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher^
London, 1930, p. 270.

Ibid, Vol. II, p. 757.

Text, pp. 143-4.

Text, pp. 72-3.

'['ext, p. 242
'Fext, p. 220-

'FhonKis Carlyle, Life of Sterling, Cliaptcr viii.

John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions, Essay on
Benthain.

Text, p. 215.

Muirhead, op. cit., p. 194.

'Text, pp. 161-4.

I'ext, p. I 54.

4 'ext, p. 209.

Text, p. 141.

Carlyle, op. cit.

'^Fext, pp. 168-76.

Text, pp. 239-240.

Text, p. 33.

Text, p. 32-
I'ext, p. 47.

Stephen Potter, Coleridge and S.T.C., London, 1935;
pp. 28-9.

"Fext, p. 236-

251

REFERENCES

[xjciv] Textjp. 34.

[xxv] Text, pp. 51, 54.

[xxvi] Text, p. 50 -

[xxvii] Biographia hiteraria (Everyman Ed.), p. 107.
[xxviii] Muirhcad, op. cit., pp. 54“6.

[xxix] Text, p. 141.

[xxx] Text, pp. 57 - 77 ■

[xxxi] Text, pp. 125-27.

[xxxii] Text, p. 142.

[xxxiii] Text, pp. 41-2.

[xxxiv] Text, p. 39.

[xxxv] Text, p. 40.

[xxxvi] Text, p. 41.

[xxxvii] Text, p. 42.

[xxxviii] Text, pp. 42-3.

[xxxix] Text, p. 42.

[xl] Text, p. 237

TEXT

PART ONE

I RELIGION

[i] Letters, Vol. I, p. 64: March 12th, 1794.

[ii] Ibid, pp. 68-9: March 30th, 1794.

[iii] Ibid, pp. 198-202; Dec. 17th, 1796.

[iv] Poems, Vol. I, pp. 113-14, lines 105-13 and

127-31:?. 124, lines 395-401.

252

R 1 ,^' E R K N C K S

2 1 ^ H I L O S O P H Y

[i] LciterSj VoL I, p. 169: Sept. 2411)5 1796.

[ii] Vol. I, pp. 27-8: 1795.

[iiij Ibid, p. 139: 1796.

[i]

[ii]
[iiij

[iv]

[vi]

[vii]
[viii]

[ix]

[xij

[xil]

[xiii]

[xivj

[XV]

[xvi]

[xviij

[xviiij

[xix]

[XX]

[xxij

[xxii]

3 PC) lorries

The Friend, Section I, Ess:ijr VI^ p. 140: 1809-10.
Poems, Vol. I, pp. 10-II5 lines 21-4O: ?I789.
Biographia Liter aria, p. 94: 1817.

The Friend, Section ^ Essay VI, pp, 140-1; 1809-10.
Poems, Vol. I, pp. 68-9: 1795.

Letters^ Vol. I, p. 72: July bth, 1794.

Ibid, p. 79: July S5lh, 1794.

Ibid, pp. 81-2: Sept. 18th, 17945 p. 90; Oct. 21st,,
1794,

Ibid, pp. 72-4: July 6th, 1794.

Ibid, pp. 104-5: Nov. 6th, 1794.

Biographia Llteraria^ pp. 88-93: 1817.

Essays, Vol. 1 , p. 7.

Ibid, p. 12.

Ibid, pp. 24-5.

Ibid, pp. 16-17.

Ibid, pp, 7-8.

Ibid, pp. 14-15.

Ibid, p, 21.

Ibid, pp. 102-5.

Ibid, pp. 29-30.

Ibid, pp. 21-4.

Ibid, pp. 15“ 16.

OWN TIMES

Essays, Vol. I, pp. 107-19.

25.1

REFERENCES

PART 1 ’ W O

I RELIGION

Biographia Literaria^ pp. 103-4: 1817.
Letters^ Vol. I, p. 228: Oct. i6th5 1797.
Ibid, p. 285: April 8tli, 1799.

Ibid, p. 247: May 14th, 1798.

Ibid, pp. 239-45: April, 1798.

Ibid, pp. 414-15: Dec. 7th, 1802.

Ibid, p. 415: Dec. 7th, 1802.

2 PHILOSOPHY

Biographia Literaria^ p. 71: 1817.

Ibid, pp. 107-8: 1817.

Letters^ Vol. II, pp. 735-6: April 8th, 1825.
Ibid, Vol. I, pp. 285-6: April 8th, 1799.

Ibid, pp. 348-50: March i6th, 1801.

Ibid, p. 358: July 22nd, 1801.

Ibid, p. 350: March i6th, 1801.

Ibid, p. 351: March 23rd, 1801.

Ibid, p. 428: Aug. 7th, 1803.

Ibid, pp. 351-2; March 23rd, 1801.

3 POLITICS

Essays, Vol. II, pp. 551-2: Morning Post, 1802
Letters, Vol. I, pp. 239-45: April, 1798.

Ibid, p. 239; April, 1798.

Poems, Vol. I, pp. 246-7, stanzas iv and v: 1798
Letters^ Vol I, pp. 239-40: April, 1798.

Poems, Vol. I, pp. 261-2,11008 160-71: 1798.
Essays^ Vol. 11, pp. 542-52: Morning Post^ 1802

254

R F F FENCES

[viii] Ibid, Vol. p. 224; Morning Post ^ 1801.

[ix] Ibid, Vol. II5 pp. 33 ^“^* Morning Post^ ^ 799 *

[x] Ibid, p. 5 ^^-' Morning Post^ 1802.

[xi] Ibid, VoL l^pp- I85-6: Morning Posty 1799.
[xiij Ibid, p. 273; Morning Post^ 1800,

4 HIS OWN TIMES

[i] Essays, Vol. II, pp. 649-50: The Courier, 1809.

[ii] Ibid, Vol. Ill, pp. 347-8: Morning Posty 1799.
[iiij Ibid, p. 345: Morning Post^ 1799-

[iv] Ibid, VoJ. II, pp. 342-3: Morning Post^ 099 -

[v] Ibid, p. 337: Morning Post^ 099 -

[vi] Ibid, pp. 3I3--I9: Morning Post^ 1800.

[vii] Ibid, pp. 406-8: Morning l^osty 1800.

[viii] Ibid, Vol. 1, pp. 200-2: Morning Post^ 1800.

[ix] Ibid, p. 204: Morning Post^ 1800.

[x] Ibid, p. 221: Morning Post^ 1800.

[xi] Ibid, pp. 222-3; Morning Posty 1800.

[xii] Ibid, pp. 271-2: Morning Posty 1800.

[xiiij Ibid, pp. 273-4: Morniing Posty 1800.

[xivj PoemSy Vol. I, p. 258, lines 49-63: 1798.

[xvj Essays, Vol. II, pp. 320-9: Morning Posty 1800-

[xvi] Ibid, p. 594; The Couriery 1809.

[xvii] Ibid, pp. 647-8: The Courier, 1809.

[xviiij Ibid, pp. 657-8: The Couriery 1809.

[xix] PoemSy Vol. I, pp. 2II-I2, lines 1-24: 1798.

[xx] Ibid, pp. 319-23, stanzas i, viii, xii-xv: 1799.

[xxi] Ibid, pp. 341-4, lines 7-20, 25-30, 87-100: 1800.

255

REFERENCES

PART THREE

I RELIGION

[i] Notes (Omniana), pp. 380-2.

[ii] Ibid, pp. 384-95.

[iii] 1st Lay Sermoit^ App. B, pp. 64-70: 1816.

2 PHILOSOPHY

[i] 1 st Lay Sermon^ pp. 15-16.

[ii] Church and State^ p. 34: 1830.

[iii] 1 st Lay Sermon^ pp. 9-10.

[iv] Ibid, p. 13.

[v] 2 nd Lay Sermon^ pp. 133-4: 1817.

[vi] Ibid, pp. 193-4.

[vii] 1 st Lay Sermon^ p. 25.

[viii] Ibid, p. 26.

[ix] Ibid, pp- 22-3.

[x] The Friend, Introductory Essays 16, p. 70: 1809-10.

[xi] Ibid, pp. 73-4.

[xii] Ibid, Section I (Political Knowledge), Essay X, p. 168.

[xiii] Ibid, Introductory Essays 15, p. 66.

[xiv] Ibid, p. 68.

[xv] Ibid, Introductory Essays 16, p. 69.

[xvi] Ibid, 1st Landing-Place, Essay 4, p, 94,

[xvii] Church and State^ pp. 78-82.

[xviii] 1 st Lay Sermon^ p. 42.

[xix] Church and State^ p, 82.

[xx] 2 nd Lay Sermon^ pp. 190-3.

[xxi] Ibid, p. 47.

[xxii] 1 st Lay Sermon^ App. E, pp. I lO-l I.

[xxiii] Ibid, App. E, pp. i lo-i i.

256

[xxivj

[xxvj

[xxvij

[xxvii]

[xxviiij

[xxix]

[xxx]

[xxxij

[xxxiij

[xxxiiij

[xxxivj

[xxxv]

[xxxvi]

PP. 88-9.

Pp. 89--90.

[xxxviiij

[xxxix]

[xlj

[xliij

[xliiij

[xlivj

[xlv]

[xlvij

[xlviij

[xiix]

[li]

R K I*' U' ]> s, ,

* ^ k 1^: Q 3

Church and Siat(\ Rp, pp,

1st iucy dn'nmn^ App.
f bitl^ Apf>. 1 r p[). S I
Church and dti^tc, pp. -
lR La\^ dn'nrm^ App.

Ibid, Ap|>. p.

Ibid, App. I'!, pp- J I ,p I
Ibid, App, lA VV’ ^ ^ /

Ibid, Ap(). Ip P- I **

T/u'J<)imirn-^Unu I (!»„!,•,!,,,( knowledge),Essay

ist !,ay Snmnn, App. h]^ 120-2- ^

I a hit' I id C p- ^ •• I 22 h 183

Ibid, p. ic)i : July i H

n)id, [). K t: A pi il *;* -f Ip \ h

Ibid, pp. iHH 0 : juh Hp2.

Ibid, [), ill p 1 )rr, i SRp j ^ ^ j'_

I.i/ I^ay i) (f ,\pp. Ip pp. ( 34 —^

T“ia 'I'M, ji. ().| ; :\l,,v ,830.

Ibid, p. It,',;: Auj'., .■.jib, iHj,.

i.v/ Lt/y bVrww//, App. 1 >^ pp_ (>^-4.

I ahft' l(dl\ p» 1 I S ; July t/ul, i 8 .jo.

Ibid, pp, IIS' Ar. jimr istli,\ 830 -
Ibid, pp. ppi p: inubuf'ci.

Church anri p. pi.

It/h/r ///App. ipp: Au?y iitlp 1832 .

IS/ Lay dermnn^ App. pp. 71 - 2 .

[bid, A[)p, H, pp, 8p
Ibid, Ap[). lA pp, 8(1 I.

115,

[ij
iii

8 IM ) k 1 'p f CS

La'S ays, Vcd. 1 I 1 , pp, <)2 (r p, y 77 //^ Courier^ i8i i.
Ihe Friend^'Lvrxanx 1 (l\)litiy;ij ICuowlcdgc), p. 103,
Ibid, (Politioul K ru>\\drd(yj, lyssJiy 2^ p- 107.

't i

A /

R E F E R E N C li: S

[iv] Essays^ VoL III, pp. 930-2: The Courier^ 1811.

[v] The Ffiendy Section I (Political Knowledge), Essay 4^
pp. 118-27.

[vi] Essays^ Vol. Ill, pp. 692-3: The Courier^ 1814.

[vii] Table pp. 227-8: April lOth, 1833.

[viii] E^saysy Vol. Ill, pp. 693-4: The 1814.

[ix] Ibid, pp. 687-8: The Courier^ 1814,

[x] The Friend, Section I (Political Knowledge), Essay 4, p. 127.

[xi] N'oteSj p. 190 (undated).

[xii] Ibid, p. 307, 1812.

[xiii] Ibid, p. 346, i8og-i6.

[xiv] Ibid, pp. 349-54* 1809-16.

[xv] Ibid, pp. 373-7: 1809-16.

[xvi] Essays^ Vol. II, pp. 652-6: The Courier, 1809.

[xvii] Table pp. 152-3: Aug. 20th, 1831.

[xviii] Ibid, p. 153: Aug. 20th, 1831.

[xix] Ibid, p. 173: April 4th, 1832.

[xx] Jids to Reflectlo 7 i\ Aphorism II: 1825.

[xxi] Auima Foetae^^. 142: 1805.

[xxii] Table Talk, pp. 228-30: Aug. I4tli, 1833.

[xxiiij Church and State^ pp. 70-1.

[xxiv] Ibid, p. 5.

[xxv] Ibid, pp. 6-17.

[xxvi] The Frmtd, Section I (Political Knowledge^), Flssay 2,
pp. 108-9.

[xxvii] Church and State, pp. 7-17.

[xxviii] Table Talk, p. 92: May iith, 1830.

[xxix] 2 nd Lay Sermon^ pp. 171-2.

[xxx] Church and State, pp. 105-6.

[xxxi] 1st Lay Sermon^ -^PP- P- 66.

[xxxii] Church and State, pp. 139-40.

[xxxiii] Table Talk, pp. 163-4: Dec. i8th, 1831.

[xxxiv] The Friend, Section I (Political Knowledge), Essay 14,
PP- 193-4-

258

[xxxv] Notes (Omniana), pp. 391-2.

[xxxvi] Letter to Ld. Liverpool: Yonge’s Life of Liverpool
Vol. II, pp. 300-7: and Notes^ p. 191.

[xxxvii] Essaysy Vol. II, pp. 668-9; The Courier^ 1810.

[xxxviiij Table Talk, p. 104: May 28th, 1830.

[xxxix] Poems^ Vol. I, pp. 315-16, lines 28-39: 1799.

[xl] Ibid, pp. 262-3, lines 176-97: 1798.

[xli] Table Talk, p. 180: May 3rd, 1832.

[xlii] Ibid, pp. 261-2: Aug. 14th, 1833.

[xliii] The Friend, Section [ (Political Knowledge), Essay 13,
pp. 189-90.

[xliv] Ibid, lYsay 14, pp, 192-3.

[xlv] Ibid, Essay 13, pp. 187-9.

[xlvi] Ibid, Essay 14, pp. 195-6.

[xlvii] Quoted by J. H. Muirhead, Coleridge as a Philosopher^

pp. 179-80: c. 1820.

[xlviii] Poems, Vol. I, pp. 237-40, lines 21-3 and 28-51: 1798.
[xlix] Ibid, pp. 259-60, lines 88-96, 103-16, and 123-9: 1798.
[ 1 ] Table Talk, p. 137: June 25th, 1831.

[li] ind Lay Sermon^ pp. 249-52.

[lii] Table Talk, p. 190; July 24th, 1832.

[liii] Ibid, p. 126: Sept. 19th, 1830.

[liv] Ibid, p, 97: May 18th, 1830.

[Iv] Ibid, p. 165: Dec. 28th, 1831.

[Ivij Notes (C)inniana), pp. 299-300: 1812.

[Ivii] Church and Ftate^ pp. 20-33.

[Iviii] Ibid, pp, 38-9.

[lix] Ibid,pp. 44-5.

[lx] Ibid, pp. 46-7.

[Ixi] Table Talk, p. 219: March 31st, 1833.

[Ixii] Church and State, pp. 67-8.

[Ixiii] Ibid, pp. 48-57.

[Ixiv] Ibid, pp. 85-7.

[Ixv] Ibid, pp. 58-61.

259

REFERENCES

[Ixvi]

Church and State^ pp. 61-3.

[Ixvii]

Ibid, pp.

90-1.

[Ixviii]

Ibid, pp.

63-6.

[Ixix]

Ibid, pp.

84-5-

[Ixx]

Ibid, pp.

[Ixxi]

Ibid, pp.

106-14.

[Ixxii]

Ibid, pp.

119-22.

[Ixxiii]

Ibid, pp.

122-5.

[Ixxiv]

Ibid, pp.

127-8.

[Ixxv]

Ibid, p.

194.

4 HIS OWN TIMES

[i]

2 nd Lay Sermon^ pp. 129-33.

[ii]

Ibid, pp. 134-5 and 139-40.

[iii]

Ibid, p. 171.

[iv]

Ibid, p. 173.

[v]

Pp. 190-216, from 27 id Lay Scrmoyi^ condensed.

[Vi]

Table Talk^^. 2l6: March 17th, 1833.

[vii]

Ibid, p. 197: Aug. I2th, 1832.

[viii]

Ibid, p. 307: June 2nd, 1834; and p. 310:

June :

[ix]

Ibid, p. 433 (undated).

Ibid, pp. 216-17; March 17th, 1833.

[xi]

Notes (Omniana), pp. 298-9: 1812.

[xii]

1 st Lay Sermon^ pp. 43-4.

[xiii]

Ibid, p. 44.

[xiv]

Essays^ Vol. Ill, pp. 701-3: The Courier^

1814.

[xv]

1st Lay Ser-mon^ pp. 45~6.

[xvi]

Table Talk, p. 19O; July 24th, 1832.

[xvii]

1 st Lay Sermony p. 47.

[xviii]

Table Talky p. 169: May 20th, 1832.

[xix]

Ibid, pp. 173-4; April 5th, 1832.

[xx]

Ibid,p. i6i:Nov. 20th, 1831.

[xxi]

Ibid, p. 135; Nov. 2ist, 1830.

260

3rd, 1834.

R 1 ^: F E R E N C E S

[xxii] Table Talk^^. 138; June 25th, 1831.

[xxiii] Ibid, pp. 161-2: Nov. 20111, 1831.

[xxiv] Ibid, p. 164: Dee, i8th, 1831.

[xxv] Ibid, pp. 161-2: Nov. 20th, 1831.

[xxvi] Ibid, p. 168: Marcli 3rd, 1832.

[xxvii] Ibid, pp. 167-8: 241]), 1832.

[xxviii] Ibid, p. 136: MarcJi 20th, 1831.

[xxix] Ibid, p, 138: June 25th, 1831.

[xxx] Ibid, p. i8i: May 21st, 1832.

[xxxi] Ibid, pp. 138-9: June 25th, 1831.

[xxxii] Ibid, p. 126: Sept. 19th, 1830.

[xxxiii] Church and State, p. 46.

[xxxiv] Table p. 178: April 29th, 1832.

[xxxv] Ibid, p. 162: Nov. 20th, 1831.

[xxxvi] The Friend, Section I (Political Knowledge), Essay 6,
p. 143.

[xxxvii] Ibid, Elssay 5, pp. 134-8.

[xxxviii] Ibid, Essay 4, pp. 116-17.

[xxxix] Btographia hitcrart a, p. 97.

[xl] Table Talk, p. 470 (undated: probably after 1830).

[xli] Ibid, p. 225: April 8tli, 1833.

[xlii] Ibid, p. 413: Dec. X3tli, 1819.

[xliiij Ibid, pp. 429-30: Oct. nth, 1820.

[xliv] Ibid, p. 45: April 27th, 1823.

[xlv] Ibid, p. 119: July 4th, 1830.

[xlvi] Ibid, p. 125: Sept, 8th, 1830.

[xlvii] Ibid, p. 205, Jan. 20th, 1833.

[xlviiij Ibid, p, 214: March 9th, 1833.

[xlix] Ibid, p. 167: Feb. 22nd, 1832.

[ 1 ] Ibid, pp. 433-4 (undated).

[li] Ibid, p. 234; May 4th, 1833.

[Hi] Ibid, pp. 45-6: April 27th, 1823.

[liiij Ibid, pp. 140-1: July 7th, 1831.

[liv] Ibid, p. 303: May 19th, 1834.

261

REFERENCES

[Iv]

Table Talkj

p. 265

■

16th, 1833.

[Ivi]

Ibid, p.

261

: Aug.

14th,

1833-

[Ivii]

Ibid, p.

186

: July

13th, I

832.

[Iviii]

Ibid, p.

203

Jan. 4th, 1833.

[lix]

Ibid, p.

241

May

15th, ]

'833-

262

SOME INTERPRETERS OF COLERIDGE
AS A POLITICAL THINKER

Probably the best study of Coleridge’s political thought is the
essay which John Stuart Mill wrote for the Westminster Review
in 1840. It is to be found in his Dissertations arid Discussions.
He has also a fine tribute to Coleridge in the first pages of his essay
on Bcnthani (1838). There are some interesting indications of the
influence of Coleridge on Mill’s generation in the latter’s Juto-
hiography (an excellent edition of which is in ‘The World’s Classics’
Library).

Of the numerous members of the Coleridge family who edited the
works of their famous forefatlier, three are worthy of attention by
the student of his political thought. His daughter Sara contributed
some interesting notes on the origins and progress of the poet’s opinions
in the introduction to her threewolume edition of his Essays on His
Own Times (1850). Coleridge’s nephew, H. N. Coleridge, Sara’s
husband, provided an apologia for his uncle in his preface to the 1853
edition of the Tah/e Talk., which is reprinted in the Oxford edition
(see bibliography). Ernest Hartley Coleridge, to whom we owe the
standard editions of the Letters and the Poems, collected a mass of
notes for a life of S. T\ C., but died leaving only a few scattered
sections of unrevised MS. A selection from these was contributed
by the Rcw. CL FI. B. Coleridge to a volume, published at the
hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death in 1934 {Coleridge: studies
by several hands . . . Edited by Edmund Blunden and Earl Leslie
Griggs, London, 1934). This selection contains some interesting
details of the young Coleridge’s 'Watchman Tour’. The same volume
includes an essay on ‘lEhe Political Thought of Coleridge’ by Harold
Beeley. This is perhaps the best study of its subject for the general
reader since Mill’s essay.

More especially for students are the two chapters in Dr. Alfred

265

INTERPRETERS OF COLERIDGE

Cobban’s Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century
(London, 1929). Dr. Cobban, however, has little patience with
Coleridge’s metaphysics. The chapter on Coleridge’s political thought
in Professor Muirhead’s Colerddge as Rhilosophcr (London, 1930),
shows convincingly how absolutely integral to Coleridge’s political
thought his metaphysics arc. An interesting attempt to place Coleridge
in the history of the Tory party is to be found in Keith Feiling’s
Sketches in Nineteenth Century Biography (London, 1930).

Of more general studies of Coleridge, Stephen Potter’s Coleridge
and S. T. C. is particularly valuable for the Pantisocracy period: but
the whole book is of fascinating interest for all who are attracted by
the mystery of Coleridge’s personality.

266

INDEX

Agricultural Distress,

America and Americans, Z14, Z42
Aristocracy: appeal to, 1^2-3
duties of, 20()

Aristotle, 104, 107

Atomic view of society, 21 |.~i c;

Augustine, St., r6, 26

Bacon, 95, 96
Barclay, 48
Beethoven, 2-j.

Bell, Dr. Andrew, 226
Benevolence, 34, 39
BENddTAM,’ 14,‘17, 128
Berkeley, 48, 96
Bill of Kigilts, 137

BODY POLSne, as a metaphor,
139-40; conditions of licalth of,
173 If.

Bolingbroke,, i 1

BONAPARd'K, NAPOId'lON, 58,
60-3, 65, 74; crimes of, 75“6, 9],
150

Book-societies, 41

BURKl'l, r I, 14, 33, 25, 26, 44, / r,

72, 80, 23 3-8

Caesar, Jacobinism of, 56
Calvin, 40
Canning, ri

Carlyle, "Phomas, 12, r6
Cartwright, Major J(dm, rzo-r, 215
Catherine II, 109
Child-labour, 2x6 IF.

CHURCH, the National, 22, 164-8;
Idea of, t 6; functions of, 168-75;
present condition of, 16-17, 239-
40; relation to Christian Church,
164; as the only pure democracy,
15 ’ 054

Class-divisions, 41-2, 231

CLERISY, Idle, 16, 96, 166,
Cobbett, II, 12, 238
COFiERIDGE, David Hartley, 17,
33; Rev. George, 19; Rev. John,
17

— SAMUEL TAYLOR, birth
and early years, 17-18; response to
French Revolution, 34-5; his
peculiar Radicalism, 19, 25, 37-
44; Pantisocracy, 19, 35-6; youth¬
ful propaganda, 19-20, 25, 38-44;
early religious views, 17-26, 31-33;
disillusion with French Revolution
19-20, 51-6; disillusion with Uni-
tarianism, 25, 47-8; rejection of
the ‘Mechanical Philosophy,’ 20-1,
48-50; German influences, 20-1,
49; powers as an observer of con¬
temporary events (Morning Post
and Courier), 22-3, 58-80; his
emerging Idealism, 22-3; Idealism
of his last years, 14-17, 21-2;
peculiar character of his Idealism,

15- 16, 21-3; his Anglicanism,

16- 17; Eis ‘Toryism’, 11-13, 15,
230; unity of his thought, 23-26;
influence, 12; (for particular
questions, sec Contents Table);
Sara, 22

COMMERCE, prosperity of during
war, 185; dubious blessings of,
189-90, 192, 238, 240-1; period¬
ical fluctuations of, 187-8; over¬
balance of spirit of, 66-7, 72, 74,
194 ff.; infection of landed gentry
^ by, 203-7

Commonwealth, Period of, 180
CONCEPTION, 133, 243
Conciones ad Populum, 25, 38
Condillac, 100, 213

INDEX

CONSCIENCE, 92
Conservative Party, 12, 230
Constitution, a, 137; die Britisli,
155-82, 217-18

Constitution of Church and State, 22,
124

Contract, original social, 134-5
ROUSSEAU)

Consulate, Tlie French, 1799, 58-60
Corn Laws, 179
Courier, The, 22-3

D’Alembert, 109
Dalton, 213
Dante, 99, 211
Davy, 213
De Quincey, 22, 27
Deism, 18-19, 26, 31-3, 48
DEMOCRACY, 233; a Church the
only pure, 15, 154
Democrats, 31, 35, 36, 39
Diderot, 109
Disraeli, ii, 12
Doctrinaires, 39
Donne, 202

EDUCATION, 25, 38, 40-41, 167,
223-7

Essays on His Own Times, 22
Expediency, inadequacy of as guide
for Statesmen, 94-6

Factory Bill, 1818, 13, 216-21
FAITH, 31, 32; Confession of, 83-5;

Essay on, 85-8
Felling, Prof. K., 11
Fox, Charles James, 71, 238

-George, 48

France: an Ode, 52-3
Friend, The, 12, 23

Game Laws, 178-9
German philosophy, 13, 49
GOVERNMENTS, inadequacy as

agents of improvement, 20, 52,
54; Jacobin Faith in, 55; based on
property, 56-7; limitations of,
180-2, 195

Hampden, 75

Happiness, definition of, 130; great¬
est of greatest number, 127-8, 129,
130; total of pleasures, 130
Harley, ii
Harrington, 95, 99
Hartley, David, 17, 18, 33, 37, 48,
50, 100, 213
Helvetius, 31
Henry VIII, 171
Highgatc, Coleridge at, 22, 23, 24
HISl'ORY, Coleridge and, 14-15,
22, 23, 93-4, 242; historical

method, 131-2; Utilitarians and,

HOBBES, 50, 109-12

Hume, David, 14, 50, 100, 134, 211

IDEA, The, 15, 21, 22, 24, 132 ff.;
distinguished from Conception,
133; of the National Church, 16;
of Pantisocracy, 19; of the Social
contract, 135-6, 138
IDEALISM, Coleridge’s, 15, 16,
21-3, 26

Idealist approach to problems, 131-9
Infant Schools, 227
Internationalism, 142

JACOBINISM, 51, 55-6, 57, 64-5,
66,72, 89-90, 118-20, 216, 235
Jesus College, Cambridge, 17, 38
Joseph II, 109
j ustices of the Peace, 139

KANT, 21, 26

Labour, state interference with, 218-
19

‘Labouring Poor,’ 67

270

I N I) E X

Laisscz-fdire, 188-9, 218-19, 241
Lancastrian Schools, 97, 226
I;andcd intcresl, 1 value of, 57,

66; infeclcd by spirit of coniinerce,

203 if.

Lay Sermonsj 22, 23
Learned order, need for, 96-7;

functions of, 169 ff.

TiCibnit/., 48-9
Liberty, English, 179-80
Liverpool, .Lord, 12, t6, 27, 209-10,
238; l.ctter lo, 21 o-t 6
rocivE, 14, 17, 18, 37, 48, 50,

8r, 102-3, ro.j., T05, 210, 213,
214, 21 ^

Lotteries, Stale, 208
Louis XV, philosopliy under, 100
Luther, ti6

Maltlius, 22 1, 222
Maurice, JL !)., 12
Meclia.nics Inslitutions, 97, 176
Mechanical and Vila! Philosophy
contras ted, 105-6
Mclhodisin, 4.0-1, 42, 78
Mcynell, .Alice, r r
Mill, Janies, 17, i B

Stuart, 14, 24-5
Milton, John, 56, 91, 99
Moneyed Literesi, 66
Monitorial Syslcin of Instruction,
226-7

Monypenny and Buclde, 12
Momiag Post, 20, 22, 127
Motives, 32, 122, 125-6
Mo/airt, 24T

Muirhead, Prof. J. H., 15, 21, 27

Nation, Spirit of a, 142
National Schools, 177, 216
NAddONAI/rV, d'he, 161-3, 165
purposes of, 171-4
Nations, La,w of, 146-50
Necessitarianism, 19, 25-6, 39-40, 49

271

Newman, J. H,, 12
Newton, Isaac, 50

Odes, To France^ 52-3; to Destruction
of the Bastille, 34
Owen, Robert, 12

Paganini, 241
Paley, 129

Pantisocracy, 19, 24, 25, 35-6
Pantagrucl, 107
Paiuirge, 107

PARI dAMENT, defects in compos¬
ition of, 178; omnipotence of,
180 ff.; reform of, 1832, 227-33
Patriotism, 142-46
ihiyne, Thomas, loi, 137
Peel, Sir Robt. (Elder), 13, 216, 219
People, The, 119

PhlRMANENCE AND PRO¬
GRESSION, 155-61
Philanthropists, 242
PIl ILOSOPHY, importance of, 92-
7; decline of, 98-104, 196; con¬
sequences of decline, loo-i
Pitt, William (Younger), ii, 12, 13,
44 (n), 68-74, 77 ? 238; his Poor

Bill, 73

Jdato, 89, 91, 104, 107, 140
Platonists, 99, 21 x, 212
Pleasure and Pain, 130
Polarity, 228
Political Economy, 221-3
Poole, 20

Poor Laws, 206, 241
‘Popularizing' of philosophy, 97
Potter, Stephen, 19
Priestley, 44, 49

Principles, importance of, 39, 94-5
PROPERTY, as a trust, 15, 161-4;
government based on, 56, 117-18,
231; the state and, 218; equalizing
of, 121

INDEX

PROPRIEl'Y, The, 162-4
Prudential reasonings, 42, 125-7

Quakers, 48, 199-200
Quixote, Don, T07

Radicalism, philosophic, 15
REASON, 83, 87-8; in relation to
religion and the Will, 88-92; gov¬
ernment based on, 113 ff.; in re¬
lation to the understanding, 106-9
Reform Bill, 1832, 227-33
Reformation, The, 170, 239
RELIGION, 31.3, 43, 47T; and
the reason, 88-92; without the
reason, 90; as centre of gravity of
a realm, 97, 212; dcclmc of in¬
fluence of as-pounterbalance to the
commercial spirit, 196-203
Representation, parliamentary, de¬
fects of, 178-232; |:ruc represent¬
ation, 229; proposed changes,
1832, 229-30; their consequences,
231

Rez)iczu, Edinburgh, 12.

- Quarterly, 12,

REVOLUTION, GLORIOUS,
103; FRENCH, II, 34, 40, 52,
60, 71, 89, 214, 228, 234-5
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 212
RIGHTS, of Man, 31, 43, 228;
and Duties, 55-6, 56-7, 87, 90,
120, 218-9, 230
Robinson, H. C., 216
ROUSSEAU, 113-16, 134

Sabbatarianism, 241

Schelling, 21

Schoolmen, 104

Scotus, Duns, 50

Self-interest, 122, 123, 129

Sensational philosophy, The, loo;

consequences of, loo-i
Sidney, Algernon, 75, 99, 122

Sidney, Philip, 99, 233

SieyAs, 58, 80

Sinecures and pensions, 193

Slavery, 37

Slave-t rade, 2 2 o- t

Southey, Robt., ii, 36, 209

Spain, resistance of to Napoleon, 74-5

Spenceans, 208

Spenser, lAlinund, 99

Spinoxa, 131

STA'hE, The, as orgatiism, 139-42;
citivcjiand, 140-42, 177, 215-16;
the purposes of, 152-4; in relation
to the Church, 1 5.'}; regulation by,
208-9, 19 5, 217 if., I 53-4; 'ILtal-
itarian, 16; general, X4“T 5, 22, 26
SuErage, equal, 120-21; for women,
229, 242

Talleyrand, 79-80
Taxation, 184-5
'Taylor, Jeremy, 202
Theology, 166-7
Tirncs, The, 80

TORYISM, Coleridge’s, ii-i2, 15
Unitarians, 20, 48

UTILTEARIANS, 14, 17; ethics
of, 121-30

Vital philosophy contrasted with
Mechanical, 105
Voltaire, 31, T09
Vox Poptdi, 233

War, 149-1 52
Washington, 63
Watchmen, The, 19, 25, 27, 38
Wedgwood, 'Thos., 49
Wellington, 239

WILL, The, 90-r; abstracted Ifom
Reason or Religion, 91
Wordsworth, ii; the Prelude, 105

Young England, 11

272

I 'r

■j-'

Co ,,

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