At night the illuminated coffee-houses, the streaming population, each person carrying a lantern, in an atmosphere warmer and softer than our conservatories, and all the innocent amusements of an out-door life—the Nubian song, the Arabian tale, the Syrian magic—afford a different, but not less delightful scene.

It was many hours before noon, however, that I made my first visit to Shoubra, beneath a sky as cloudless as it remained during the whole six months I was in Egypt, during which time I have no recollection that we were favoured by a single drop of rain; and yet the ever-living breeze on the great river, and the excellent irrigation of the earth, produce a freshness in the sky and soil, which are missed in other Levantine regions, where there is more variety of the seasons.

Shoubra is about four or five miles from the metropolis. It rises on the banks of the Nile, and the road to it from Cairo is a broad but shady avenue, formed of sycamores, of noble growth and colour; on one side delightful glimpses of the river, with its palmy banks and sparkling villages, and on the other, after a certain tract of vivid vegetation, the golden sands of the desert, and the shifting hillocks which it forms; or, perhaps, the grey peaks of some chain of pyramids.

The palace of Shoubra is a pile of long low buildings looking to the river—moderate in its character, and modest in its appointments; but clean, orderly, and in a state of complete repair; and, if we may use such an epithet with reference to oriental life, comfortable. It possesses all the refined conveniences of European manners, of which the pasha at the time I am referring to was extremely proud. Most of these had been the recent gift of the French government, and his highness occasionally amused his guests—some sheikh from Arabia, or some emir from the Lebanon—by the exhibition of some scientific means of domestic accommodation with which use has made us familiar, but which I was assured had sensibly impressed the magnates of the desert and the mountain with the progress of modern civilisation.

The gardens of Shoubra, however, are vast, fanciful, and kept in admirable order. They appeared to me in their character also entirely oriental. You enter them by long, low, winding walks of impenetrable shade; you emerge upon an open ground sparkling with roses, arranged in beds of artificial forms, and leading to gilded pavilions and painted kiosks. Arched walks of orange trees, with the fruit and the flowers hanging over your head, lead again to fountains, or to some other garden-court, where myrtles border beds of tulips, and you wander on mosaic walks of polished pebbles. A vase flashes amid a group of dark cypresses, and you are invited to repose under a Syrian walnut tree by a couch or a summer-house.

The most striking picture, however, of this charming retreat is a lake surrounded by light cloisters of white marble, and in its centre a fountain of crocodiles, carved in the same material. That material as well as the art, however, are European. It was Carrara that gave the pure and glittering blocks, and the Tuscan chisel called them into life. It is a pity that the honourable board of directors, in their recent offering of the silver fountain to the pasha, had not been aware of the precedent thus afforded by his highness's own creation for the introduction of living forms into Moslem sculpture and carving. They might have varied their huge present with advantage. Indeed, with the crocodile and the palm-tree, surely something more beautiful and not less characteristic than their metallic mausoleum might easily have been devised.

This marble pavilion at Shoubra, indeed, with its graceful, terraced peristyles, its chambers and divans, the bright waters beneath, with their painted boats, wherein the ladies of the harem chase the gleaming shoals of gold and silver fish, is a scene worthy of a sultan; but my attendant, a Greek employed in the garden, told me I ought to view it on some high festival, crowded by the court in their rich costumes, to appreciate all its impressive beauty. This was a scene not reserved for me, yet my first visit to Shoubra closed with an incident not immemorable.

I had quitted the marble pavilion and was about to visit the wilderness where roam, in apparent liberty, many rare animals, when I came, somewhat suddenly, on a small circular plot into which several walks emptied, cut through a thick hedge of myrtle. By a sun-dial stood a little man, robust, though aged, rather stout, and of a very cheerful countenance; his attire plain and simple, a pelisse of dark silk, and a turban white as his snowy beard; he was in merry conversation with his companion, who turned out to be his jester. In the background, against the myrtle wall, stood three or four courtiers in rich dresses—courtiers, for the little old man was their princely master—the great Pasha of Egypt.



EDEN AND LEBANON

I FOUND myself high among the mountains, and yet amid a series of green slopes. All around me sparkled with cultivation—vineyards, gardens, groves of young mulberry trees, clustering groups of the sycamore and the walnut. Falling around, the cascades glittered in the sun, until, reaching the bottom of the winding valley, they mingled with the waters of a rivulet that glided through a glade of singular vividness.

On the broad bosom of a sunny hill, behind which rose a pyramid of bare rock, was a most beautiful village—flat cottages with terraced roofs, shaded by spreading trees, and surrounded by fruit and flowers. A cerulean sky above; the breath of an infinite variety of fragrant herbs around; and a land of silk and wine; everywhere the hum of bees and the murmur of falling streams; while, on the undulating down, a band of beauteous children were frolicking with the kids.

The name of this village, the fairest spot in the region of Lebanon, is Eden, which, rendered from the Arabic into the English tongue, means a 'Dwelling of Delight.'

I ascended the peak that overhung this village. I beheld ridges of mountains succeeding each other in proportionate pre-eminence, until the range of the eternal glaciers, with their lustrous cones, flashed in the Syrian sun. I descended into the deep and solemn valleys, skirted the edges of rocky precipices, and toiled over the savage monotony of the dreary table-land. At length, on the brow of a mountain, I observed the fragments of a gloomy forest—cedar, and pine, and cypress. The wind moaning through its ancient avenues and the hoarse roar of a cataract were the only sounds that greeted me.

In the front was a scanty group of gigantic trees, that seemed the relics of some pre-Adamite grove. Their grey and massive trunks, each of which must have been more than twelve yards in girth, were as if quite dead; while, about twenty feet from the ground, they divided into five or six huge limbs, each equal to a single tree, but all, as it were, lifeless amid their apparent power.

Bare of all foliage, save on their ancient crests—black, blasted, riven, and surrounded by deep snows—behold the trees that built the palaces of Solomon!

When I recall the scene from which I had recently parted, and contrasted it with the spectacle before me, it seemed that I had quitted the innocence and infancy of Nature to gaze on its old age—of exhausted passions and desolate neglect.



A SYRIAN SKETCH

THE sun was quivering above the horizon, when I strolled forth from Jaffa to enjoy the coming breeze amid the beautiful gardens that environ that agreeable town. Riding along the previous day, my attention had been attracted by a marble gate, the fragment of some old temple, that now served as the entrance to one of these enclosures, their secure boundary otherwise formed by a picturesque and impenetrable hedge of Indian fig.

It is not a hundred yards from the town; behind it stretches the plain of Ramie—the ancient Arimathea-broad and fertile, and, at this moment, green; for it was just after the latter rains, when Syria is most charming. The caravan track winding through it led to Jerusalem.

The air was exquisitely soft and warm, and sweet with the perfume of the orange bowers. I passed through the marble portal, adorned with some florid yet skilful sculptures, and found myself in a verdant wilderness of fruit-trees, rising in rich confusion from the turf, through which not a single path seemed to wander. There were vast groups of orange and lemon-trees, varied occasionally with the huge offspring of the citron-tree, and the glowing produce of the pomegranate; while, ever and anon, the tall banana raised its head aloft with its green or golden clusters, and sometimes the graceful and languid crest of the date-bearing palm.

While I was in doubt as to the direction I should bend my steps, my ear was caught by the wild notes of Turkish music; and, following the sounds, I emerged upon a plot of turf, clear from trees, in the middle of which was a fountain, and, by its margin, seated on a delicate Persian carpet, a venerable Turk. Some slaves were near him, one of whom, at a little distance, was playing on a rude lyre; in the master's left hand was a volume of Arabian poetry, and he held in his right the serpentine tube of his narghileh, or Syrian pipe. When he beheld me, he saluted me with all the dignity of the Orient, pressing his hand to his heart, but not rising. I apologised for my intrusion; but he welcomed me with serene cordiality, and invited me to share his carpet and touch his pipe.

Some time elapsed in answering those questions respecting European horses and European arms, wherein the Easterns delight. At length, the solemn and sonorous voice of the muezzin, from the minarets of Jaffa, came floating on the air. The sun had set; and, immediately, my host and his companions performed their ablutions in the fountain; and kneeling towards Mecca, repeated their accustomed prayers. Then rising, the Turkish aga, for such was his rank, invited me to enjoy the evening breeze, and accompany him in a walk round his garden.

As we proceeded, my companion plucked an orange, and taking a knife from his girdle, and cutting the fruit in half, offered me one moiety, and threw the other away. More than once he repeated this ceremony, which somewhat excited my surprise. At length he inquired my opinion of his fruit. I enlarged, and with sincerity, on its admirable quality, the racy sweetness of its flavour, which I esteemed unequalled; but I could not refrain from expressing my surprise, that of fruit so exquisite he should studiously waste so considerable a portion.

'Effendi,' said the Turk, with a grave though gracious smile, 'to friends we give only the sunny side.'



THE BOSPHORUS

THE stranger whose felicity it has been to float between the shores of the Bosphorus will often glance back with mingled feelings of regret and satisfaction to the memory of those magical waters. This splendid strait, stretching from the harbour of Constantinople to the mouth of the Euxine, may be about twenty miles in length, and its ordinary breadth seldom exceeds one mile. The old Greek story tells that one might hear the birds sing on the opposite shore. And thus two great continents are divided by an ocean stream narrower than many rivers that are the mere boundaries of kingdoms. Yet it is strange that the character of these two famous divisions of our earth is nowhere more marked than on the shores of the Bosphorus. The traveller turns without disappointment from the gay and glittering shores of Europe to the sublimer beauty and the dusky grandeur of Asia.

The European side, until you advance within four or five miles of the Black Sea, is almost uninterruptedly studded with fanciful and ornamental buildings: beautiful villages, and brilliant summer palaces, and bright kiosks, painted in arabesque, and often gilt. The green background to the scene is a sparkling screen of terraced gardens, rising up a chain of hills whose graceful undulations are crowned with groves of cypress and of chestnut, occasionally breaking into fair and delicate valleys, richly wooded, and crossed by a grey and antique aqueduct.

But in Asia the hills rise into mountains, and the groves swell into forests. Everything denotes a vast, rich and prolific land, but there is something classical, antique, and even mysterious in its general appearance. An air of stillness and deep repose pervades its less cultivated and less frequented shores; and the very eagles, as they linger over the lofty peak of 'the Giant's grave,' seem conscious that they are haunting some heroic burial-place.

I remember that one of the most strange, and even sublime, spectacles that I ever beheld occurred to me one balmy autumnal eve as I returned home in my caique from Terapia, a beautiful village on the Bosphorus, where I had been passing the day, to Pera. I encountered an army of dolphins, who were making their way from the AEgean and the Sea of Marmora through the Strait to the Euxine. They stretched right across the water, and I should calculate that they covered, with very little interval, a space of three or four miles. It is very difficult to form an estimate of their number, but there must, of course, have been many thousands. They advanced in grand style, and produced an immense agitation: the snorting, spouting, and splashing, and the wild panting rush, I shall never forget. As it was late, no other caique was in sight, and my boatmen, apprehensive of being run down, stopped to defend themselves with their oars. I had my pistols with me, and found great sport, as, although the dolphins made every effort to avoid us, there were really crowds always in shot. Whenever one was hit, general confusion ran through the whole line. They all flounced about with increased energy, ducked their round heads under water, and turned up their arrowy tails. We remained thus stationary for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and very diverting I found the delay. At length the mighty troop of strangers passed us, and, I suppose, must have arrived at the Symplegades about the same time that I sought the elegant hospitality of the British Palace at Pera.



AN INTERVIEW WITH A GREAT TURK

WHEN I was in Egypt the great subject of political speculation was the invasion of Syria; not that the object of the formation of the camp at Alexandria was generally known; on the contrary, it was a secret,-but a secret shared by many ears. Forty thousand well-disciplined troops were assembled at Cairo; and it was whispered at Court that Abdallah Pasha of Acre might look to himself, a young and valiant chief, by-the-bye, whom I well know, but indulging in dissipation, extraordinary even in the Levant. I was exceedingly anxious of becoming in some manner attached to this expedition; and as I was not without influence in the proper quarters, there appeared little probability of my wish not being gratified. With these views I remained in Egypt longer than I had intended, but it would seem that the invaders were not quite as ardent as their intended volunteer, for affairs at Alexandria progressed but indifferently. Orders and counter-orders, marches and counter-marches, boats pressed on the Nile for the passage of troops from the capital, which were all liberated the next day, many divans and much smoking; but still the troops remained within pistol-shot of the citadel, and months glided away apparently without any material advancement.

I had often observed that although there was in most subjects an excellent understanding between the two Pashas, Mehemet Ali and Ibrahim, a degree of petty jealousy existed between them on the point of their mutual communications with foreigners; so that if I happened one morning to attend the divan of the Grand Pasha, as the Franks styled the father, I was sure, on some excuse or other, of being summoned the next day to the levee of the son; I was therefore not surprised when, one day, on my return from paying my respects to the divan at the citadel of Cairo, I found a Nubian eunuch in attendance at my quarters, telling me that Ibrahim Pasha was anxious to see me.

I accordingly repaired without loss of time to the sumptuous palace of that chieftain: and being ushered into his presence, I found the future conqueror of Syria attended only by his dragoman, his secretary; and an aide-de-camp.

A pipe was immediately brought me, but Ibrahim himself did not smoke. After the usual compliments, 'Effendi,' said Ibrahim, 'do you think the English horses would live in Egypt?'

I was too practised an observer of the Turkish character to suppose that English horses were really the occasion of my summons. The Turks are very diplomatic, and are a long time coming to the point. I answered, however, that, with English grooms, I was of opinion that English horses would flourish in any climate. A curt, dry, uninteresting conversation about English horses was succeeded by some queries, which I had answered fifty times before, about English pistols: and then came a sly joke or two about English women. At length the point of the interview began to poke its horns out of this shell of tittle-tattle.

'If you want to go with the army,' said his Highness, ''tis I who am the person to speak to. They know nothing about those things up there' (meaning the citadel).

I answered his Highness that I had attended the divan merely as a matter of ceremony, and that I had not interchanged a word with the Grand Pasha on the subject of the expedition.

'I suppose you talked with Boghaz?' said Ibrahim.

Boghaz was the favourite of Mehemet Ali.

'Neither with Boghaz nor any one else. Your Highness having once graciously promised me that I should attend you, I should have thought it both impertinent and unnecessary to apply to any other person whatever.'

'Tahib!' exclaimed his Highness, which meant that he was satisfied. 'After all, I do not know whether the army will march at all. You have been in Syria?'

I answered, in the affirmative, a question which had often been addressed to me.

'Do you think I could march as far as Gaza?' inquired Ibrahim, with a smile.

This was a question of mockery. It was like asking whether the Life Guards could take Windsor. I therefore only returned the smile, and said that I did not doubt the enemy would agree to settle affairs upon that condition.

'Tahib! Well I think I can march as far as they speak Arabic!' This was a favourite phrase of his Highness.

I answered that I hoped, if I had the honour of attending his Highness, the army would march till we could see another ocean.

'It is all talk up there,' replied Ibrahim; 'but my life is a life of deeds.'

'Words are very good things sometimes,' I replied; 'that is, if we keep marching at the same time.'

'God is great!' exclaimed Ibrahim; and looking round to his officers, 'the Effendi speaks truth; and thus it was that Redchid beat the beys.'

Ibrahim alluded to the Albanian campaign of the preceding year, when the energy of the grand vizier crushed the rebellious beys of the ancient Epirus.

'What do you think of Redchid?' he inquired.

'I think he is worthy of being your Highness's rival.'

'He has always been victorious,' said Ibrahim; 'but I think his sabre is made of gold. That will not do with me.'

'It's a pity,' I observed, 'that if your Highness find time to march into Syria, you had not acted simultaneously with the Albanians, or with the Pasha of Scutari.'

'May I kill my mother but it is true; but up there, they will watch, and watch, and watch, till they fall asleep.'

The truth is, the Orientals have no idea of military diversions; and even if they combine, each strives to be the latest in the field, in order that he may take advantage of the other's success or discomfiture. Mehemet Ali, at an immense expenditure, had excited two terrible revolts in European Turkey, and then waited to invade Syria until the armies of the Porte were unemployed. The result with some will justify his policy; but in the conquest of Syria, the truth is, Ibrahim himself used a golden sabre, and the year, before, the contingents of the pashas, whom he was obliged to bribe, were all busied in Europe.

The night previous to this conversation the style of the military oath of the Egyptian army had been altered; and the troops, instead of swearing allegiance to the Sultan, had pledged themselves to Mehemet Ali. The Grand Pasha was so nervous about this change, that the order for it was countermanded twice in four hours; however, what with gratuities to the troops, and the discreet distribution of promotion among the officers, everything went off very quietly. There was also a rumour that Mehemet Ali intended immediately to assume the title of Caliph.

This piece of information is necessary to explain the following striking observation of Ibrahim Pasha.

'Effendi, do you think that a man can conquer Syria, who is not called a caliph? Will it make 40,000 men 80,000?'

I replied, that I thought the assumption of the title would have a beneficial effect at foreign courts.

'Bah! before the Yahoos hear of it, I shall be at Damascus. Up there, they are always busying themselves with forms. The eagle in his flight does not think of his shadow on the earth!'



MUNICH

THE destiny of nations appears to have decreed that a society should periodically, though rarely, flourish, characterised by its love of the Fine Arts, and its capacity of ideal creation. These occasional and brilliant ebullitions of human invention elevate the race of man; they purify and chasten the taste of succeeding generations; and posterity accepts them as the standard of what is choice, and the model of what is excellent.

Classic Greece and Christian Italy stand out in our universal annals as the epochs of the Arts. During the last two centuries, while manners have undergone a rapid transition, while physical civilisation has advanced in an unprecedented degree, and the application of science to social life has diverted the minds of men from other pursuits, the Fine Arts have decayed and vanished.

I wish to call the attention of my countrymen to another great movement in the creative mind of Europe; one yet young and little recognised, but not inferior, in my opinion, either to that of Athens or of Florence.

It was on a cloudless day of the autumn of last year, that I found myself in a city that seemed almost visibly rising beneath my eye. The street in which I stood was of noble dimensions, and lined on each side with palaces or buildings evidently devoted to public purposes. Few were completely finished: the sculptor was working at the statues that adorned their fronts; the painter was still touching the external frescoes; and the scaffold of the architect was not in every instance withdrawn. Everywhere was the hum of art and artists. The Byzantine style of many of these buildings was novel to me in its modern adaptation, yet very effective. The delicate detail of ornament contrasted admirably with the broad fronts and noble facades which they adorned. A church with two very lofty towers of white marble, with their fretted cones relieved with cerulean blue, gleamed in the sun; and near it was a pile not dissimilar to the ducal palace at Venice, but of nobler and more beautiful proportions, with its portal approached by a lofty flight of steps, and guarded by the colossal statues of poets and philosophers—suitably guarded, for it was the National Library.

As I advanced, I found myself in squares and circuses, in every instance adorned by an obelisk of bronze or the equestrian statue of some royal hero: I observed a theatre with a lofty Corinthian portico, and a pediment brilliantly painted in fresco with designs appropriate to its purpose; an Ionic museum of sculpture, worthy to enshrine the works of a Phidias or a Praxiteles; and a palace for the painter, of which I was told the first stone had been rightly laid on the birthday of Raffaelle. But what struck me most in this city, more than its galleries, temples, and palaces, its magnificent buildings, splendid paintings, and consummate statues, was the all-pervading presence and all-inspiring influence of living and breathing Art. In every street, a school: the atelier of the sculptor open, the studio of the painter crowded: devoted pupils, aspiring rivals: enthusiasm, emulation, excellence. Here the long-lost feudal-art of colouring glass re-discovered; there fresco-painting entirely revived, and on the grandest scale; while the ardent researches of another man of genius successfully analyses the encaustic tenting of Herculaneum, and secures the secret process for the triumph of modern Art. I beheld a city such as I had mused over amid the crumbling fanes of Pericles, or, aided alike by memory and fancy, had conjured up in the palaces and gardens of the Medici.

Such is Munich, a city which, half a century ago, was the gross and corrupt capital of a barbarous and brutal people. Baron Reisbech, who visited Bavaria in 1780, describes the Court of Munich as one not at all more advanced than those of Lisbon and Madrid. A good-natured prince, fond only of show and thinking only of the chase; an idle, dissolute, and useless nobility; the nomination to offices depending on women and priests; the aristocracy devoted to play, and the remainder of the inhabitants immersed in scandalous debauch.

With these recollections of the past, let us enter the palace of the present sovereign. With habits of extreme simplicity, and a personal expenditure rigidly economical, the residence of the King of Bavaria, when completed, will be the most extensive and the most sumptuous palace in the world. But, then, it is not merely the palace of a king: it is a temple dedicated to the genius of a nation. The apartments of state, painted in fresco on the grandest scale, bold in design, splendid in colour, breathe the very Teutonic soul. The subjects are taken from the 'Nibelungenlied,' the Gothic epic, and commemorate all the achievements of the heroic Siegfried, and all the adventures of the beautiful Chrimhilde. The heart of a German beats as he gazes on the forms and scenes of the Teutonic Iliad; as he beholds Haghen the fierce, and Dankwart the swift; Volker, the minstrel knight, and the beautiful and haughty Brunhilda. But in point of harmonious dimension and august beauty, no chamber is perhaps more imposing than the Kaiser Saal, or Hall of the Sovereigns. It is, I should think, considerably above one hundred feet in length, broad and lofty in exact proportion. Its roof is supported on either side by columns of white marble; the inter-columniations are filled by colossal statues, of gilded brass, of the electors and kings of the country. Seated on his throne, at the end of this imperial chamber, Louis of Bavaria is surrounded by the solemn majesty of his ancestors. These statues are by Schwanthaler, a sculptor who to the severe and classic taste and profound sentiment of his master, Thorwaldsen, unites an exuberance of invention which has filled Munich with the greatest works since Phidias. Cornelius, Julius Schnorr, and Hess are the principal painters who have covered the galleries, churches, and palaces of Munich with admirable frescoes. The celebrated Klenze is known throughout Europe as the first of living architects, and the favourite of his sovereign when that sovereign did not wear a crown; but we must not forget the name of Gartner, the architect who has revived the Byzantine style of building with such admirable effect.

But it was in the private apartments of the king that I was peculiarly impressed with the supreme genius of Schwanthaler. These chambers, eight in number, are painted in encaustic, with subjects from the Greek poets, of which Schwanthaler supplied the designs. The ante-chambers are devoted to Orpheus and Hesiod, and the ornaments are in the oldest Greek style; severely simple; archaic, but not rude; the figures of the friezes in outline, and without relief. The saloon of reception, on the contrary, is Homeric; and in its colouring, design, and decoration, as brilliant, as free, and as flowing as the genius of the great Maeonian. The chamber of the throne is entirely adorned with white bas-reliefs, raised on a ground of dead gold; the subjects Pindaric; not inferior in many instances to the Attic remains, and characterised, at the same time, by a singular combination of vigour and grace. Another saloon is devoted to AEschylus, and the library to Sophocles. The gay, wild muse of Aristophanes laughs and sings in his Majesty's dressing-room; while the king is lulled to slumber by the Sicilian melodies and the soothing landscapes of Theocritus.

Of these chambers, I should say that they were a perfect creation of Art. The rooms themselves are beautifully proportioned; the subjects of their decorations are the most interesting in every respect that could be selected; and the purity, grace, and invention of the designs, are equalled only by their colouring, at the same time the most brilliant and harmonious that can be conceived; and the rich fancy of the arabesques and other appropriate decorations, which blend with all around, and heighten the effect of the whole. Yet they find no mean rivals in the private chambers of the queen, decorated in an analogous style, but entirely devoted to the poets of her own land. The Minnesingers occupy her first apartments, but the brilliant saloon is worthy of Wieland, whose Oberon forms it frieze; while the bedchamber gleams with the beautiful forms and pensive incidents of Goethe's esoteric pen. Schiller has filled the study with his stirring characters and his vigorous incidents. Groups from 'Wallenstein' and 'Wilhelm Tell' form the rich and unrivalled ceiling: while the fight of the dragon and the founding of the bell, the innocent Fridolin, the inspired maiden of Orleans, breathe in the compartments of the walls.

When I beheld these refined creations, and recalled the scenes and sights of beauty that had moved before me in my morning's wanderings, I asked myself, how Munich, recently so Boeotian, had become the capital of modern Art; and why a country of limited resources, in a brief space, and with such facility and completeness, should have achieved those results which had so long and utterly eluded the desires of the richest and most powerful community in the world?

It is the fashion of the present age to underrate the influence of individual character. For myself, I have ever rejected this consolation of mediocrity. I believe that everything that is great has been accomplished by great men. It is not what witnessed at Munich, or know of its sovereign, that should make me doubt the truth of my conviction. Munich is the creation of its king, and Louis of Bavaria is not only a king but a poet. A poet on a throne has realised his dreams.



THE SPIRIT OF WHIGGISM

[In the following pages Lord Beaconsfield expounds that theory of the English Constitution which he had previously set forth in his pamphlet 'A Vindication of the English Constitution in a Letter to a Noble and Learned Lord.' The same theory is expounded in another way in the three great novels, 'Coningsby,' 'Sybil,' and 'Tancred.' His contemporaries never seem to have understood it, while his assailants of a later date appear to have written and spoken concerning him in absolute ignorance of his real political creed. The concluding paragraph of the tract ought, in the minds of all candid men, to disperse at once and forever the innumerable calumnies levelled at Lord Beaconsfield during and since the Reform struggle of 1859-1867.]



CHAPTER I.

Object of the Whigs

ENGLAND has become great by her institutions. Her hereditary Crown has in a great degree insured us from the distracting evils of a contested succession; her Peerage, interested, from the vast property and the national honours of its members, in the good government of the country, has offered a compact bulwark against the temporary violence of popular passion; her House of Commons, representing the conflicting sentiments of an estate of the realm not less privileged than that of the Peers, though far more numerous, has enlisted the great mass of the lesser proprietors of the country in favour of a political system which offers them a constitutional means of defence and a legitimate method of redress; her Ecclesiastical Establishment, preserved by its munificent endowment from the fatal necessity of pandering to the erratic fancies of its communicants, has maintained the sacred cause of learning and religion, and preserved orthodoxy while it secured toleration; her law of primogeniture has supplied the country with a band of natural and independent leaders, trustees of those legal institutions which pervade the land, and which are the origin of our political constitution. That great body corporate, styled a nation-a vast assemblage of human beings knit together by laws and arts and customs, by the necessities of the present and the memory of the past—offers in this country, through these its vigorous and enduring members, a more substantial and healthy framework than falls to the lot of other nations. Our stout-built constitution throws off with more facility and safety those crude and dangerous humours which must at times arise in all human communities. The march of revolution must here at least be orderly. We are preserved from those reckless and tempestuous sallies that in other countries, like a whirlwind, topple down in an instant an ancient crown, or sweep away an illustrious aristocracy. This constitution, which has secured order, has consequently promoted civilisation; and the almost unbroken tide of progressive amelioration has made us the freest, the wealthiest, and the most refined society of modern ages. Our commerce is unrivalled, our manufacturers supply the world, our agriculture is the most skilful in Christendom. So national are our institutions, so completely have they arisen from the temper and adapted themselves to the character of the people, that when for a season they were apparently annihilated, the people of England voluntarily returned to them, and established them with renewed strength and renovated vigour.

The constitution of England is again threatened, and at a moment when the nation is more prosperous, more free, and more famous than at any period of its momentous and memorable career. Why is this? What has occasioned these distempered times, which make the loyal tremble and the traitor smile? Why has this dark cloud suddenly gathered in a sky so serene and so splendid? Is there any analogy between this age and that of the first Charles? Are the same causes at work, or is the apparent similarity produced only by designing men, who make use of the perverted past as a passport to present mischief? These are great questions, which it may be profitable to discuss and wise to study.

Rapin, a foreigner who wrote our history, in the course of his frigid yet accurate pages, indulged in one philosophical observation. Struck at the same time by our greatness and by the fury of our factions, the Huguenot exclaimed: 'It appears to me that this great society can only be dissolved by the violence of its political parties.' What are these parties? Why are they violent? Why should they exist? In resolving these questions, we may obtain an accurate idea of our present political position, and by pondering over the past we may make that past not a prophecy, as the disaffected intend, but a salutary lesson by which the loyal may profit.

The two great parties into which England has during the last century and a half been divided originated in the ancient struggle between the Crown and the aristocracy. As long as the Crown possessed or aspired to despotic power, the feeling of the nation supported the aristocracy in their struggles to establish a free government. The aristocracy of England formed the constitution of the Plantagenets; the Wars of the Roses destroyed that aristocracy, and the despotism of the Tudors succeeded. Renovated by more than a century of peace and the spoils of the Papacy, the aristocracy of England attacked the first Stuarts, who succeeded to a despotism which they did not create. When Charles the First, after a series of great concessions which ultimately obtained for him the support of the most illustrious of his early opponents, raised the royal standard, the constitution of the Plantagenets, and more than the constitution of the Plantagenets, had been restored and secured. But a portion of the able party which had succeeded in effecting such a vast and beneficial revolution was not content to part with the extraordinary powers which they had obtained in this memorable struggle. This section of the aristocracy were the origin of the English Whigs, though that title was not invented until the next reign. The primitive Whigs-'Parliament-men,' as they liked to call themselves, 'Roundheads,' as they were in time dubbed—aspired to an oligarchy. For a moment they obtained one; but unable to maintain themselves in power against the returning sense and rising spirit of a generous and indignant people, they called to their aid that domestic revolutionary party which exists in all countries, and an anti-national enemy in addition. These were the English Radicals, or Root-and-Branch men, and the Scotch Covenanters. To conciliate the first they sacrificed the Crown; to secure the second they abolished the Church. The constitution of England in Church and State was destroyed, and the Whig oligarchy, in spite of their machinations, were soon merged in the common ruin.

The ignoble tyranny to which this great nation was consequently subject produced that reaction which is in the nature of human affairs. The ancient constitution was in time restored, and the Church and the Crown were invested with greater powers than they had enjoyed previously to their overthrow. So hateful had been the consequences of Whig rule, that the people were inclined rather to trust the talons of arbitrary power than to take refuge under the wing of these pretended advocates of popular rights. A worthless monarch and a corrupted court availed themselves of the offered opportunity; and when James the Second ascended the throne, the nation was again prepared to second the aristocracy in a struggle for their liberties. But the Whigs had profited by their previous experiment: they resolved upon a revolution, but they determined that that revolution should be brought about by as slight an appeal to popular sympathies as possible. They studiously confined that appeal to the religious feelings of the nation. They hired a foreign prince and enlisted a foreign army in their service. They dethroned James, they established themselves in power without the aid of the mass; and had William the Third been a man of ordinary capacity, the constitution of Venice would have been established in England in 1688. William the Third told the Whigs that he would never consent to be a Doge. Resembling Louis Philippe in his character as well as in his position, that extraordinary prince baffled the Whigs by his skilful balance of parties; and had Providence accorded him an heir, it is probable that the oligarchical faction would never have revived in England. The Whigs have ever been opposed to the national institutions because they are adverse to the establishment of an oligarchy. Local institutions, supported by a landed gentry, check them; hence their love of centralisation and their hatred of unpaid magistrates.

An independent hierarchy checks them; hence their affected advocacy of toleration and their patronage of the Dissenters. The power of the Crown checks them; therefore they always labour to reduce the sovereign to a nonentity, and by the establishment of the Cabinet they have virtually banished the King from his own councils. But, above all, the Parliament of England checks them, and therefore it may be observed that the Whigs at all times are quarrelling with some portion of those august estates. They despair of destroying the Parliament; by it, and by it alone, can they succeed in their objects. Corruption for one part, force for the other, then, is their motto. In 1640 they attempted to govern the country by the House of Commons, because the aristocracy was then more powerful in the House of Commons than in the House of Lords, where a Peerage, exhausted by civil wars, had been too liberally recruited from the courtiers of the Tudors and the Stuarts. At the next revolution which the Whigs occasioned, they attempted to govern the country by the House of Lords, in which they were predominant; and, in order to guarantee their power for ever, they introduced a Bill to deprive the King of his prerogative of making further Peers. The revolution of 1640 led to the abolition of the House of Lords because the Lords opposed the oligarchy. Having a majority in the House of Lords, the Whigs introduced the Peerage Bill, by which the House of Lords would have been rendered independent of the sovereign; unpopular with the country, the Whigs attacked the influence of popular election, and the moment that, by the aid of the most infamous corruption, they had obtained a temporary majority in the Lower House, they passed the Septennial Act.

The Whigs of the eighteenth century 'swamped' the House of Commons; the Whigs of the nineteenth would 'swamp' the House of Lords. The Whigs of the eighteenth century would have rendered the House of Lords unchangeable; the Whigs of the nineteenth remodel the House of Commons.

I conclude here the first chapter of the 'Spirit of Whiggism'-a little book which I hope may be easily read and easily remembered. The Whig party have always adopted popular cries. In one age it is Liberty, in another reform; at one period they sound the tocsin against popery, in another they ally themselves with papists. They have many cries, and various modes of conduct; but they have only one object—the establishment of an oligarchy in this free and equal land. I do not wish this country to be governed by a small knot of great families, and therefore I oppose the Whigs.



CHAPTER II.

Parliamentary Reform

WHEN the Whigs and their public organs favour us with their mysterious hints that the constitution has provided the sovereign with a means to re-establish at all times a legislative sympathy between the two Houses of Parliament, it may be as well to remind them that we are not indebted for this salutary prerogative to the forbearance of their party. Suppose their Peerage Bill had passed into an Act, how would they have carried the Reform Bill of 1832? The Whigs may reply, that if the Peerage Bill had become a law, the Reform Bill would never have been introduced; and I believe them. In that case, the British House of Lords would have been transformed into a Venetian Senate, and the old walls of St. James's might have witnessed scenes of as degrading mortification as the famous ducal palace of the Adriatic.

George III. routed the Whigs, consolidated by half a century of power; but an ordinary monarch would have sunk beneath the Coalition and the India Bill. This scheme was the last desperate effort of the oligarchical faction previous to 1830. Not that they were inactive during the great interval that elapsed between the advent of Mr. Pitt and the resurrection of Lord Grey: but, ever on the watch for a cry to carry them into power, they mistook the yell of Jacobinism for the chorus of an emancipated people, and fancied, in order to take the throne by storm, that nothing was wanting but to hoist the tricolour and to cover their haughty brows with a red cap. This fatal blunder clipped the wings of Whiggism; nor is it possible to conceive a party that had effected so many revolutions and governed a great country for so long a period, more broken, sunk, and shattered, more desolate and disheartened, than these same Whigs at the Peace of Paris. From that period till 1830, the tactics of the Whigs consisted in gently and gradually extricating themselves from their false position as the disciples of Jacobinism, and assuming their ancient post as the hereditary guardians of an hereditary monarchy. To make the transition less difficult than it threatened, they invented Liberalism, a bridge by which they were to regain the lost mainland, and daintily recross on tiptoe the chasm over which they had originally sprung with so much precipitation. A dozen years of 'liberal principles' broke up the national party of England, cemented by half a century of prosperity and glory, compared with which all the annals of the realm are dim and lack-lustre. Yet so weak intrinsically was the oligarchical faction, that their chief, despairing to obtain a monopoly of power for his party, elaborately announced himself as the champion of his patrician order, and attempted to coalesce with the liberalised leader of the Tories. Had that negotiation led to the result which was originally intended by those interested, the Riots of Paris would not have occasioned the Reform of London.

It is a great delusion to believe that revolutions are ever effected by a nation. It is a faction, and generally a small one, that overthrows a dynasty or remodels a constitution. A small party, stung by a long exile from power, and desperate of success except by desperate means, invariably has recourse to a coup-d'etat. An oligarchical party is necessarily not numerous. Its members in general attempt, by noble lineage or vast possessions, to compensate for their poverty of numbers. The Whigs, in 1830, found themselves by accident in place, but under very peculiar circumstances. They were in place but not in power. In each estate of the realm a majority was arrayed against them. An appeal to the Commons of England, that constituency which, in its elements, had undergone no alteration since the time of Elizabeth, either by the influence of the legislature or the action of time—that constituency which had elected Pym, and Selden, and Hampden, as well as Somers, Walpole, and Pulteney—an appeal to this constituency, it was generally acknowledged, would be fatal to the Whigs, and therefore they determined to reconstruct it. This is the origin of the recent parliamentary reform: the Whigs, in place without being in power, resolved as usual upon a coup-d'etat, and looked about for a stalking-horse. In general the difficult task had devolved upon them of having to accomplish their concealed purpose while apparently achieving some public object. Thus they had carried the Septennial Act on the plea of preserving England from popery, though their real object was to prolong the existence of the first House of Commons in which they could command a majority.

But in the present instance they became sincerely parliamentary reformers, for by parliamentary reform they could alone subsist; and all their art was dedicated so to contrive, that in this reformation their own interest should secure an irresistible predominance.

But how was an oligarchical party to predominate in popular elections? Here was the difficulty. The Whigs had no resources from their own limited ranks to feed the muster of the popular levies. They were obliged to look about for allies wherewith to form their new popular estate. Any estate of the Commons modelled on any equitable principle, either of property or population, must have been fatal to the Whigs; they, therefore, very dexterously adopted a small minority of the nation, consisting of the sectarians, and inaugurating them as the people with a vast and bewildering train of hocus-pocus ceremonies, invested the Dissenters with political power. By this coup-d'etat they managed the House of Commons, and having at length obtained a position, they have from that moment laid siege to the House of Lords, with the intention of reducing that great institution and making it surrender at discretion. This is the exact state of English politics during the last five years. The Whigs have been at war with the English constitution. First of all they captured the King; then they vanquished the House of Commons; now they have laid siege to the House of Lords. But here the fallacy of their grand scheme of political mystification begins to develop itself. Had, indeed, their new constituency, as they have long impudently pretended, really been 'the people,' a struggle between such a body and the House of Lords would have been brief but final. The absurdity of supposing that a chamber of two or three hundred individuals could set up their absolute will and pleasure against the decrees of a legislative assembly chosen by the whole nation is so glaring that the Whigs and their scribes might reasonably suspect that in making such allegations they were assuredly proving too much. But as 'the people' of the Whigs is in fact a number of Englishmen not exceeding in amount the population of a third-rate city, the English nation is not of opinion that this arrogant and vaunting moiety of a class privileged for the common good, swollen though it may be by some jobbing Scots and rebel Irish, shall pass off their petty and selfish schemes of personal aggrandisement as the will of a great people, as mindful of its duty to its posterity as it is grateful for the labours of its ancestors. The English nation, therefore, rallies for rescue from the degrading plots of a profligate oligarchy, a barbarising sectarianism, and a boroughmongering Papacy round their hereditary leaders—the Peers. The House of Lords, therefore, at this moment represents everything in the realm except the Whig oligarchs, their tools—the Dissenters, and their masters—the Irish priests. In the meantime the Whigs bawl aloud that there is a 'collision'! It is true there is a collision; but it is not a collision between the Lords and the people, but between the Ministers and the Constitution.



CHAPTER III.

The Menace to England

IT MAY be as well to remind the English nation that a revolutionary party is not necessarily a liberal one, and that a republic is not indispensably a democracy. Such is the disposition of property in England that, were a republic to be established here to-morrow, it would partake rather of the oligarchical than of the aristocratic character. We should be surprised to find in how few families the power of the State was concentrated. And although the framers of the new commonwealth would be too crafty to base it on any avowed and ostensible principle of exclusion, but on the contrary would in all probability ostentatiously inaugurate the novel constitution by virtue of some abstract plea about as definite and as prodigal of practical effects as the rights of man or the sovereignty of the people, nevertheless I should be astonished were we not to find that the great mass of the nation, as far as any share in the conduct of public affairs was concerned, was as completely shut out from the fruition and exercise of power as under that Venetian polity which has ever been the secret object of Whig envy and Whig admiration. The Church, under such circumstances, would probably have again been plundered, and therefore the discharge of ecclesiastical duties might be spared to the nation; but the people would assuredly be practically excluded from its services, which would swarm with the relations and connections of the senatorial class; for, whether this country be governed only by the House of Commons, or only by the House of Lords, the elements of the single chamber will not materially differ; and although in the event of the triumph of the Commons, the ceremony of periodical election may be retained (and we should not forget that the Long Parliament soon spared us that unnecessary form), the selected members will form a Senate as irresponsible as any House of Parliament whose anomalous constitution may now be the object of Whig sneers or Radical anathemas.

The rights and liberties of a nation can only be preserved by institutions. It is not the spread of knowledge or the march of intellect that will be found a sufficient surety for the public welfare in the crisis of a country's freedom. Our interest taints our intelligence, our passions paralyse our reason. Knowledge and capacity are too often the willing tools of a powerful faction or a dexterous adventurer. Life, is short, man is imaginative; our means are limited, our passions high.

In seasons of great popular excitement, gold and glory offer strong temptations to needy ability. The demagogues throughout a country, the orators of town-councils and vestries, and the lecturers of mechanics' institutes present, doubtless in most cases unconsciously, the ready and fit machinery for the party or the individual that aspires to establish a tyranny. Duly graduating in corruption, the leaders of the mob become the oppressors of the people. Cultivation of intellect and diffusion of knowledge may make the English nation more sensible of the benefits of their social system, and better qualified to discharge the duties with which their institutions have invested them, but they will never render them competent to preserve their liberties without the aid of these institutions. Let us for a moment endeavour to fancy Whiggism in a state of rampant predominance; let us try to contemplate England enjoying all those advantages which our present rulers have not yet granted us, and some of which they have as yet only ventured to promise by innuendo. Let us suppose our ancient monarchy abolished, our independent hierarchy reduced to a stipendiary sect, the gentlemen of England deprived of their magisterial functions, and metropolitan prefects and sub-prefects established in the counties and principal towns, commanding a vigorous and vigilant police, and backed by an army under the immediate orders of a single House of Parliament. Why, these are threatened changes—aye, and not one of them that may not be brought about to-morrow, under the plea of the 'spirit of the age' or 'county reform' or 'cheap government.' But where then will be the liberties of England? Who will dare disobey London?—the enlightened and reformed metropolis! And can we think, if any bold squire, in whom some of the old blood might still chance to linger, were to dare to murmur against this grinding tyranny, or appeal to the spirit of those neighbours whose predecessors his ancestors had protected, can we flatter ourselves that there would not be judges in Westminster Hall prepared and prompt to inflict on him all the pains and penalties, the dungeon, the fine, the sequestration, which such a troublesome Anti-Reformer would clearly deserve? Can we flatter ourselves that a Parliamentary Star Chamber and a Parliamentary High Commission Court would not be in the background to supply all the deficiencies of the laws of England? When these merry times arrive—the times of extraordinary tribunals and extraordinary taxes—and, if we proceed in our present course, they are much nearer than we imagine-the phrase 'Anti-Reformer' will serve as well as that of 'Malignant,' and be as valid a plea as the former title for harassing and plundering all those who venture to wince under the crowning mercies of centralisation.

Behold the Republic of the Whigs! Behold the only Republic that can be established in England except by force! And who can doubt the swift and stern termination of institutions introduced by so unnatural and irrational a process. I would address myself to the English Radicals. I do not mean those fine gentlemen or those vulgar adventurers who, in this age of quackery, may sail into Parliament by hoisting for the nonce the false colours of the movement; but I mean that honest and considerable party, too considerable, I fear, for their happiness and the safety of the State-who have a definite object which they distinctly avow—I mean those thoughtful and enthusiastic men who study their unstamped press, and ponder over a millennium of operative amelioration. Not merely that which is just, but that which is also practicable, should be the aim of a sagacious politician. Let the Radicals well consider whether, in attempting to achieve their avowed object, they are not, in fact, only assisting the secret views of a party whose scheme is infinitely more adverse to their own than the existing system, whose genius I believe they entirely misapprehend. The monarchy of the Tories is more democratic than the Republic of the Whigs. It appeals with a keener sympathy to the passions of the millions; it studies their interest with a more comprehensive solicitude. Admitting for a moment that I have mistaken the genius of the English constitution, what chance, if our institutions be overthrown, is there of substituting in their stead a more popular polity? This hazard, both for their own happiness and the honour of their country, the English Radicals are bound to calculate nicely. If they do not, they will find themselves, too late, the tools of a selfish faction or the slaves of a stern usurper.



CHAPTER IV.

The English Constitution

A CHAPTER on the English constitution is a natural episode on the spirit of Whiggism. There is this connection between the subjects—that the spirit of Whiggism is hostile to the English constitution. No political institutions ever yet flourished which have been more the topic of discussion among writers of all countries and all parties than our famous establishment of 'King, Lords, and Commons;' and no institutions ever yet flourished, of which the character has been more misrepresented and more misconceived. One fact alone will illustrate the profound ignorance and the perplexed ideas. The present Whig leader of the House of Commons, a member of a family who pique themselves on their constitutional reputation, an author who has even written an elaborate treatise on our polity, in one of his speeches, delivered only so late as the last session of Parliament, declared his desire and determination to uphold the present settlement of the 'three estates of the realm, viz.—King, Lords, and Commons.' Now, his Gracious Majesty is no more an estate of the realm than Lord John Russell himself. The three estates of the realm are the estate of the Lords Spiritual, the estate of the Lords Temporal, and the estate of the Commons. An estate is a popular class established into a political order. It is a section of the nation invested for the public and common good with certain powers and privileges. Lord John Russell first writes upon the English constitution, and then reforms it, and yet, even at this moment, is absolutely ignorant of what it consists. A political estate is a complete and independent body. Now, all power that is independent is necessarily irresponsible. The sovereign is responsible because he is not an estate; he is responsible through his Ministers; he is responsible to the estates and to them alone.

When the Whigs obtained power in 1830, they found the three estates of the realm opposed to them, and the Government, therefore, could not proceed. They resolved, therefore, to remodel them. They declared that the House of Commons was the House of the people, and that the people were not properly represented. They consequently enlarged the estate of the Commons; they increased the number of that privileged order who appear by their representatives in the Lower House of Parliament. They rendered the estate of the Commons more powerful by this proceeding, because they rendered them more numerous; but they did not render their representatives one jot more the representatives of the people. Throwing the Commons of Ireland out of the question, for we cannot speculate upon a political order so unsettled that it has been thrice remodelled during the present century, some 300,000 individuals sent up, at the last general election, their representatives to Westminster.

Well, are these 300,000 persons the people of England? Grant that they are; grant that these members are divided into two equal portions. Well, then, the people of England consist of 150,000 persons. I know that there are well-disposed persons that tremble at this reasoning, because, although they admit its justice, they allege it leads to universal suffrage. We must not show, they assert, that the House of the people is not elected by the people. I admit it; we must not show that the House of the people is not elected by the people, but we must show that the House of Commons is not the House of the people, that it never was intended to be the House of the people, and that, if it be admitted to be so by courtesy, or become so in fact, it is all over with the English constitution.

It is quite impossible that a whole people can be a branch of a legislature. If a whole people have the power of making laws, it is folly to suppose that they will allow an assembly of 300 or 400 individuals, or a solitary being on a throne, to thwart their sovereign will and pleasure. But I deny that a people can govern itself. Self-government is a contradiction in terms. Whatever form a government may assume, power must be exercised by a minority of numbers. I shall, perhaps, be reminded of the ancient republics. I answer, that the ancient republics were as aristocratic communities as any that flourished in the middle ages. The Demos of Athens was an oligarchy living upon slaves. There is a great slave population even in the United States, if a society of yesterday is to illustrate an argument on our ancient civilisation.

But it is useless to argue the question abstractedly.

The phrase 'the people' is sheer nonsense. It is not a political term. It is a phrase of natural history. A people is a species; a civilised community is a nation. Now, a nation is a work of art and a work of time. A nation is gradually created by a variety of influences—the influence of original organisation, of climate, soil, religion, laws, customs, manners, extraordinary accidents and incidents in their history, and the individual character of their illustrious citizens. These influences create the nation—these form the national mind, and produce in the course of centuries a high degree of civilisation. If you destroy the political institutions which these influences have called into force, and which are the machinery by which they constantly act, you destroy the nation. The nation, in a state of anarchy and dissolution, then becomes a people; and after experiencing all the consequent misery, like a company of bees spoiled of their queen and rifled of their hive, they set to again and establish themselves into a society.

Although all society is artificial, the most artificial society in the world is unquestionably the English nation. Our insular situation and our foreign empire, our immense accumulated wealth and our industrious character, our peculiar religious state, which secures alike orthodoxy and toleration, our church and our sects, our agriculture and our manufactures, our military services, our statute law, and supplementary equity, our adventurous commerce, landed tenure, and unprecedented system of credit, form, among many others, such a variety of interests, and apparently so conflicting, that I do not think even the Abbe Sieyes himself could devise a scheme by which this nation could be absolutely and definitely represented.

The framers of the English constitution were fortunately not of the school of Abbe Sieyes. Their first object was to make us free; their next to keep us so. While, therefore, they selected equality as the basis of their social order, they took care to blend every man's ambition with the perpetuity of the State. Unlike the levelling equality of modern days, the ancient equality of England elevates and creates. Learned in human nature, the English constitution holds out privilege to every subject as the inducement to do his duty. As it has secured freedom, justice, and even property to the humblest of the commonwealth, so, pursuing the same system of privileges, it has confided the legislature of the realm to two orders of the subjects—orders, however, in which every English citizen may be constitutionally enrolled—the Lords and the Commons. The two estates of the Peers are personally summoned to meet in their chamber: the more extensive and single estate of the Commons meets by its representatives. Both are political orders, complete in their character, independent in their authority, legally irresponsible for the exercise of their power. But they are the trustees of the nation, not its masters; and there is a High Court of Chancery in the public opinion of the nation at large, which exercises a vigilant control over these privileged classes of the community, and to which they are equitably and morally amenable. Estimating, therefore, the moral responsibility of our political estates, it may fairly be maintained that, instead of being irresponsible, the responsibility of the Lords exceeds that of the Commons. The House of Commons itself not being an estate of the realm, but only the representatives of an estate, owes to the nation a responsibility neither legal nor moral. The House of Commons is responsible only to that privileged order who are its constituents. Between the Lords and the Commons themselves there is this prime difference—that the Lords are known, and seen, and marked; the Commons are unknown, invisible, and unobserved. The Lords meet in a particular spot; the Commons are scattered over the kingdom. The eye of the nation rests upon the Lords, few in number, and notable in position; the eye of the nation wanders in vain for the Commons, far more numerous, but far less remarkable. As a substitute the nation appeals to the House of Commons, but sometimes appeals in vain; for if the majority of the Commons choose to support their representatives in a course of conduct adverse to the opinion of the nation, the House of Commons will set the nation at defiance. They have done so once; may they never repeat that destructive career! Such are our two Houses of Parliament—the most illustrious assemblies since the Roman Senate and Grecian Areopagus; neither of them is the 'House of the People,' but both alike represent the 'Nation.'



CHAPTER V.

A True Democracy

THERE are two propositions, which, however at the first glance they may appear to contradict the popular opinions of the day, are nevertheless, as I believe, just and true. And they are these:—First. That there is no probability of ever establishing a more democratic form of government than the present English constitution.

Second. That the recent political changes of the Whigs are, in fact, a departure from the democratic spirit of that constitution.

Whatever form a government may assume, its spirit must be determined by the laws which regulate the property of the country. You may have a Senate and Consuls, you may have no hereditary titles, and you may dub each householder or inhabitant a citizen; but if the spirit of your laws preserves masses of property in a particular class, the government of the country will follow the disposition of the property. So also you may have an apparent despotism without any formal popular control, and with no aristocracy, either natural or artificial, and the spirit of the government may nevertheless be republican. Thus the ancient polity of Rome, in its best days, was an aristocracy, and the government of Constantinople is the nearest approach to a democracy on a great scale, and maintained during a great period, that history offers. The constitution of France during the last half century has been fast approaching that of the Turks. The barbarous Jacobins blended modern equality with the refined civilisation of ancient France; the barbarous Ottomans blended their equality with the refined civilisation of ancient Rome. Paris secured to the Jacobins those luxuries that their system never could have produced: Byzantium served the same purpose to the Turks. Both the French and their turbaned prototypes commenced their system with popular enthusiasm, and terminated it with general subjection. Napoleon and Louis Philippe are playing the same part as the Suleimans and the Mahmouds. The Chambers are but a second-rate Divan, the Prefects but inferior Pachas: a solitary being rules alike in the Seraglio and the Tuileries, and the whole nation bows to his despotism on condition that they have no other master save himself.

The disposition of property in England throws the government of the country into the hands of its natural aristocracy. I do not believe that any scheme of the suffrage, or any method of election, could divert that power into other quarters. It is the necessary consequence of our present social state. I believe, the wider the popular suffrage, the more powerful would be the natural aristocracy. This seems to me an inevitable consequence; but I admit this proposition on the clear understanding that such an extension should be established on a fair, and not a factious, basis.

Here, then, arises the question of the ballot, into the merits of which. I shall take another opportunity of entering, recording only now my opinion, that in the present arrangement of the constituencies, even the ballot would favour the power of the natural aristocracy, and that, if the ballot were simultaneously introduced with a fair and not a factious extension of the suffrage, it would produce no difference whatever in the ultimate result.

Quitting, then, these considerations, let us arrive at the important point. Is there any probability of a different disposition of property in England—a disposition of property which, by producing a very general similarity of condition, would throw the government of the country into the hands of any individuals whom popular esteem or fancy might select?

It appears to me that this question can only be decided by ascertaining the genius of the English nation. What is the prime characteristic of the English mind? I apprehend I may safely decide upon its being industry. Taking a general but not a superficial survey of the English character since the Reformation, a thousand circumstances convince me that the salient point in our national psychology is the passion for accumulating wealth, of which industry is the chief instrument. We value our freedom principally because it leaves us unrestricted in our pursuits; and that reverence for law and for all that is established, which also eminently distinguishes the English nation, is occasioned by the conviction that, next to liberty, order is the most efficacious assistant of industry.

And thus we see that those great revolutions which must occur in the history of all nations when they happen here produce no permanent effects upon our social state. Our revolutions are brought about by the passions of creative minds taking advantage, for their own aggrandisement, of peculiar circumstances in our national progress. They are never called for by the great body of the nation. Churches are plundered, long rebellions maintained, dynasties changed, parliaments abolished; but when the storm is passed, the features of the social landscape remain unimpaired; there are no traces of the hurricane, the earthquake, or the volcano; it has been but a tumult of the atmosphere, that has neither toppled down our old spires and palaces nor swallowed up our cities and seats of learning, nor blasted our ancient woods, nor swept away our ports and harbours. The English nation ever recurs to its ancient institutions—the institutions that have alike secured freedom and order; and after all their ebullitions, we find them, when the sky is clear, again at work, and toiling on at their eternal task of accumulation.

There is this difference between the revolutions of England and the revolutions of the Continent—the European revolution is a struggle against privilege; an English revolution is a struggle for it. If a new class rises in the State, it becomes uneasy to take its place in the natural aristocracy of the land: a desperate faction or a wily leader takes advantage of this desire, and a revolution is the consequence. Thus the Whigs in the present day have risen to power on the shoulders of the manufacturing interest. To secure themselves in their posts, the Whigs have given the new interest an undue preponderance; but the new interest, having obtained its object, is content. The manufacturer, like every other Englishman, is as aristocratic as the landlord. The manufacturer begins to lack in movement. Under Walpole the Whigs played the same game with the commercial interests; a century has passed, and the commercial interests are all as devoted to the constitution as the manufacturers soon will be. Having no genuine party, the Whigs seek for succour from the Irish papists; Lord John Russell, however, is only imitating Pym under the same circumstances. In 1640, when the English movement was satisfied, and the constitutional party, headed by such men as Falkland and Hyde, were about to attain power, Pym and his friends, in despair at their declining influence and the close divisions in their once unanimous Parliament, fled to the Scotch Covenanters, and entered into a 'close compact' for the destruction of the Church of England as the price of their assistance. So events repeat themselves; but if the study of history is really to profit us, the nation at the present day will take care that the same results do not always occur from the same events.

When passions have a little subsided, the industrious ten-pounder, who has struggled into the privileged order of the Commons, proud of having obtained the first step of aristocracy, will be the last man to assist in destroying the other gradations of the scale which he or his posterity may yet ascend; while the new member of a manufacturing district has his eye already upon a neighbouring park, avails himself of his political position to become a county magistrate, meditates upon a baronetcy, and dreams of a coroneted descendant.

The nation that esteems wealth as the great object of existence will submit to no laws that do not secure the enjoyment of wealth. Now, we deprive wealth of its greatest source of enjoyment, as well as of its best security, if we deprive it of power. The English nation, therefore, insists that property shall be the qualification for power, and the whole scope of its laws and customs is to promote and favour the accumulation of wealth and the perpetuation of property. We cannot alter, therefore, the disposition of property in this country without we change the national character. Far from the present age being hostile to the supremacy of property, there has been no period of our history where property has been more esteemed, because there has been no period when the nation has been so industrious.

Believing, therefore, that no change will occur in the disposition of property in this country, I cannot comprehend how our government can become more democratic. The consequence of our wealth is an aristocratic constitution; the consequence of our love of liberty is an aristocratic constitution founded on an equality of civil rights. And who can deny that an aristocratic constitution resting on such a basis, where the legislative, and even the executive office may be obtained by every subject of the realm, is, in fact, a noble democracy? The English constitution, faithful to the national character, secures to all the enjoyment of property and the delights of freedom. Its honours are a perpetual reward of industry; every Englishman is toiling to obtain them; and this is the constitution to which every Englishman will always be devoted, except he is a Whig.

In the next Chapter I shall discuss the second proposition.



CHAPTER VI.

Results of Whiggism

THE Tories assert that the whole property of the country is on their side; and the Whigs, wringing their hands over lost elections and bellowing about 'intimidation,' seem to confess the soft impeachment. Their prime organ also assures us that every man with 500L. per annum is opposed to them. Yet the Whig-Radical writers have recently published, by way of consolation to their penniless proselytes, a list of some twenty Dukes and Marquises, who, they assure us, are devoted to 'Liberal' principles, and whose revenues, in a paroxysm of economical rhodomontade, they assert, could buy up the whole income of the rest of the hereditary Peerage. The Whig-Radical writers seem puzzled to reconcile this anomalous circumstance with the indisputably forlorn finances of their faction in general. Now, this little tract on the 'Spirit of Whiggism' may perhaps throw some light upon this perplexing state of affairs. For myself, I see in it only a fresh illustration of the principles which I have demonstrated, from the whole current of our history, to form the basis of Whig policy. This union of oligarchical wealth and mob poverty is the very essence of the 'Spirit of Whiggism.'

The English constitution, which, from the tithing-man to the Peer of Parliament, has thrown the whole government of the country into the hands of those who are qualified by property to perform the duties of their respective offices, has secured that diffused and general freedom, without which the national industry would neither have its fair play nor its just reward, by a variety of institutions, which, while they prevent those who have no property from invading the social commonwealth, in whose classes every industrious citizen has a right to register himself, offer also an equally powerful check to the ambitious fancies of those great families, over whose liberal principles and huge incomes the Whig-Radical writers gloat with the self-complacency of lackeys at the equipages of their masters. There is ever an union in a perverted sense between those who are beneath power and those who wish to be above it; and oligarchies and despotisms are usually established by the agency of a deluded multitude. The Crown, with its constitutional influence over the military services, a Parliament of two houses watching each other's proceedings with constitutional jealousy, an independent hierarchy and, not least, an independent magistracy, are serious obstacles in the progressive establishment of that scheme of government which a small knot of great families—these dukes and marquises, whose revenues according to the Government organ, could buy up the income of the whole peerage-naturally wish to introduce. We find, therefore, throughout the whole period of our more modern history, a powerful section of the great nobles ever at war with the national institutions, checking the Crown, attacking the independence of that House of Parliament in which they happen to be in a minority—no matter which, patronising sects to reduce the influence of the Church, and playing town against country to overcome the authority of the gentry.

It is evident that these aspiring oligarchs, as a party, can have little essential strength; they can count upon nothing but their retainers. To secure the triumph of their cause, therefore, they are forced to manoeuvre with a pretext, and while they aim at oligarchical rule, they apparently advocate popular rights. They hold out, consequently, an inducement to all the uneasy portion of the nation to enlist under their standard; they play their discontented minority against the prosperous majority, and, dubbing their partisans 'the people,' they flatter themselves that their projects are irresistible. The attack is unexpected, brisk, and dashing, well matured, dexterously mystified. Before the nation is roused to its danger, the oligarchical object is often obtained; and then the oligarchy, entrenched in power, count upon the nation to defend them from their original and revolutionary allies. If they succeed, a dynasty is changed, or a Parliament reformed, and the movement is stopped; if the Tories or the Conservatives cannot arrest the fatal career which the Whigs have originally impelled, then away go the national institutions; the crown falls from the King's brow; the crosier is snapped in twain; one House of Parliament is sure to disappear, and the gentlemen of England, dexterously dubbed Malignants, or Anti-Reformers, or any other phrase in fashion, the dregs of the nation sequester their estates and install themselves in their halls; and 'liberal principles' having thus gloriously triumphed, after a due course of plunder, bloodshed, imprisonment, and ignoble tyranny, the people of England, sighing once more to be the English nation, secure order by submitting to a despot, and in time, when they have got rid of their despot, combine their ancient freedom with their newly-regained security by re-establishing the English constitution.

The Whigs of the present day have made their assault upon the nation with their usual spirit. They have already succeeded in controlling the sovereign and in remodelling the House of Commons. They have menaced the House of Lords, violently assailed the Church, and reconstructed the Corporations. I shall take the two most comprehensive measures which they have succeeded in carrying, and which were at the time certainly very popular, and apparently of a very democratic character,-their reform of the House of Commons, and their reconstruction of the municipal corporations. Let us see whether these great measures have, in fact, increased the democratic character of our constitution or not—whether they veil an oligarchical project, or are, in fact, popular concessions inevitably offered by the Whigs in their oligarchical career.

The result of the Whig remodelling of the order of the Commons has been this—that it has placed the nomination of the Government in the hands of the popish priesthood. Is that a great advance of public intelligence and popular liberty? Are the parliamentary nominees of M'Hale and Kehoe more germane to the feelings of the English nation, more adapted to represent their interests, than the parliamentary nominees of a Howard or a Percy? This papist majority, again, is the superstructure of a basis formed by some Scotch Presbyterians and some English Dissenters, in general returned by the small constituencies of small towns—classes whose number and influence, intelligence and wealth, have been grossly exaggerated for factious purposes, but classes avowedly opposed to the maintenance of the English constitution. I do not see that the cause of popular power has much risen, even with the addition of this leaven. If the suffrages of the Commons of England were polled together, the hustings-books of the last general election will prove that a very considerable majority of their numbers is opposed to the present Government, and that therefore, under this new democratic scheme, this great body of the nation are, by some hocus-pocus tactics or other, obliged to submit to the minority. The truth is, that the new constituency has been so arranged that an unnatural preponderance has been given to a small class, and one hostile to the interests of the great body. Is this more democratic? The apparent majority in the House of Commons is produced by a minority of the Commons themselves; so that a small and favoured class command a majority in the House of Commons, and the sway of the administration, as far as that House is concerned, is regulated by a smaller number of individuals than those who governed it previous to its reform.

But this is not the whole evil: this new class, with its unnatural preponderance, is a class hostile to the institutions of the country, hostile to the union of Church and State, hostile to the House of Lords, to the constitutional power of the Crown, to the existing system of provincial judicature. It is, therefore, a class fit and willing to support the Whigs in their favourite scheme of centralisation, without which the Whigs can never long maintain themselves in power. Now, centralisation is the death-blow of public freedom; it is the citadel of the oligarchs, from which, if once erected, it will be impossible to dislodge them. But can that party be aiming at centralised government which has reformed the municipal corporations? We will see. The reform of the municipal corporations of England is a covert attack on the authority of the English gentry,-that great body which perhaps forms the most substantial existing obstacle to the perpetuation of Whiggism in power. By this democratic Act the county magistrate is driven from the towns where he before exercised a just influence, while an elective magistrate from the towns jostles him on the bench at quarter sessions, and presents in his peculiar position an anomaly in the constitution of the bench, flattering to the passions, however fatal to the interests, of the giddy million. Here is a lever to raise the question of county reform whenever an obstinate shire may venture to elect a representative in Parliament hostile to the liberal oligarchs. Let us admit, for the moment, that the Whigs ultimately succeed in subverting the ancient and hereditary power of the English gentry. Will the municipal corporations substitute themselves as an equivalent check on a centralising Government? Whence springs their influence? From property? Not half a dozen have estates. Their influence springs from the factitious power with which the reforming Government has invested them, and of which the same Government will deprive them in a session, the moment they cease to be corresponding committees of the reforming majority in the House of Commons. They will either be swept away altogether, or their functions will be limited to raising the local taxes which will discharge their expenses of the detachment of the metropolitan police, or the local judge or governor, whom Downing Street may send down to preside over their constituents. With one or two exceptions, the English corporations do not possess more substantial and durable elements of power than the municipalities of France. What check are they on Paris? These corporations have neither prescription in their favour, nor property. Their influence is maintained neither by tradition nor substance. They have no indirect authority over the minds of their townsmen; they have only their modish charters to appeal to, and the newly engrossed letter of the law. They have no great endowments of whose public benefits they are the official distributers; they do not stand on the vantage-ground on which we recognise the trustees of the public interests; they neither administer to the soul nor the body; they neither feed the poor nor educate the young; they have no hold on the national mind; they have not sprung from the national character; they were born by faction, and they will live by faction. Such bodies must speedily become corrupt; they will ultimately be found dangerous instruments in the hands of a faction. The members of the country corporations will play the game of a London party, to secure their factitious local importance and obtain the consequent results of their opportune services.

I think I have now established the two propositions with which I commenced my last chapter: and will close this concluding one of the 'Spirit of Whiggism' with their recapitulation, and the inferences which I draw from them. If there be a slight probability of ever establishing in this country a more democratic government than the English constitution, it will be as well, I conceive, for those who love their rights, to maintain that constitution; and if the more recent measures of the Whigs, however plausible their first aspect, have, in fact, been a departure from the democratic character of that constitution, it will be as well for the English nation to oppose, with all their heart, and all their soul, and all their strength, the machinations of the Whigs and the 'Spirit of Whiggism.'

THE END