CHAPTER IX.
I have now shown the grave character of the question which we are discussing. I have stated the principles of Magna Charta which form the basis of our Constitution, and I have pointed out how these principles are violated by the Acts which we oppose; I have traced the pernicious consequences arising from this violation, politically as well as morally; and I have briefly indicated the means by which we may repair the breach which has been made.
A question which involves not only the principles of morality but the fundamental principles of our liberties, must be referred for its final decision to no meaner tribunal than that of the entire people. That people is the only tribunal competent to decide a question so vital as this, which affects every individual in the nation, and must colour the whole of the future internal policy of England. In retaining or rejecting these Acts we have now to determine whether our Constitution shall stand as it has stood hitherto, or whether it shall be changed. This question can only be determined by that power in whose hands the Constitution is ultimately vested. The determination of this momentous question will involve also the fate of all that legislation the tendency of which, during the last century, has been gradually to weaken the Constitution through the insidious rejection in a large number of cases of that great safeguard of our liberties, Jury Trial. Had not the way been paved for such arbitrary Acts as those which we oppose, by the innovations which our great constitutional lawyers have so deplored, it would have been impossible for Parliament to have escaped arousing the alarm of the people when it proposed this present wholesale breach of the great principles of English jurisprudence. But the present Acts have opened our eyes to the nature and tendency of those encroachments which have long been silently going on among us, and we now see it to be a strong argument against such encroachments that they should have culminated in such an invasion of our rights. Men will carelessly tolerate for a long time encroachments in cases of little moment, if these encroachments tend towards the ease and expedition of justice; but when they find that under colour of that ease or expedition, men prompted by selfishness and fear, have made a law which hands over a vast multitude of the people into the power of the lowest of the executive, the real worth of our country begins to appear, and rather than tolerate such an evil they will abolish that whole system, so far as it relates to criminal cases, if that system can successfully be pleaded as an excuse for such treachery on the part of our rulers.[100]
What tribunal then can decide so grave and important a national question as this, other than the nation itself? What therefore shall we think of a Government which, when the nation has pressed this question upon it, has shown itself so contemptuous of the great constitutional principle involved, as to profess to investigate the question by means of a tribunal of twenty-six men, a considerable proportion of whom rank among the actual framers or supporters of the Acts? Further, in what light must it appear to us when we learn that the investigation conducted by this tribunal is expressly to be made into the “operation and administration” of the Acts, and that it has no other specified object? Those who made such a limitation must surely either have been ignorant of, or determined to override, the constitutional objections which the nation itself has proclaimed more or less distinctly from the first; otherwise why was not the inquiry directed at least in part to that momentous question on which it must finally be decided?
A Royal Commission has been appointed to inquire into these Acts. What is the subject of their inquiry? Is it whether this law be consistent with the first principles of morality? No, for that, such a tribunal, not being the ultimate fount of truth, is incompetent; nor, since we have each of us direct access to the ultimate fount of truth, do we need its verdict on this point. Is it whether this law be consistent or not with the principles of the English Constitution? No, although into this question inquiry might well have been made by such a body, for there are constitutional lawyers amongst us who could not on inquiry have remained blind to the fact of this great violation of our rights. But such an inquiry apparently did not suit the Government; therefore, what do they inquire into? Merely into this question, How does this double violation of the constitution and of morality work?
Whatever, therefore, be the verdict of this Commission, it obviously cannot affect either of these vital questions, which must be tried by the whole nation; and the decision of this Commission, worthless if it be for extension, is equally worthless if it be for repeal, because these Acts, if repealed on that verdict, would then be repealed on the ground of their unsatisfactory operation. The evil principle would not only be left undisputed and unrebuked, but it would be practically admitted that our constitutional privileges may again be violated should the results of such violation be temporarily satisfactory. Therefore I unhesitatingly venture to assert, that if the verdict of this Royal Commission should be for repeal, it would be more hurtful to our national interests than if it should report for extension, because, as it must be evident, the Acts would then be repealed on the ground of their medical inoperativeness, or the difficulty of their administration, or for some reason short of their constitutional iniquity, and not—as they will be when repealed by the people—on the ground and by reason of their essential wickedness as violations of morality and constitutional liberty. Surely it was the guardian genius of our Constitution who so happily blinded the Government which passed this law, as to permit it to assign and limit the grounds of this inquiry, as it has done, and has thus led it to throw upon the people themselves the necessity and duty, not only of repealing these Acts, but of forcing Parliament to place on the Statute-book a lasting record of this bitter conflict, in the form of a Statute which shall bind our Legislature for all future ages to regard as sacred the constitutional rights of the people, and which shall make it impossible for it again thus to violate the Constitution.
The great restraining Statutes which exist in England have grown out of aggressions made by those in power; and were not some unusual aggressions periodically to call for the renewal of such restraints, our Constitution might slip out of our hands without our being aware of it. Such restraints as these are as necessary now as they were in ancient times; nor will the progress of civilisation or the diffusion of education ever preclude the necessity of such ever-renewed restraints. For no diffusion of the ideas of liberty, no universal admission and universal acceptance of the doctrine of personal freedom, no acuteness of perception of the necessity of political equality for the very existence of a State, can ever eradicate from the hearts of men those passions and instincts which have been, in all ages and in all countries, the cause of the destruction of liberty. For liberties are not undermined for the sake of undermining liberties. The Constitution is not attacked with the motive of destroying it; but in all ages and in all countries liberties have been undermined, and constitutions have been invaded, not for those ends directly, but for the immediate end of some private passion or some private lust which is inconsistent with public liberty, and which can only be gained by its overthrow.
Let me therefore press upon my readers to remember that when we have obtained the repeal of these obnoxious Statutes, our work is then only half done. Besides that negative action, a positive action is called for, and means have to be taken to prevent the recurrence of such an invasion and such a struggle. Unless this be done, we are not safe for more than a generation. When we who have fought this battle are laid in our graves, when at some future time those who succeed us may be less vigilant or more enduring than we, and when at the same time men in power may be actuated by the same ever-recurring instincts of passion and self-interest—instincts which are always at the root of the destruction of freedom,—then our liberties may be irretrievably lost, and we shall be to blame for it, unless we have at the present crisis, as our forefathers have done, placed on the records of Parliament a solemn and binding agreement between the people and its rulers, whereby each shall be strictly bound to conform to their respective obligations.
Guizot remarks, in speaking of the success of English revolutions:—“It is not enough that rights should be recognised and promises made, it is further necessary that these rights should be respected, and these promises fulfilled; the last article therefore of the Great Charter is especially intended to provide this guarantee. It is there said that the barons shall elect twenty-five by their own free choice, charged to exercise all vigilance that the provisions of the charter may never fail to be carried into effect. The powers of these twenty-five barons (a kind of vigilance committee) were unlimited.” If the king or his agents allowed themselves to violate the enactments of the charter in the very smallest particular, the barons were to denounce this abuse before the king, and demand that it should be instantly checked. If the king did not accede to their demand, the barons had the right, forty days after the summons had been issued by them, to prosecute the king, to deprive him of all his lands and castles, “the safety of his person, the queen and his children being respected,” until the abuse had been reformed to the satisfaction of the barons and of the whole nation.[101]
Any one who reads the History of England may judge for himself of the wisdom of these immortal restraining Statutes called the Petition of Rights and Bill of Rights, which were made necessary by the aggressions and illegal actions of subsequent monarchs. And in less terrible crises than those which called for these great confirmatory charters, it has been invariably the habit of the English people to claim, through Parliament, besides the redress of the wrong committed, some similar wholesome restraining Statute, elucidating and strengthening anew that particular part of the Constitution which may happen to have been imperilled, and securing that similar violations shall not, in future, be attempted with impunity. Among these may be reckoned the famous Habeas Corpus Act, and a multitude of others which it is needless here to recount.
It would be improper for me to conclude this Essay, in which I have pointed out the similarity of the present crises to others in past history, without calling the reader’s attention to one characteristic in which these Acts of Parliament stand pre-eminent in the history of our legislation. The tyrannical aggressions of those in power in former days were indeed always the fruit of lust in some form or other,—greed of gain, or personal influence, personal pleasure, jealousy, or revenge; yet the effect of those aggressions was not so directly as in the present case to make the people immoral. The immorality was at first at least confined to the aggressor. He assailed the liberties only of the subject, and in so doing struck, no doubt, more or less remotely, at the root of public virtue; but he did not proclaim a vicious moral code in the ears of the whole people. Now this last tyrannous aggression has sown broadcast the seeds of an immoral principle. This is a law which not only proceeds of evil, but immediately results in evil, by forcing a moral iniquity upon the people. It is pre-eminently an onslaught on morality, while it is an attack on the Constitution. Therefore in order to oppose this great twofold evil, we need, not only the revival of all our English patriotism, our love of freedom and of justice, but a deeper revival still, that of the soul and of the spirit. We need a renewal of faith in divine and eternal principles, a moral regeneration, a practical return to the simplicity of Christ.
Guizot, in speaking of the secret of the success of the English Revolution, says that in spite of the moral scepticism of the times “the mass of the people remained faithful to simple Christianity,—as much attached to their doctrines as to their liberties. The views of the citizen, of the freeholder, and even of the peasant, soared far above his actual condition. He was a Christian; in his family or among his friends he boldly studied the mysteries of Divine power; what earthly power, he asked, could be so high that he must abstain from considering it? In the Sacred Scriptures he read the laws of God; to render obedience to them he was forced to resist other laws; it therefore became necessary to him to ascertain where human legislation ought to terminate.” It is this alternative which, in a much more marked and naked form than ever before, our citizens, our freeholders, and our peasants are once more driven to contemplate face to face; and the question, “Shall we obey God or man?” is that which they are now called upon once more to answer.
The whole conduct of the resistance in which we are now engaged to this immoral and arbitrary law will depend upon the sincerity and depth of the religious principle of this country. A moral and spiritual conviction must be the heart and soul of our present movement. Already it is proved to be so, and will be more fully proved ere the struggle be ended. Already that revival of moral faith, the simultaneousness of which with the rapid advances of a materialistic creed rests upon the promise of God himself, is beginning to prove its force as the most potent agency for political reform. Already it is gathering into a compact company the grave, the virtuous, the religious throughout the land.
It would be unseasonable at the close of this Essay for me to approach that difficult question which must needs, at times, trouble the minds of thoughtful persons who try to read the tendencies of the age; I mean the subtle connection between democracy and despotism—the tendency of democratic nations to combine the idea of a strongly centralized, ubiquitous, and omnipotent government with that of the sovereignty of the people, a combination which, when fully realized, makes every man willing to put himself in leading-strings, because it is not a person, nor a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain; but before closing these remarks I venture to address a word of caution to my readers among the working classes who are electors. There are persons of birth, of station, spoiled, it may be, by the long inheritance of privilege, who hate the Constitution because of the barriers which it places between themselves and the accomplishment from time to time of certain arbitrary designs, and because in general, in a noble degree, it is no “respecter of persons.” On the other hand, there are men—and among them are some who loudly profess to be the people’s friends—who despise the Constitution, and who see without a regret the invasion of its fundamental principles,—principles which they affect to believe are obsolete. When, therefore, the time comes, once and again, for you to look around you to select men to represent you in Parliament, and when gentlemen come forward professing the Radical principles which the majority of you uphold, pause for a moment! for among these professors there are some such as those to whom I allude, who despise the Constitution. Myself a Liberal, and an admirer of republican[102] institutions, I venture to advise you to regard this class of political aspirants with extreme suspicion. Withhold from them your confidence until you have thoroughly sounded their principles. Those to whom I allude are for the most part young men, or men at least characterized by that immaturity of judgment which is not the exclusive attribute of youth. They talk loudly of a future Republic, while they are at heart, though it may be unconsciously so, the prophets and devotees of the despotism of the future—that despotism which may consist with democratical institutions, and which may prove to be the most terrible of all tyrannies. You will scarcely fail to detect this tendency in the conversation of these men, who sometimes possess more of University cultivation than knowledge of the Constitution of England or experience of life. You will hear them speak with approbation of the most sweeping and compulsory measures; you will find them betraying a contempt for individual freedom, and a readiness to sacrifice the rights of persons, however sacred, to the interests of the “sovereign people,” represented by an arbitrary, centralized, imperial government. Sheltered under the idea of the sovereignty of the people, they find it possible to foster many a project destructive of individual freedom. It is to be feared that when such persons come into positions of power they will carry out these tendencies into practice. Adopting all the institutions of a democratical community as their basis, thereby appealing to your sympathy and winning your confidence, they will (not wilfully perhaps, but through a natural love of domination, or from mere thoughtlessness and immaturity of mind)[103] contribute to reduce their republic of the future to that state of society described by De Tocqueville—a man who fully acquiesced in and sympathized with the republican development of his day, but saw its dangers. “The supreme power in such a democracy,” he says, “extends its arm over the whole community; it covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened and made weak; such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupifies a people; ... it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.—I think,” he says elsewhere, “that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories.... I have been led to think that the nations of Christendom will perhaps eventually undergo some sort of oppression like that which hung over several of the nations of the ancient world.”[104] A Greek sage observed long ago that the strongest oligarchies are those which in themselves were democratical. The possibility of such a future despotism need not however be regarded with dread by a people long trained to freedom, and watchful for the interests of all. I believe that we may escape subjection to this despotism of the future, which is shadowed forth in the crude and anomalous theories of the politicians to whom I have alluded, by holding fast those very principles by the strength of which our people have been enabled so happily in times past to resist monarchical aggressions. The vital source for the nourishment of those principles is a deep conviction of the Divine government of the world, and of the worth of every soul created by God. “If,” says De Tocqueville, “amongst the opinions of a democratic people any of those pernicious theories exist which inculcate that all perishes with the body, let the men by whom such theories are professed be marked as the natural foes of such a people. The Materialists are offensive to me in many respects; I am disgusted at their arrogance. If their system could be of any utility to man, it would seem to be by giving him a modest opinion of himself. But these reasoners show that it is not so; and when they think they have said enough to establish that they are brutes, they show themselves as proud as if they had demonstrated that they are gods.”[105] We have lately seen this arrogant materialism culminate in a temper of mind well expressed by one of the writers in the organ of the fashionable London Clubs, where, treating of that large class of persons of various shades of character who are brought under the Contagious Diseases Acts, he says these women ought to be “treated as foul sewers are treated, as physical facts and not as moral agents.” Sewers have neither souls nor civil rights; by admitting into their political theory the idea that any class of human beings whatever may be reduced to the level of an inanimate nuisance for political purposes, these writers have demonstrated to us very clearly the intimate connection between a gross materialism and the most cruel and oppressive despotism. The men who speak thus, and who act in harmony with their utterances, do not believe that the beings of whom they speak have souls; to them any regenerating influence from a Divine source upon the spirit of man or woman is inconceivable. It is needless to indicate more particularly the natural and close alliance between this materialism and the coercive and oppressive policy which such materialists, though frequently professing radicalism, will readily adopt, merely transferring the power of the deprivation of civil and human rights from the hands of a monarch or a hereditary aristocracy into those of official experts who will be the elect of a fully enfranchised people, and therefore more dangerously confided in by the people. In order that we may avoid such a future despotism having its root deeply laid in a materialistic creed, we need—and a merciful God will grant it—for each individual, and for the nation at large, a fuller measure of that light of the conscience, and that life of the spirit which will enable us to discern with clearness and to tread with perseverance that path which leads to the goal whither the hopes of the human race are ever tending.
The following are the editions of some books consulted:—
De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Third edition. Saunders and Otley.
Blackstone’s Commentaries. Thirteenth edition, with Christian’s Notes.
De Lolme on the Constitution. Second edition. Wilkie and Robinson.
Creasy on the Constitution. Eighth edition. Bentley.
Guizot’s Causes of the Success of the English Revolution. Murray.