May. CHAP. ment of laws made by common consent, won for its LXIII. author the freedom of the city of London, and was 1776. widely circulated through the kingdom, and the continent of Europe, especially Germany. His masterly plea for America was unavailing; but his tract gained peculiar importance from his applying to the actual condition of the representation of his own country, the principle on which America justified her resist"The time may come," said he, "when a general election in Britain will be nothing but a general auction of boroughs." ance. Carrying the war into the heart of English politics and society, he raised the cry for the reform in parliament, which was never to be hushed, and transferred English opinion to the side of America for the sake of that liberty which was of all things dearest to the English nation. But what hope was there of reform in England? It was the vices of its ruling classes which prepared reform by forcing independence on America. Or how could France at that time offer liberty a home? "For my part," said Chastellux, "I think there can be neither durable liberty nor happiness but for nations who have representative governments." "I think so too," said the octogenarian Voltaire. "The right of self-administration," said Malesherbes to Louis the Sixteenth, as he threw up his ministry in despair, "belongs to every community; it is a natural right, the right of reason. The surest, the most natural method is for a king to consult the nation itself." Turgot, like Malesherbes, believed in the imprescriptible rights of man to the free use of his powers; and wished also that the executive chief should profit LXIII. May. by the counsels of the collected wisdom of the na- CHAP. tion; but he now stood without any support in the cabinet; and his want of influence had appeared in 1776. the discussions on America. One of two things must therefore follow; either Turgot must become all prevailing and establish his system, or go into private life. Maurepas, roused by jealousy, insinuated to the right-minded king, that discontent pervaded France, and that it had Turgot alone for its object; that it was not best to wait for his resignation, for he might give as his reason for the act that he was hindered in the accomplishment of good. On the twelfth of May he was therefore dismissed, as one who was not suited to his place. For a moment the friends of the people had a beautiful and a peaceful dream; but it soon. passed away, leaving the monarchy of France to sway and fall, and the people to be awakened by the example of the western world. The new minister of finance was De Clugny; a passionate and intemperate rogue, a gamester, and a debauchee, who at once conciliated support by giving out that he would do nothing disagreeable to the farmers general of the revenue. "To what masters, ye great gods, do ye give up the universe!" exclaimed Condorcet. In parting with Malesherbes, the king discarded his truest personal friend ; in Turgot, French monarchy lost its firmest support, the nobility its only possible saviour; but for America the result was very different; no one was left in the cabinet who was able to restrain the government from yielding to the rising enthusiasm for America. So tangled is the web of history! The retirement of the two men who were the apostles of liberty pushed CHAP forward the cause of human freedom, though by irLXIII. regular and disorderly movements. 1776. In the early part of the century Leibnitz had May. found traces of the opinions of Epicurus and Spinoza in the books that were most in vogue, and in the men of the great world who were the masters of affairs, and he had foretold in consequence a general overturn in Europe. "The generous sentiment which prefers country and the general good to life," he said, "is dying out; public spirit is no more in fashion, and has lost the support of good morals and true religion; the ruling motive in the best is honor, and that is a principle which tolerates any thing but baseness, does not condemn shedding a deluge of blood from ambition or caprice, and might suffer a Herostratus or a Don Juan to pass for a hero; patriotism is mocked at, and the well-intentioned, who speak of what will become of posterity, are answered by saying that posterity may see to that. If this mental epidemic goes on increasing, providence will correct mankind by the revolution which it must cause." But men had more and more given the reins to brutal passions; and throwing off the importunate fear of an overruling providence, no longer knew of any thing superior to humanity, or more godlike than themselves. "What distinguishes man," said Aristotle, "is the faculty of recognizing something higher and better than himself." The eighteenth century refused to look for any thing better; the belief in the divine reason was derided like the cowering at spectres and hobgoblins; and the worship of humanity became the prevailing idolatry. Art was commissioned to gratify taste; morality had for its office to increase pleasure; LXIII. May. forgetting that the highest liberty consists in being CHAP. forced by right reason to choose the best, men cherished sensualism as a system, and self-indulgence was 1776. the law of courts and aristocracies. A blind, unreasoning, selfish conservatism, assumed that creative power was exhausted; that nature had completed her work, and that nothing was to be done but to keep things as they were; not knowing that this conception is at war with nature herself and her eternal order, men substituted for true conservatism, which looks always to the action of moral forces, the basest form of atheism and the most hopeless theory of despotic power. The age had ceased to wrestle with doubt, and accepted it not with anguish as the despair of reason, but with congratulation and pride. To renounce the search for eternal truth passed for wisdom; the notion that there can be no cognition of the immutable and the divine, the shallow infidelity which denies the beautiful, the true, and the good, was extolled as the perfection of enlightened reason, the highest end of intellectual striving. The agony of questioning was over; men cherished no wish for any thing beyond appearances and vain show. The prevailing philosophy in its arrogance was proud of its chains. It not only derided the infinite in man, but it jeered at the thought that man can commune with the infinite. It scoffed at all knowledge that transcends the senses, limited itself to the inferior lessons of experience, and rejected ideas which are the archetypes of things for ideas which were no more than pictures on the brain; dethroning the beautiful for the agreeable; the right CHAP. for the useful; the true for the seeming; knowing LXIII. nothing of a universal moral government, referring 1776. every thing to the self of the individual. Hume May. brought this philosophy of materialism to the test, and applying doubt to its lessons, laid bare its corruption. His profound and searching scepticism was the bier on which it was laid out in state; where all the world might come and see that it really was no more. But while he taught the world that it led to nothingness, he taught nothing in its stead. It was the same in practical life. Hume might oppose the war with America, because it threatened to mortgage all the revenues of the land in England; but ever welcome at the Bourbon palace and acceptable to George the Third, he had professed to prove that tyrants should not be deposed, that the euthanasia of the British constitution would be absolutism. Scepticism like this could not build up a commonwealth or renovate the world; there must be a new birth in philosophy, or all is lost in the world of reflection; in political life there is no hope of improvement, but from that inborn faith in the intelligent, moral, and divine government of the world, which always survives in the masses. Away, then, with the system of impotent doubt, which teaches that Europe cannot be extricated from the defilements of a selfish aristocracy or despotism, that the British constitution, though it may have a happy death, can have no reform. Let scepticism, the wandering nomad, that intrudes into every field only to desecrate and deny, strike her tents and make way for a people who have power to build up the house of humanity, because they have faith in eternal truth and trust in |