No More Learning

There was a society which undertook the office of giving gentlemen a
liberal education on low terms, and which assumed the sounding name of
the Royal Academies Company. In a pompous advertisement it was announced
that the directors of the Royal Academies Company had engaged the best
masters in every branch of knowledge, and were about to issue twenty
thousand tickets at twenty shillings each. There was to be a lottery;
two thousand prizes were to be drawn; and the fortunate holders of the
prizes were to be taught, at the charge of the Company, Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, French, Spanish, conic sections, trigonometry, heraldry,
japanning, fortification, bookkeeping and the art of playing the
theorbo. Some of these companies took large mansions and printed their
advertisements in gilded letters. Others, less ostentatious, were
content with ink, and met at coffeehouses in the neighbourhood of the
Royal Exchange. Jonathan's and Garraway's were in a constant ferment
with brokers, buyers, sellers, meetings of directors, meetings
of proprietors. Time bargains soon came into fashion. Extensive
combinations were formed, and monstrous fables were circulated, for
the purpose of raising or depressing the price of shares. Our country
witnessed for the first time those phenomena with which a long
experience has made us familiar. A mania of which the symptoms were
essentially the same with those of the mania of 1720, of the mania of
1825, of the mania of 1845, seized the public mind. An impatience to
be rich, a contempt for those slow but sure gains which are the proper
reward of industry, patience and thrift, spread through society. The
spirit of the cogging dicers of Whitefriars took possession of the grave
Senators of the City, Wardens of Trades, Deputies, Aldermen. It was
much easier and much more lucrative to put forth a lying prospectus
announcing a new stock, to persuade ignorant people that the dividends
could not fall short of twenty per cent. , and to part with five thousand
pounds of this imaginary wealth for ten thousand solid guineas, than to
load a ship with a well chosen cargo for Virginia or the Levant. Every
day some new bubble was puffed into existence, rose buoyant, shone
bright, burst, and was forgotten. [368]

The new form which covetousness had taken furnished the comic poets
and satirists with an excellent subject; nor was that subject the
less welcome to them because some of the most unscrupulous and most
successful of the new race of gamesters were men in sad coloured clothes
and lank hair, men who called cards the Devil's books, men who thought
it a sin and a scandal to win or lose twopence over a backgammon board.
It was in the last drama of Shadwell that the hypocrisy and knavery of
these speculators was, for the first time, exposed to public ridicule.
He died in November 1692, just before his Stockjobbers came on the
stage; and the epilogue was spoken by an actor dressed in deep mourning.
The best scene is that in which four or five stern Nonconformists,
clad in the full Puritan costume, after discussing the prospects of
the Mousetrap Company and the Fleakilling Company, examine the question
whether the godly may lawfully hold stock in a Company for bringing over
Chinese ropedancers. "Considerable men have shares," says one austere
person in cropped hair and bands; "but verily I question whether it
be lawful or not. " These doubts are removed by a stout old Roundhead
colonel who had fought at Marston Moor, and who reminds his weaker
brother that the saints need not themselves see the ropedancing, and
that, in all probability, there will be no ropedancing to see. "The
thing," he says, "is like to take; the shares will sell well; and then
we shall not care whether the dancers come over or no. " It is important
to observe that this scene was exhibited and applauded before one
farthing of the national debt had been contracted. So ill informed were
the numerous writers who, at a later period, ascribed to the national
debt the existence of stockjobbing and of all the immoralities connected
with stockjobbing. The truth is that society had, in the natural course
of its growth, reached a point at which it was inevitable that there
should be stockjobbing whether there were a national debt or not, and
inevitable also that, if there were a long and costly war, there should
be a national debt.

How indeed was it possible that a debt should not have been contracted,
when one party was impelled by the strongest motives to borrow, and
another was impelled by equally strong motives to lend? A moment had
arrived at which the government found it impossible, without exciting
the most formidable discontents, to raise by taxation the supplies
necessary to defend the liberty and independence of the nation; and, at
that very moment, numerous capitalists were looking round them in vain
for some good mode of investing their savings, and, for want of such
a mode, were keeping their wealth locked up, or were lavishing it on
absurd projects. Riches sufficient to equip a navy which would sweep the
German Ocean and the Atlantic of French privateers, riches sufficient
to maintain an army which might retake Namur and avenge the disaster of
Steinkirk, were lying idle, or were passing away from the owners into
the hands of sharpers. A statesman might well think that some part of
the wealth which was daily buried or squandered might, with advantage to
the proprietor, to the taxpayer and to the State, be attracted into the
Treasury. Why meet the extraordinary charge of a year of war by seizing
the chairs, the tables, the beds of hardworking families, by compelling
one country gentleman to cut down his trees before they were ready for
the axe, another to let the cottages on his land fall to ruin, a third
to take away his hopeful son from the University, when Change Alley was
swarming with people who did not know what to do with their money and
who were pressing every body to borrow it?

It was often asserted at a later period by Tories, who hated the
national debt most of all things, and who hated Burnet most of all men,
that Burnet was the person who first advised the government to contract
a national debt. But this assertion is proved by no trustworthy
evidence, and seems to be disproved by the Bishop's silence. Of all men
he was the least likely to conceal the fact that an important fiscal
revolution had been his work. Nor was the Board of Treasury at that time
one which much needed, or was likely much to regard, the counsels of a
divine. At that Board sate Godolphin the most prudent and experienced,
and Montague the most daring and inventive of financiers. Neither of
these eminent men could be ignorant that it had long been the practice
of the neighbouring states to spread over many years of peace the
excessive taxation which was made necessary by one year of war. In Italy
this practice had existed through many generations. France had, during
the war which began in 1672 and ended in 1679, borrowed not less than
thirty millions of our money. Sir William Temple, in his interesting
work on the Batavian federation, had told his countrymen that, when he
was ambassador at the Hague, the single province of Holland, then ruled
by the frugal and prudent De Witt, owed about five millions sterling,
for which interest at four per cent. was always ready to the day, and
that when any part of the principal was paid off the public creditor
received his money with tears, well knowing that he could find no other
investment equally secure. The wonder is not that England should have at
length imitated the example both of her enemies and of her allies, but
that the fourth year of her arduous and exhausting struggle against
Lewis should have been drawing to a close before she resorted to an
expedient so obvious.

On the fifteenth of December 1692 the House of Commons resolved itself
into a Committee of Ways and Means. Somers took the chair. Montague
proposed to raise a million by way of loan; the proposition was
approved; and it was ordered that a bill should be brought in. The
details of the scheme were much discussed and modified; but the
principle appears to have been popular with all parties. The moneyed men
were glad to have a good opportunity of investing what they had hoarded.
The landed men, hard pressed by the load of taxation, were ready to
consent to any thing for the sake of present ease. No member ventured to
divide the House. On the twentieth of January the bill was read a third
time, carried up to the Lords by Somers, and passed by them without any
amendment. [369]

By this memorable law new duties were imposed on beer and other liquors.
These duties were to be kept in the Exchequer separate from all other
receipts, and were to form a fund on the credit of which a million was
to be raised by life annuities. As the annuitants dropped off, their
annuities were to be divided among the survivors, till the number of
survivors was reduced to seven. After that time, whatever fell in was to
go to the public. It was therefore certain that the eighteenth century
would be far advanced before the debt would be finally extinguished. The
rate of interest was to be ten per cent. till the year 1700, and after
that year seven per cent. The advantages offered to the public creditor
by this scheme may seem great, but were not more than sufficient to
compensate him for the risk which he ran. It was not impossible that
there might be a counterrevolution; and it was certain that, if there
were a counterrevolution, those who had lent money to William would lose
both interest and principal.

Such was the origin of that debt which has since become the greatest
prodigy that ever perplexed the sagacity and confounded the pride of
statesmen and philosophers. At every stage in the growth of that debt
the nation has set up the same cry of anguish and despair. At every
stage in the growth of that debt it has been seriously asserted by wise
men that bankruptcy and ruin were at hand. Yet still the debt went on
growing; and still bankruptcy and ruin were as remote as ever. When the
great contest with Lewis the Fourteenth was finally terminated by the
Peace of Utrecht, the nation owed about fifty millions; and that
debt was considered, not merely by the rude multitude, not merely by
foxhunting squires and coffeehouse orators, but by acute and profound
thinkers, as an incumbrance which would permanently cripple the body
politic; Nevertheless trade flourished; wealth increased; the nation
became richer and richer. Then came the war of the Austrian Succession;
and the debt rose to eighty millions. Pamphleteers, historians and
orators pronounced that now, at all events, our case was desperate.
Yet the signs of increasing prosperity, signs which could neither be
counterfeited nor concealed, ought to have satisfied observant and
reflecting men that a debt of eighty millions was less to the England
which was governed by Pelham than a debt of fifty millions had been to
the England which was governed by Oxford. Soon war again broke forth;
and, under the energetic and prodigal administration of the first
William Pitt, the debt rapidly swelled to a hundred and forty millions.
As soon as the first intoxication of victory was over, men of theory and
men of business almost unanimously pronounced that the fatal day had now
really arrived. The only statesman, indeed, active or speculative, who
did not share in the general delusion was Edmund Burke. David Hume,
undoubtedly one of the most profound political economists of his time,
declared that our madness had exceeded the madness of the Crusaders.
Richard Coeur de Lion and Saint Lewis had not gone in the face of
arithmetical demonstration. It was impossible to prove by figures that
the road to Paradise did not lie through the Holy Land; but it was
possible to prove by figures that the road to national ruin was through
the national debt. It was idle, however, now to talk about the road; we
had done with the road; we had reached the goal; all was over; all
the revenues of the island north of Trent and west of Reading were
mortgaged. Better for us to have been conquered by Prussia or Austria
than to be saddled with the interest of a hundred and forty millions.
[370] And yet this great philosopher--for such he was--had only to open
his eyes, and to see improvement all around him, cities increasing,
cultivation extending, marts too small for the crowd of buyers and
sellers, harbours insufficient to contain the shipping, artificial
rivers joining the chief inland seats of industry to the chief seaports,
streets better lighted, houses better furnished, richer wares exposed to
sale in statelier shops, swifter carriages rolling along smoother roads.
He had, indeed, only to compare the Edinburgh of his boyhood with
the Edinburgh of his old age. His prediction remains to posterity, a
memorable instance of the weakness from which the strongest minds
are not exempt. Adam Smith saw a little and but a little further.
He admitted that, immense as the burden was, the nation did actually
sustain it and thrive under it in a way which nobody could have
foreseen. But he warned his countrymen not to repeat so hazardous an
experiment. The limit had been reached. Even a small increase might
be fatal. [371] Not less gloomy was the view which George Grenville,
a minister eminently diligent and practical, took of our financial
situation. The nation must, he conceived, sink under a debt of a hundred
and forty millions, unless a portion of the load were borne by the
American colonies. The attempt to lay a portion of the load on the
American colonies produced another war. That war left us with an
additional hundred millions of debt, and without the colonies whose help
had been represented as indispensable. Again England was given over;
and again the strange patient persisted in becoming stronger and more
blooming in spite of all the diagnostics and prognostics of State
physicians. As she had been visibly more prosperous with a debt of a
hundred and forty millions than with a debt of fifty millions, so she,
as visibly more prosperous with a debt of two hundred and forty millions
than with a debt of a hundred and forty millions. Soon however the wars
which sprang from the French Revolution, and which far exceeded in cost
any that the world had ever seen, tasked the powers of public credit to
the utmost. When the world was again at rest the funded debt of England
amounted to eight hundred millions. If the most enlightened man had been
told, in 1792, that, in 1815, the interest on eight hundred millions
would be duly paid to the day at the Bank, he would have been as hard of
belief as if he had been told that the government would be in possession
of the lamp of Aladdin or of the purse of Fortunatus. It was in truth
a gigantic, a fabulous debt; and we can hardly wonder that the cry of
despair should have been louder than ever. But again that cry was found
to have been as unreasonable as ever. After a few years of exhaustion,
England recovered herself. Yet, like Addison's valetudinarian, who
continued to whimper that he was dying of consumption till he became so
fat that he was shamed into silence, she went on complaining that she
was sunk in poverty till her wealth showed itself by tokens which made
her complaints ridiculous. The beggared, the bankrupt society not
only proved able to meet all its obligations, but, while meeting those
obligations, grew richer and richer so fast that the growth could almost
be discerned by the eye. In every county, we saw wastes recently turned
into gardens; in every city, we saw new streets, and squares, and
markets, more brilliant lamps, more abundant supplies of water; in the
suburbs of every great seat of industry, we saw villas multiplying fast,
each embosomed in its gay little paradise of lilacs and roses. While
shallow politicians were repeating that the energies of the people were
borne down by the weight of the public burdens, the first journey was
performed by steam on a railway. Soon the island was intersected by
railways. A sum exceeding the whole amount of the national debt at the
end of the American war was, in a few years, voluntarily expended by
this ruined people in viaducts, tunnels, embankments, bridges, stations,
engines. Meanwhile taxation was almost constantly becoming lighter
and lighter; yet still the Exchequer was full. It may be now affirmed
without fear of contradiction that we find it as easy to pay the
interest of eight hundred millions as our ancestors found it, a century
ago, to pay the interest of eighty millions.

It can hardly be doubted that there must have been some great fallacy
in the notions of those who uttered and of those who believed that long
succession of confident predictions, so signally falsified by a long
succession of indisputable facts. To point out that fallacy is the
office rather of the political economist than of the historian. Here
it is sufficient to say that the prophets of evil were under a double
delusion. They erroneously imagined that there was an exact analogy
between the case of an individual who is in debt to another individual
and the case of a society which is in debt to a part of itself; and this
analogy led them into endless mistakes about the effect of the system
of funding. They were under an error not less serious touching the
resources of the country. They made no allowance for the effect produced
by the incessant progress of every experimental science, and by the
incessant efforts of every man to get on in life. They saw that the debt
grew; and they forgot that other things grew as well as the debt.

A long experience justifies us in believing that England may, in the
twentieth century, be better able to bear a debt of sixteen hundred
millions than she is at the present time to bear her present load. But
be this as it may, those who so confidently predicted that she must
sink, first under a debt of fifty millions, then under a debt of eighty
millions then under a debt of a hundred and forty millions, then under a
debt of two hundred and forty millions, and lastly under a debt of eight
hundred millions, were beyond all doubt under a twofold mistake. They
greatly overrated the pressure of the burden; they greatly underrated
the strength by which the burden was to be borne.

It may be desirable to add a few words touching the way in which the
system of funding has affected the interests of the great commonwealth
of nations. If it be true that whatever gives to intelligence an
advantage over brute force and to honesty an advantage over dishonesty
has a tendency to promote the happiness and virtue of our race, it can
scarcely be denied that, in the largest view, the effect of this system
has been salutary. For it is manifest that all credit depends on two
things, on the power of a debtor to pay debts, and on his inclination
to pay them. The power of a society to pay debts is proportioned to the
progress which that society has made in industry, in commerce, and in
all the arts and sciences which flourish under the benignant influence
of freedom and of equal law. The inclination of a society to pay
debts is proportioned to the degree in which that society respects the
obligations of plighted faith. Of the strength which consists in extent
of territory and in number of fighting men, a rude despot who knows
no law but his own childish fancies and headstrong passions, or a
convention of socialists which proclaims all property to be robbery, may
have more than falls to the lot of the best and wisest government. But
the strength which is derived from the confidence of capitalists such a
despot, such a convention, never can possess. That strength,--and it
is a strength which has decided the event of more than one great
conflict,--flies, by the law of its nature, from barbarism and fraud,
from tyranny and anarchy, to follow civilisation and virtue, liberty and
order.

While the bill which first created the funded debt of England was
passing, with general approbation, through the regular stages, the
two Houses discussed, for the first time, the great question of
Parliamentary Reform.

It is to be observed that the object of the reformers of that generation
was merely to make the representative body a more faithful interpreter
of the sense of the constituent body. It seems scarcely to have
occurred to any of them that the constituent body might be an
unfaithful interpreter of the sense of the nation. It is true that those
deformities in the structure of the constituent body, which, at length,
in our own days, raised an irresistible storm of public indignation,
were far less numerous and far less offensive in the seventeenth century
than they had become in the nineteenth. Most of the boroughs which were
disfranchised in 1832 were, if not positively, yet relatively, much more
important places in the reign of William the Third than in the reign
of William the Fourth. Of the populous and wealthy manufacturing towns,
seaports and watering places, to which the franchise was given in the
reign of William the Fourth, some were, in the reign of William the
Third, small hamlets, where a few ploughmen or fishermen lived under
thatched roofs; some were fields covered with harvests, or moors
abandoned to grouse; With the exception of Leeds and Manchester, there
was not, at the time of the Revolution, a single town of five thousand
inhabitants which did not send two representatives to the House of
Commons. Even then, however, there was no want of startling anomalies.
Looe, East and West, which contained not half the population or half the
wealth of the smallest of the hundred parishes of London, returned
as many members as London. [372] Old Sarum, a deserted ruin which the
traveller feared to enter at night lest he should find robbers lurking
there, had as much weight in the legislature as Devonshire or Yorkshire.
[373] Some eminent individuals of both parties, Clarendon, for example,
among the Tories, and Pollexfen among the Whigs, condemned this system.
Yet both parties were, for very different reasons, unwilling to alter
it. It was protected by the prejudices of one faction and by the
interests of the other. Nothing could be more repugnant to the genius of
Toryism than the thought of destroying at a blow institutions which
had stood through ages, for the purpose of building something more
symmetrical out of the ruins. The Whigs, on the other hand, could not
but know that they were much more likely to lose than to gain by a
change in this part of our polity. It would indeed be a great mistake
to imagine that a law transferring political power from small to large
constituent bodies would have operated in 1692 as it operated in 1832.

In 1832 the effect of the transfer was to increase the power of the town
population. In 1692 the effect would have been to make the power of the
rural population irresistible. Of the one hundred and forty-two members
taken away in 1832 from small boroughs more than half were given to
large and flourishing towns. But in 1692 there was hardly one large and
flourishing town which had not already as many members as it could, with
any show of reason, claim. Almost all therefore that was taken from the
small boroughs must have been given to the counties; and there can be
no doubt that whatever tended to raise the counties and to depress the
towns must on the whole have tended to raise the Tories and to depress
the Whigs. From the commencement of our civil troubles the towns had
been on the side of freedom and progress, the country gentlemen and
the country clergymen on the side of authority and prescription. If
therefore a reform bill, disfranchising small constituent bodies and
giving additional members to large constituent bodies, had become law
soon after the Revolution, there can be little doubt that a decided
majority of the House of Commons would have consisted of rustic baronets
and squires, high Churchmen, high Tories, and half Jacobites. With such
a House of Commons it is almost certain that there would have been a
persecution of the Dissenters; it is not easy to understand how there
could have been an union with Scotland; and it is not improbable that
there would have been a restoration of the Stuarts. Those parts of
our constitution therefore which, in recent times, politicians of
the liberal school have generally considered as blemishes, were, five
generations ago, regarded with complacency by the men who were most
zealous for civil and religious freedom.

But, while Whigs and Tories agreed in wishing to maintain the existing
rights of election, both Whigs and Tories were forced to admit that
the relation between the elector and the representative was not what it
ought to be. Before the civil wars the House of Commons had enjoyed
the fullest confidence of the nation. A House of Commons, distrusted,
despised, hated by the Commons, was a thing unknown. The very words
would, to Sir Peter Wentworth or Sir Edward Coke, have sounded like
a contradiction in terms. But by degrees a change took place. The
Parliament elected in 1661, during that fit of joy and fondness which
followed the return of the royal family, represented, not the deliberate
sense, but the momentary caprice of the nation. Many of the members were
men who, a few months earlier or a few months later, would have had
no chance of obtaining seats, men of broken fortunes and of dissolute
habits, men whose only claim to public confidence was the ferocious
hatred which they bore to rebels and Puritans. The people, as soon as
they had become sober, saw with dismay to what an assembly they had,
during their intoxication, confided the care of their property, their
liberty and their religion. And the choice, made in a moment of frantic
enthusiasm, might prove to be a choice for life. As the law then stood,
it depended entirely on the King's pleasure whether, during his reign,
the electors should have an opportunity of repairing their error.
Eighteen years passed away. A new generation grew up. To the fervid
loyalty with which Charles had been welcomed back to Dover succeeded
discontent and disaffection. The general cry was that the kingdom was
misgoverned, degraded, given up as a prey to worthless men and more
worthless women, that our navy had been found unequal to a contest with
Holland, that our independence had been bartered for the gold of France,
that our consciences were in danger of being again subjected to the yoke
of Rome. The people had become Roundheads; but the body which alone
was authorised to speak in the name of the people was still a body of
Cavaliers. It is true that the King occasionally found even that House
of Commons unmanageable. From the first it had contained not a few true
Englishmen; others had been introduced into it as vacancies were made by
death; and even the majority, courtly as it was, could not but feel some
sympathy with the nation. A country party grew up and became formidable.
But that party constantly found its exertions frustrated by systematic
corruption. That some members of the legislature received direct bribes
was with good reason suspected, but could not be proved. That the
patronage of the Crown was employed on an extensive scale for the
purpose of influencing votes was matter of notoriety. A large proportion
of those who gave away the public money in supplies received part of
that money back in salaries; and thus was formed a mercenary band on
which the Court might, in almost any extremity, confidently rely.

The servility of this Parliament had left a deep impression on the
public mind. It was the general opinion that England ought to be
protected against all risk of being ever again represented, during a
long course of years, by men who had forfeited her confidence, and who
were retained by a fee to vote against her wishes and interests. The
subject was mentioned in the Convention; and some members wished to deal
with it while the throne was still vacant. The cry for reform had ever
since been becoming more and more importunate. The people, heavily
pressed by taxes, were naturally disposed to regard those who lived on
the taxes with little favour. The war, it was generally acknowledged,
was just and necessary; and war could not be carried on without large
expenditure. But the larger the expenditure which was required for the
defence of the nation, the more important it was that nothing should
be squandered. The immense gains of official men moved envy and
indignation. Here a gentleman was paid to do nothing. There many
gentlemen were paid to do what would be better done by one. The coach,
the liveries, the lace cravat and diamond buckles of the placeman were
naturally seen with an evil eye by those who rose up early and lay down
late in order to furnish him with the means of indulging in splendour
and luxury. Such abuses it was the especial business of a House of
Commons to correct. What then had the existing House of Commons done in
the way of correction? Absolutely nothing. In 1690, indeed, while the
Civil List was settling, some sharp speeches had been made. In 1691,
when the Ways and Means were under consideration, a resolution had
been passed so absurdly framed that it had proved utterly abortive. The
nuisance continued, and would continue while it was a source of profit
to those whose duty was to abate it. Who could expect faithful and
vigilant stewardship from stewards who had a direct interest in
encouraging the waste which they were employed to check? The House
swarmed with placemen of all kinds, Lords of the Treasury, Lords of
the Admiralty, Commissioners of Customs, Commissioners of Excise,
Commissioners of Prizes, Tellers, Auditors, Receivers, Paymasters,
Officers of the Mint, Officers of the household, Colonels of regiments,
Captains of men of war, Governors of forts. We send up to Westminster,
it was said, one of our neighbours, an independent gentleman, in
the full confidence that his feelings and interests are in perfect
accordance with ours. We look to him to relieve us from every burden
except those burdens without which the public service cannot be
carried on, and which therefore, galling as they are, we patiently and
resolutely bear. But before he has been a session in Parliament we
learn that he is a Clerk of the Green Cloth or a Yeoman of the Removing
Wardrobe, with a comfortable salary. Nay, we sometimes learn that he has
obtained one of those places in the Exchequer of which the emoluments
rise and fall with the taxes which we pay. It would be strange indeed if
our interests were safe in the keeping of a man whose gains consist in a
percentage on our losses. The evil would be greatly diminished if we had
frequent opportunities of considering whether the powers of our agent
ought to be renewed or revoked. But, as the law stands, it is not
impossible that he may hold those powers twenty or thirty years. While
he lives, and while either the King or the Queen lives, it is not likely
that we shall ever again exercise our elective franchise, unless there
should be a dispute between the Court and the Parliament. The more
profuse and obsequious a Parliament is, the less likely it is to give
offence to the Court. The worse our representatives, therefore, the
longer we are likely to be cursed with them.

The outcry was loud. Odious nicknames were given to the Parliament.
Sometimes it was the Officers' Parliament; sometimes it was the Standing
Parliament, and was pronounced to be a greater nuisance than even a
standing army.

Two specifics for the distempers of the State were strongly recommended,
and divided the public favour. One was a law excluding placemen from
the House of Commons.
The other was a law limiting the duration of
Parliaments to three years. In general the Tory reformers preferred
a Place Bill, and the Whig reformers a Triennial Bill; but not a few
zealous men of both parties were for trying both remedies.

Before Christmas a Place Bill was laid on the table of the Commons. That
bill has been vehemently praised by writers who never saw it, and who
merely guessed at what it contained. But no person who takes the trouble
to study the original parchment, which, embrowned with the dust of a
hundred and sixty years, reposes among the archives of the House of
Lords, will find much matter for eulogy.

About the manner in which such a bill should have been framed there
will, in our time, be little difference of opinion among enlightened
Englishmen. They will agree in thinking that it would be most pernicious
to open the House of Commons to all placemen, and not less pernicious to
close that House against all placemen. To draw with precision the
line between those who ought to be admitted and those who ought to be
excluded would be a task requiring much time, thought and knowledge of
details. But the general principles which ought to guide us are obvious.
The multitude of subordinate functionaries ought to be excluded. A
few functionaries who are at the head or near the head of the great
departments of the administration ought to be admitted.

The subordinate functionaries ought to be excluded, because their
admission would at once lower the character of Parliament and destroy
the efficiency of every public office. They are now excluded, and the
consequence is that the State possesses a valuable body of servants who
remain unchanged while cabinet after cabinet is formed and dissolved,
who instruct every successive minister in his duties, and with whom it
is the most sacred point of honour to give true information, sincere
advise, and strenuous assistance to their superior for the time being.
To the experience, the ability and the fidelity of this class of men is
to be attributed the ease and safety with which the direction of affairs
has been many times, within our own memory, transferred from Tories to
Whigs and from Whigs to Tories. But no such class would have existed if
persons who received salaries from the Crown had been suffered to sit
without restriction in the House of Commons. Those commissionerships,
assistant secretaryships, chief clerkships, which are now held for life
by persons who stand aloof from the strife of parties, would have been
bestowed on members of Parliament who were serviceable to the government
as voluble speakers or steady voters. As often as the ministry was
changed, all this crowd of retainers would have been ejected from
office, and would have been succeeded by another set of members of
Parliament who would probably have been ejected in their turn before
they had half learned their business. Servility and corruption in the
legislature, ignorance and incapacity in all the departments of the
executive administration, would have been the inevitable effects of such
a system.

Still more noxious, if possible, would be the effects of a system
under which all the servants of the Crown, without exception, should be
excluded from the House of Commons. Aristotle has, in that treatise on
government which is perhaps the most judicious and instructive of all
his writings, left us a warning against a class of laws artfully framed
to delude the vulgar, democratic in seeming, but oligarchic in effect.
[374] Had he had an opportunity of studying the history of the English
constitution, he might easily have enlarged his list of such laws. That
men who are in the service and pay of the Crown ought not to sit in
an assembly specially charged with the duty of guarding the rights and
interests of the community against all aggression on the part of the
Crown is a plausible and a popular doctrine. Yet it is certain that if
those who, five generations ago, held that doctrine, had been able to
mould the constitution according to their wishes, the effect would have
been the depression of that branch of the legislature which springs from
the people and is accountable to the people, and the ascendency of the
monarchical and aristocratical elements of our polity. The government
would have been entirely in patrician hands. The House of Lords,
constantly drawing to itself the first abilities in the realm, would
have become the most august of senates, while the House of Commons would
have sunk almost to the rank of a vestry. From time to time undoubtedly
men of commanding genius and of aspiring temper would have made their
appearance among the representatives of the counties and boroughs. But
every such man would have considered the elective chamber merely as a
lobby through which he must pass to the hereditary chamber. The first
object of his ambition would have been that coronet without which he
could not be powerful in the state. As soon as he had shown that he
could be a formidable enemy and a valuable friend to the government, he
would have made haste to quit what would then have been in every sense
the Lower House for what would then have been in every sense the Upper.
The conflict between Walpole and Pulteney, the conflict between Pitt and
Fox, would have been transferred from the popular to the aristocratic
part of the legislature. On every great question, foreign, domestic or
colonial, the debates of the nobles would have been impatiently expected
and eagerly devoured. The report of the proceedings of an assembly
containing no person empowered to speak in the name of the government,
no person who had ever been in high political trust, would have been
thrown aside with contempt. Even the control of the purse of the nation
must have passed, not perhaps in form, but in substance, to that body in
which would have been found every man who was qualified to bring forward
a budget or explain an estimate. The country would have been governed by
Peers; and the chief business of the Commons would have been to wrangle
about bills for the inclosing of moors and the lighting of towns.

These considerations were altogether overlooked in 1692. Nobody thought
of drawing a line between the few functionaries who ought to be allowed
to sit in the House of Commons and the crowd of functionaries who ought
to be shut out. The only line which the legislators of that day took
pains to draw was between themselves and their successors. Their own
interest they guarded with a care of which it seems strange that they
should not have been ashamed. Every one of them was allowed to keep
the places which he had got, and to get as many more places as he could
before the next dissolution of Parliament, an event which might not
happen for many years. But a member who should be chosen after the first
of February 1693 was not to be permitted to accept any place whatever.
[375]

In the House of Commons the bill passed through all its stages rapidly
and without a single division. But in the Lords the contest was sharp
and obstinate. Several amendments were proposed in committee; but all
were rejected. The motion that the bill should pass was supported by
Mulgrave in a lively and poignant speech, which has been preserved, and
which proves that his reputation for eloquence was not unmerited. The
Lords who took the other side did not, it should seem, venture to deny
that there was an evil which required a remedy; but they maintained
that the proposed remedy would only aggravate the evil. The patriotic
representatives of the people had devised a reform which might perhaps
benefit the next generation; but they had carefully reserved to
themselves the privilege of plundering the present generation. If this
bill passed, it was clear that, while the existing Parliament lasted,
the number of placemen in the House of Commons would be little, if at
all, diminished; and, if this bill passed, it was highly probable that
the existing Parliament would last till both King William and Queen Mary
were dead. For as, under this bill, Their Majesties would be able to
exercise a much greater influence over the existing Parliament than
over any future Parliament, they would naturally wish to put off a
dissolution as long as possible. The complaint of the electors of
England was that now, in 1692, they were unfairly represented. It was
not redress, but mockery, to tell them that their children should be
fairly represented in 1710 or 1720. The relief ought to be immediate;
and the way to give immediate relief was to limit the duration of
Parliaments, and to begin with that Parliament which, in the opinion of
the country, had already held power too long.

The forces were so evenly balanced that a very slight accident might
have turned the scale. When the question was put that the bill do pass,
eighty-two peers were present. Of these forty-two were for the bill, and
forty against it. Proxies were then called. There were only two proxies
for the bill; there were seven against it; but of the seven three were
questioned, and were with difficulty admitted. The result was that the
bill was lost by three votes.

The majority appears to have been composed of moderate Whigs and
moderate Tories. Twenty of the minority protested, and among them
were the most violent and intolerant members of both parties, such as
Warrington, who had narrowly escaped the block for conspiring against
James, and Aylesbury, who afterwards narrowly escaped the block for
conspiring against William. Marlborough, who, since his imprisonment,
had gone all lengths in opposition to the government, not only put his
own name to the protest, but made the Prince of Denmark sign what it
was altogether beyond the faculties of His Royal Highness to comprehend.
[376]

It is a remarkable circumstance that neither Caermarthen, the first in
power as well as in abilities of the Tory ministers, nor Shrewsbury, the
most distinguished of those Whigs who were then on bad terms with the
Court, was present on this important occasion. Their absence was in all
probability the effect of design; for both of them were in the House no
long time before and no long time after the division.

A few days later Shrewsbury laid on the table of the Lord a bill for
limiting the duration of Parliaments. By this bill it was provided
that the Parliament then sitting should cease to exist on the first
of January 1694, and that no future Parliament should last longer than
three years.

Among the Lords there seems to have been almost perfect unanimity on
this subject. William in vain endeavoured to induce those peers in whom
he placed the greatest confidence to support his prerogative. Some of
them thought the proposed change salutary; others hoped to quiet the
public mind by a liberal concession; and others had held such language
when they were opposing the Place Bill that they could not, without
gross inconsistency, oppose the Triennial Bill. The whole House too bore
a grudge to the other House, and had a pleasure in putting the other
House in a most disagreeable dilemma. Burnet, Pembroke, nay, even
Caermarthen, who was very little in the habit of siding with the people
against the throne, supported Shrewsbury. "My Lord," said the King to
Caermarthen, with bitter displeasure, "you will live to repent the part
which you are taking in this matter. " [377] The warning was disregarded;
and the bill, having passed the Lords smoothly and rapidly, was carried
with great solemnity by two judges to the Commons.

Of what took place in the Commons we have but very meagre accounts; but
from those accounts it is clear that the Whigs, as a body, supported the
bill, and that the opposition came chiefly from Tories. Old Titus, who
had been a politician in the days of the Commonwealth, entertained the
House with a speech in the style which had been fashionable in those
days. Parliaments, he said, resembled the manna which God bestowed on
the chosen people. They were excellent while they were fresh; but if
kept too long they became noisome; and foul worms were engendered by
the corruption of that which had been sweeter than honey. Littleton
and other leading Whigs spoke on the same side. Seymour, Finch, and
Tredenham, all stanch Tories, were vehement against the bill; and even
Sir John Lowther on this point dissented from his friend and patron
Caermarthen. Several Tory orators appealed to a feeling which was strong
in the House, and which had, since the Revolution, prevented many
laws from passing. Whatever, they said, comes from the Peers is to be
received with suspicion; and the present bill is of such a nature that,
even if it were in itself good, it ought to be at once rejected merely
because it has been brought down from them. If their Lordships were to
send us the most judicious of all money bills, should we not kick it to
the door? Yet to send us a money bill would hardly be a grosser affront
than to send us such a bill as this. They have taken an initiative
which, by every rule of parliamentary courtesy, ought to have been left
to us. They have sate in judgment on us, convicted us, condemned us to
dissolution, and fixed the first of January for the execution. Are we
to submit patiently to so degrading a sentence, a sentence too passed by
men who have not so conducted themselves as to have acquired any right
to censure others? Have they ever made any sacrifice of their own
interest, of their own dignity, to the general welfare? Have not
excellent bills been lost because we would not consent to insert in them
clauses conferring new privileges on the nobility? And now that their
Lordships are bent on obtaining popularity, do they propose to
purchase it by relinquishing even the smallest of their own oppressive
privileges? No; they offer to their country that which will cost them
nothing, but which will cost us and will cost the Crown dear. In such
circumstances it is our duty to repel the insult which has been offered
to us, and, by doing so, to vindicate the lawful prerogative of the
King.

Such topics as these were doubtless well qualified to inflame the
passions of the House of Commons. The near prospect of a dissolution
could not be very agreeable to a member whose election was likely to be
contested. He must go through all the miseries of a canvass, must shake
hands with crowds of freeholders or freemen, must ask after their wives
and children, must hire conveyances for outvoters, must open alehouses,
must provide mountains of beef, must set rivers of ale running, and
might perhaps, after all the drudgery and all the expense, after being
lampooned, hustled, pelted, find himself at the bottom of the poll, see
his antagonists chaired, and sink half ruined into obscurity. All this
evil he was now invited to bring on himself, and invited by men whose
own seats in the legislature were permanent, who gave up neither dignity
nor quiet, neither power nor money, but gained the praise of patriotism
by forcing him to abdicate a high station, to undergo harassing labour
and anxiety, to mortgage his cornfields and to hew down his woods. There
was naturally much irritation, more probably than is indicated by the
divisions. For the constituent bodies were generally delighted with the
bill; and many members who disliked it were afraid to oppose it. The
House yielded to the pressure of public opinion, but not without a
pang and a struggle. The discussions in the committee seem to have been
acrimonious. Such sharp words passed between Seymour and one of the Whig
members that it was necessary to put the Speaker in the chair and the
mace on the table for the purpose of restoring order. One amendment was
made. The respite which the Lords had granted to the existing Parliament
was extended from the first of January to Lady Day, in order that there
might be full time for another session. The third reading was carried
by two hundred votes to a hundred and sixty-one. The Lords agreed to the
bill as amended; and nothing was wanting but the royal assent. Whether
that assent would or would not be given was a question which remained in
suspense till the last day of the session. [378]

One strange inconsistency in the conduct of the reformers of that
generation deserves notice. It never occurred to any one of those who
were zealous for the Triennial Bill that every argument which could be
urged in favour of that bill was an argument against the rules which
had been framed in old times for the purpose of keeping parliamentary
deliberations and divisions strictly secret. It is quite natural that
a government which withholds political privileges from the commonalty
should withhold also political information. But nothing can be more
irrational than to give power, and not to give the knowledge without
which there is the greatest risk that power will be abused. What could
be more absurd than to call constituent bodies frequently together that
they might decide whether their representative had done his duty by
them, and yet strictly to interdict them from learning, on trustworthy
authority, what he had said or how he had voted? The absurdity however
appears to have passed altogether unchallenged. It is highly probable
that among the two hundred members of the House of Commons who voted for
the third reading of the Triennial Bill there was not one who would have
hesitated about sending to Newgate any person who had dared to publish
a report of the debate on that bill, or a list of the Ayes and the Noes.
The truth is that the secrecy of parliamentary debates, a secrecy which
would now be thought a grievance more intolerable than the Shipmoney
or the Star Chamber, was then inseparably associated, even in the most
honest and intelligent minds, with constitutional freedom. A few old
men still living could remember times when a gentleman who was known at
Whitehall to have let fall a sharp word against a court favourite would
have been brought before the Privy Council and sent to the Tower. Those
times were gone, never to return. There was no longer any danger that
the King would oppress the members of the legislature; and there was
much danger that the members of the legislature might oppress the
people. Nevertheless the words Privilege of Parliament, those words
which the stern senators of the preceding generation had murmured when a
tyrant filled their chamber with his guards, those words which a hundred
thousand Londoners had shouted in his ears when he ventured for the last
time within the walls of their city; still retained a magical influence
over all who loved liberty. It was long before even the most enlightened
men became sensible that the precautions which had been originally
devised for the purpose of protecting patriots against the displeasure
of the Court now served only to protect sycophants against the
displeasure of the nation.

It is also to be observed that few of those who showed at this time the
greatest desire to increase the political power of the people were as
yet prepared to emancipate the press from the control of the government.
The Licensing Act, which had passed, as a matter of course, in 1685,
expired in 1693, and was renewed, not however without an opposition,
which, though feeble when compared with the magnitude of the object in
dispute, proved that the public mind was beginning dimly to perceive
how closely civil freedom and freedom of conscience are connected with
freedom of discussion.

On the history of the Licensing Act no preceding writer has thought it
worth while to expend any care or labour. Yet surely the events which
led to the establishment of the liberty of the press in England, and in
all the countries peopled by the English race, may be thought to have
as much interest for the present generation as any of those battles and
sieges of which the most minute details have been carefully recorded.

During the first three years of William's reign scarcely a voice seems
to have been raised against the restrictions which the law imposed on
literature. Those restrictions were in perfect harmony with the theory
of government held by the Tories, and were not, in practice, galling
to the Whigs. Roger Lestrange, who had been licenser under the last two
Kings of the House of Stuart, and who had shown as little tenderness
to Exclusionists and Presbyterians in that character as in his other
character of Observator, was turned out of office at the Revolution, and
was succeeded by a Scotch gentleman, who, on account of his passion for
rare books, and his habit of attending all sales of libraries, was known
in the shops and coffeehouses near Saint Paul's by the name of Catalogue
Fraser. Fraser was a zealous Whig. By Whig authors and publishers he
was extolled as a most impartial and humane man. But the conduct which
obtained their applause drew on him the abuse of the Tories, and was
not altogether pleasing to his official superior Nottingham. [379] No
serious difference however seems to have arisen till the year 1692. In
that year an honest old clergyman named Walker, who had, in the time of
the Commonwealth, been Gauden's curate, wrote a book which convinced
all sensible and dispassionate readers that Gauden, and not Charles the
First, was the author of the Icon Basilike. This book Fraser suffered to
be printed. If he had authorised the publication of a work in which the
Gospel of Saint John or the Epistle to the Romans had been represented
as spurious, the indignation of the High Church party could hardly have
been greater. The question was not literary, but religious. Doubt was
impiety. In truth the Icon was to many fervent Royalists a supplementary
revelation. One of them indeed had gone so far as to propose that
lessons taken out of the inestimable little volume should be read in
the churches. [380] Fraser found it necessary to resign his place; and
Nottingham appointed a gentleman of good blood and scanty fortune named
Edmund Bohun. This change of men produced an immediate and total change
of system; for Bohun was as strong a Tory as a conscientious man who
had taken the oaths could possibly be. He had been conspicuous as a
persecutor of nonconformists and a champion of the doctrine of passive
obedience. He had edited Filmer's absurd treatise on the origin of
government, and had written an answer to the paper which Algernon Sidney
had delivered to the Sheriffs on Tower Hill. Nor did Bohun admit that,
in swearing allegiance to William and Mary, he had done any thing
inconsistent with his old creed. For he had succeeded in convincing
himself that they reigned by right of conquest, and that it was the duty
of an Englishman to serve them as faithfully as Daniel had served Darius
or as Nehemiah had served Artaxerxes. This doctrine, whatever peace it
might bring to his own conscience, found little favour with any
party. The Whigs loathed it as servile; the Jacobites loathed it as
revolutionary. Great numbers of Tories had doubtless submitted to
William on the ground that he was, rightfully or wrongfully, King
in possession; but very few of them were disposed to allow that his
possession had originated in conquest. Indeed the plea which had
satisfied the weak and narrow mind of Bohun was a mere fiction, and, had
it been a truth, would have been a truth not to be uttered by Englishmen
without agonies of shame and mortification. [381] He however clung to
his favourite whimsy with a tenacity which the general disapprobation
only made more intense. His old friends, the stedfast adherents
of indefeasible hereditary right, grew cold and reserved. He asked
Sancroft's blessing, and got only a sharp word, and a black look.
He asked Ken's blessing; and Ken, though not much in the habit of
transgressing the rules of Christian charity and courtesy, murmured
something about a little scribbler. Thus cast out by one faction, Bohun
was not received by any other. He formed indeed a class apart; for he
was at once a zealous Filmerite and a zealous Williamite. He held that
pure monarchy, not limited by any law or contract, was the form of
government which had been divinely ordained. But he held that William
was now the absolute monarch, who might annul the Great Charter, abolish
trial by jury, or impose taxes by royal proclamation, without forfeiting
the right to be implicitly obeyed by Christian men. As to the rest,
Bohun was a man of some learning, mean understanding and unpopular
manners. He had no sooner entered on his functions than all Paternoster
Row and Little Britain were in a ferment. The Whigs had, under Fraser's
administration, enjoyed almost as entire a liberty as if there had been
no censorship. But they were now as severely treated as in the days of
Lestrange. A History of the Bloody Assizes was about to be published,
and was expected to have as great a run as the Pilgrim's Progress. But
the new licenser refused his Imprimatur. The book, he said, represented
rebels and schismatics as heroes and martyrs; and he would not sanction
it for its weight in gold. A charge delivered by Lord Warrington to the
grand jury of Cheshire was not permitted to appear, because His Lordship
had spoken contemptuously of divine right and passive obedience.
Julian Johnson found that, if he wished to promulgate his notions of
government, he must again have recourse, as in the evil times of King
James, to a secret press. [382] Such restraint as this, coming
after several years of unbounded freedom, naturally produced violent
exasperation. Some Whigs began to think that the censorship itself was a
grievance; all Whigs agreed in pronouncing the new censor unfit for his
post, and were prepared to join in an effort to get rid of him.

Of the transactions which terminated in Bohun's dismission, and which
produced the first parliamentary struggle for the liberty of unlicensed
printing, we have accounts written by Bohun himself and by others; but
there are strong reasons for believing that in none of those accounts is
the whole truth to be found. It may perhaps not be impossible, even at
this distance of time, to put together dispersed fragments of evidence
in such a manner as to produce an authentic narrative which would have
astonished the unfortunate licenser himself.

There was then about town a man of good family, of some reading, and of
some small literary talent, named Charles Blount. [383] In politics he
belonged to the extreme section of the Whig party. In the days of the
Exclusion Bill he had been one of Shaftesbury's brisk boys, and had,
under the signature of Junius Brutus, magnified the virtues and public
services of Titus Oates, and exhorted the Protestants to take signal
vengeance on the Papists for the fire of London and for the murder
of Godfrey. [384] As to the theological questions which were in issue
between Protestants and Papists, Blount was perfectly impartial. He was
an infidel, and the head of a small school of infidels who were troubled
with a morbid desire to make converts. He translated from the Latin
translation part of the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, and appended to it
notes of which the flippant profaneness called forth the severe censure
of an unbeliever of a very different order, the illustrious Bayle. [385]
Blount also attacked Christianity in several original treatises, or
rather in several treatises purporting to be original; for he was
the most audacious of literary thieves, and transcribed, without
acknowledgment, whole pages from authors who had preceded him. His
delight was to worry the priests by asking them how light existed
before the sun was made, how Paradise could be bounded by Pison, Gihon,
Hiddekel and Euphrates, how serpents moved before they were condemned
to crawl, and where Eve found thread to stitch her figleaves. To his
speculations on these subjects he gave the lofty name of the Oracles of
Reason; and indeed whatever he said or wrote was considered as oracular
by his disciples. Of those disciples the most noted was a bad writer
named Gildon, who lived to pester another generation with doggrel and
slander, and whose memory is still preserved, not by his own voluminous
works, but by two or three lines in which his stupidity and venality
have been contemptuously mentioned by Pope. [386]

Little as either the intellectual or the moral character of Blount may
seem to deserve respect, it is in a great measure to him that we must
attribute the emancipation of the English press. Between him and the
licensers there was a feud of long standing. Before the Revolution one
of his heterodox treatises had been grievously mutilated by Lestrange,
and at last suppressed by orders from Lestrange's superior the Bishop
of London. [387] Bohun was a scarcely less severe critic than Lestrange.
Blount therefore began to make war on the censorship and the censor.
The hostilities were commenced by a tract which came forth without any
license, and which is entitled A Just Vindication of Learning and of the
Liberty of the Press, by Philopatris. [388] Whoever reads this piece,
and is not aware that Blount was one of the most unscrupulous plagiaries
that ever lived, will be surprised to find, mingled with the poor
thoughts and poor words of a thirdrate pamphleteer, passages so elevated
in sentiment and style that they would be worthy of the greatest name
in letters. The truth is that the just Vindication consists chiefly of
garbled extracts from the Areopagitica of Milton. That noble discourse
had been neglected by the generation to which it was addressed, had
sunk into oblivion, and was at the mercy of every pilferer. The literary
workmanship of Blount resembled the architectural workmanship of those
barbarians who used the Coliseum and the Theatre of Pompey as quarries,
who built hovels out of Ionian friezes and propped cowhouses on pillars
of lazulite. Blount concluded, as Milton had done, by recommending that
any book might be printed without a license, provided that the name of
the author or publisher were registered. [389] The Just Vindication was
well received. The blow was speedily followed up. There still remained
in the Areopagitica many fine passages which Blount had not used in his
first pamphlet. Out of these passages he constructed a second pamphlet
entitled Reasons for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. [390] To these
Reasons he appended a postscript entitled A Just and True Character
of Edmund Bohun. This character was written with extreme bitterness.
Passages were quoted from the licenser's writings to prove that he held
the doctrines of passive obedience and nonresistance. He was accused of
using his power systematically for the purpose of favouring the enemies
and silencing the friends of the Sovereigns whose bread he ate; and it
was asserted that he was the friend and the pupil of his predecessor Sir
Roger.

Blount's Character of Bohun could not be publicly sold; but it was
widely circulated. While it was passing from hand to hand, and while
the Whigs were every where exclaiming against the new censor as a second
Lestrange, he was requested to authorise the publication of an anonymous
work entitled King William and Queen Mary Conquerors. [391] He readily
and indeed eagerly complied. For in truth there was between the
doctrines which he had long professed and the doctrines which were
propounded in this treatise a coincidence so exact that many suspected
him of being the author; nor was this suspicion weakened by a passage
to which a compliment was paid to his political writings. But the real
author was that very Blount who was, at that very time, labouring to
inflame the public both against the Licensing Act and the licenser.
Blount's motives may easily be divined. His own opinions were
diametrically opposed to those which, on this occasion, he put forward
in the most offensive manner.