Summary of Politics

The Last Ten Years—This day ten years ago (the 1st of January) I sat down to write the first number of the Register. When I look back to that time, and consider how the country then stood, what a contrast presents itself to my mind! The preliminaries of peace had just then been concluded; the price of provisions had just then been lowered; the people were on tiptoe for commerce and manufactures; every print-shop window presented something demonstrative of friendship with Buonaparté, and the Attorney General (now the prime minister)⁶¹ stood ready to prosecute, by information ex-officio,⁶² any one who dared to write what was called a libel upon that new friend of England.—Now, what is the picture? A war with that same Buonaparté, for the possession of the island of Malta,⁶³ has led to the overthrow of every state formerly in alliance with us. A war for the island of Malta has put into the hands of that same Buonaparté the whole of Italy from the confines of France down to the shores of Calabria. It has united the Seven United Provinces to France. It has raised a new kingdom in the heart of Germany under a brother of Napoleon, in which kingdom are included the ancient dominions of the House of Brunswick. It has driven from their thrones the sovereigns of Spain and Portugal, and has gone pretty far towards putting those countries also into the hands of Buonaparté. It has made a naval arsenal at Antwerp, whence have already issued many ships of the line. It has paved the way for France becoming a great naval power. It has added five hundred millions to the national Debt of England. It has banished gold from circulation. It has ruined commerce and manufactures in England. It has, in this respect, produced a new order of things both in Europe and America, both which can now dispense with English goods⁶⁴—What inroads have been made upon English liberty during this period, I shall not, and need not, attempt to describe; and, as to the weight of taxes, / who need be told of that?—Our state is now not as it ever was before: and, that man must be blind indeed, who does not see that it is daily becoming more and more perilous.—Ask any man, be he of what party he may, what he thinks of the present state of things, and you will find, that he expects, that a great change, of some sort or other, will take place ere long. He cannot tell what it will be; he cannot even guess; he is full of fears, and that is all. The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people, have no longer any plausible grounds of hope to hold out. They have uttered falshoods, so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty.—What will the state of the country be, then, at the end of the next ten years? What shall I have to record, before I come to the end of the next twenty volumes of this work?—I will hazard no speculation; nor, indeed, is it in the power of any man to form any idea of what is likely to happen. But I think, one may venture to say, that the conduct of this government will not change; that, let which party will be in power, the system will, as long as it can, go on; and that it will continue to produce effects similar to those which it has already produced. How long the system will last no man can tell; but we may, by observing what it has done in the last ten years, judge of what it will do in each succeeding year; and, if we suppose its existence for another ten, we may form some, idea of what our state will then be.—At any rate, come what will, the people will not have to blame the “Jacobins and Levellers.” They were against the war, which has produced all the evil effects we witness. They were for letting the French republicans alone. They have had no hand in any of the measures that have been pursued; they have had no power, and are liable to no responsibility and no blame. They have been an object of incessant attack and abuse. The next ten years will shew whether they have merited this, or any part of it. If the country / shall be preserved by the present system; if it shall find itself secure from without and happy within at the end of the next ten years, why, then, I shall be ready to allow, that the “Jacobins and Levellers” have been in error; but, if the contrary should prove to be the case, surely we shall then hear them acquitted; surely we shall no longer see them the object of attack and abuse.—It is the common practice of men, to judge from experience. If a farmer finds that the managing of his land in a certain way produces loss instead of gain, he loses no time in changing his course; and so it is with all other men who act according to the dictates of reason. But, it would really seem, that governments act upon no such principle; that they are wholly deaf to the voice of experience; that they either do not see, or that they heed not, the consequences of their measures. Were not this the case, how could it possibly be, that no change should have taken place in the measures of any of the old governments that we have seen annihilated? In no instance have we seen them attempt to make any change: nay, they seem to have grown more and more attached to their several systems in proportion as the evil consequences of them became manifest to all the world. It can be accounted for only in this way: that the persons in the enjoyment of power and of the emoluments belonging to power have thought, that they would lose both by a reformation as effectually as by a destruction of the government; and, therefore, that, as they could lose no more by the latter than by the former, they have, in every case, endeavoured to uphold corruptions and abuses to the last possible moment, though they clearly saw the destructive consequences that must finally ensue. Destruction being, to them, the same thing as a reformation in its effects, they have preferred the former to the latter, because the latter must, of course, be earlier in its operation. To tell a man in the enjoyment of the fruits of such a system, that the government would be finally destroyed unless it was speedily reformed, was not likely to weigh with him in favour of reformation; because he saw, at the same time, that, to him, reformation of the government was, in fact, destruction; and, therefore, the later it came the less grievous it was to him.—Here we have the real cause of what has been called the blindness of the old governments, / but which was nothing more than the natural desire of those who lived by corruptions and abuses, to live as long as they could.—We here see, also, the cause of that persecution of opinions, which has invariably increased as the old governments felt their danger increase. Those, who enjoyed the wealth sucked from the veins of the people, by the means of corruptions and abuses, would naturally make use of their power to prevent the propagation of opinions tending to undermine and destroy those abuses; and, as the danger of destruction became more imminent, the endeavours to prevent it would, of course, become more active. The persecution has, therefore, in all these cases, been the effect of fear; and, it is well known, that cruelty is never so great as when it has such a foundation. Look at the murders that are committed, and you will find nine-tenths of them arising from the same cause. It is the fear of detection that draws the murderer’s knife and steels his heart. The tyrants of Africa are bloody from fear: they kill others, lest those others should kill them. The persecution of the propagation of opinions, which we have witnessed in the old governments now no more, have proceeded from the same cause as the horrible murders at Marr’s and Williamson’s:⁶⁵ the fear of exposure, and the consequent infamy and punishment.—When men have expressed their surprize at seeing those old governments grow more and more tyrannical and cruel in proportion as their situation became perilous; when they have exclaimed: “how blind! how mad! thus to excite additional hatred against themselves at such a time, when they ought to see that they stand so much in need of the good will of the people!” When men have thus exclaimed, they have not duly considered the motive of those governments; if they had, they would have felt no surprize.