CORRUPTION,
AN EPISTLE.
Boast on, my friend—tho' stript of all beside,
Thy struggling nation still retains her pride:
That pride which once in genuine glory woke
When Marlborough fought and brilliant St. John spoke;
That pride which still, by time and shame unstung,
Outlives even Whitelocke's sword and Hawkesbury's tongue!
Boast on, my friend, while in this humbled isle[1]
Where Honor mourns and Freedom fears to smile,
Where the bright light of England's fame is known
But by the shadow o'er our fortunes thrown;
Where, doomed ourselves to naught but wrongs and slights,[2]
We hear you boast of Britain's glorious rights,
As wretched slaves that under hatches lie
Hear those on deck extol the sun and sky!
Boast on, while wandering thro' my native haunts,
I coldly listen to thy patriot vaunts;
And feel, tho' close our wedded countries twine,
More sorrow for my own than pride from thine.
Yet pause a moment—and if truths severe
Can find an inlet to that courtly ear,
Which hears no news but Ward's gazetted lies,
And loves no politics in rhyme but Pye's,—
If aught can please thee but the good old saws
Of "Church and State," and "William's matchless laws,"
And "Acts and Rights of glorious Eighty-eight,"—
Things which tho' now a century out of date
Still serve to ballast with convenient words,
A few crank arguments for speeching lords,—
Turn while I tell how England's freedom found,
Where most she lookt for life, her deadliest wound;
How brave she struggled while her foe was seen,
How faint since Influence lent that foe a screen;
How strong o'er James and Popery she prevailed,
How weakly fell when Whigs and gold assailed.
While kings were poor and all those schemes unknown
Which drain the people to enrich the throne;
Ere yet a yielding Commons had supplied
Those chains of gold by which themselves are tied,
Then proud Prerogative, untaught to creep
With bribery's silent foot on Freedom's sleep,
Frankly avowed his bold enslaving plan
And claimed a right from God to trample man!
But Luther's schism had too much roused mankind
For Hampden's truths to linger long behind;
Nor then, when king-like popes had fallen so low,
Could pope-like kings escape the levelling blow.[3]
That ponderous sceptre (in whose place we bow
To the light talisman of influence now),
Too gross, too visible to work the spell
Which modern power performs, in fragments fell:
In fragments lay, till, patched and painted o'er
With fleurs-de-lis, it shone and scourged once more.
'Twas then, my friend, thy kneeling nation quaft
Long, long and deep, the churchman's opiate draught
Of passive, prone obedience—then took flight
All sense of man's true dignity and right;
And Britons slept so sluggish in their chain
That Freedom's watch-voice called almost in vain.
Oh England! England! what a chance was thine,
When the last tyrant of that ill-starred line
Fled from his sullied crown and left thee free
To found thy own eternal liberty!
How nobly high in that propitious hour
Might patriot hands have raised the triple tower[4]
Of British freedom on a rock divine
Which neither force could storm nor treachery mine!
But no—the luminous, the lofty plan,
Like mighty Babel, seemed too bold for man;
The curse of jarring tongues again was given
To thwart a work which raised men nearer heaven.
While Tories marred what Whigs had scarce begun,
While Whigs undid what Whigs themselves had done.
The hour was lost and William with a smile
Saw Freedom weeping o'er the unfinisht pile!
Hence all the ills you suffer,—hence remain
Such galling fragments of that feudal chain[5]
Whose links, around you by the Norman flung,
Tho' loosed and broke so often, still have clung.
Hence sly Prerogative like Jove of old
Has turned his thunder into showers of gold,
Whose silent courtship wins securer joys,
Taints by degrees, and ruins without noise.
While parliaments, no more those sacred things
Which make and rule the destiny of kings.
Like loaded dice by ministers are thrown,
And each new set of sharpers cog their own.
Hence the rich oil that from the Treasury steals
Drips smooth o'er all the Constitution's wheels,
Giving the old machine such pliant play[6]
That Court and Commons jog one joltless way,
While Wisdom trembles for the crazy car,
So gilt, so rotten, carrying fools so far;
And the duped people, hourly doomed to pay
The sums that bribe their liberties away,[7]—
Like a young eagle who has lent his plume
To fledge the shaft by which he meets his doom,—
See their own feathers pluckt, to wing the dart
Which rank corruption destines for their heart!
But soft! methinks I hear thee proudly say,
"What! shall I listen to the impious lay
"That dares with Tory license to profane
"The bright bequests of William's glorious reign?
"Shall the great wisdom of our patriot sires,
"Whom Hawkesbury quotes and savory Birch admires,
"Be slandered thus? shall honest Steele agree
"With virtuous Rose to call us pure and free,
"Yet fail to prove it? Shall our patent pair
"Of wise state-poets waste their words in air,
"And Pye unheeded breathe his prosperous strain,
"And Canning take the people's sense in vain?"
The people!—ah! that Freedom's form should stay
Where Freedom's spirit long hath past away!
That a false smile should play around the dead
And flush the features when the soul hath fled![8]
When Rome had lost her virtue with her rights,
When her foul tyrant sat on Capreae's heights,[9]
Amid his ruffian spies and doomed to death
Each noble name they blasted with their breath,—
Even then, (in mockery of that golden time,
When the Republic rose revered, sublime,
And her proud sons, diffused from zone to zone,
Gave kings to every nation but their own,)
Even then the senate and the tribunes stood,
Insulting marks, to show how high the flood
Of Freedom flowed, in glory's bygone day,
And how it ebbed,—for ever ebbed away![10]
Look but around—tho' yet a tyrant's sword
Nor haunts our sleep nor glitters o'er our board,
Tho' blood be better drawn, by modern quacks,
With Treasury leeches than with sword or axe;
Yet say, could even a prostrate tribune's power
Or a mock senate in Rome's servile hour
Insult so much the claims, the rights of man,
As doth that fettered mob, that free divan,
Of noble tools and honorable knaves,
Of pensioned patriots and privileged slaves;—
That party-colored mass which naught can warm
But rank corruption's heat—whose quickened swarm
Spread their light wings in Bribery's golden sky,
Buzz for a period, lay their eggs and die;—
That greedy vampire which from Freedom's tomb
Comes forth with all the mimicry of bloom
Upon its lifeless cheek and sucks and drains
A people's blood to feel its putrid veins!
Thou start'st, my friend, at picture drawn so dark—
"Is there no light?"—thou ask'st—"no lingering spark
"Of ancient fire to warm us? Lives there none,
"To act a Marvell's part?"[11]—alas! not one.
To place and power all public spirit tends,
In place and power all public spirit ends;
Like hardy plants that love the air and sky,
When out, 'twill thrive—but taken in, 'twill die!
Not bolder truths of sacred Freedom hung
From Sidney's pen or burned on Fox's tongue,
Than upstart Whigs produce each market-night,
While yet their conscience, as their purse, is light;
While debts at home excite their care for those
Which, dire to tell, their much-loved country owes,
And loud and upright, till their prize be known,
They thwart the King's supplies to raise their own.
But bees on flowers alighting cease their hum—
So, settling upon places, Whigs grow dumb.
And, tho' most base is he who, 'neath the shade
Of Freedom's ensign plies corruption's trade,
And makes the sacred flag he dares to show
His passport to the market of her foe,
Yet, yet, I own, so venerably dear
Are Freedom's grave old anthems to my ear,
That I enjoy them, tho' by traitors sung,
And reverence Scripture even from Satan's tongue.
Nay, when the constitution has expired,
I'll have such men, like Irish wakers, hired
To chant old "Habeas Corpus" by its side,
And ask in purchased ditties why it died?
See yon smooth lord whom nature's plastic pains
Would seem to've fashioned for those Eastern reigns
When eunuchs flourisht, and such nerveless things
As men rejected were the chosen of kings;—[12]
Even he, forsooth, (oh fraud, of all the worst!)
Dared to assume the patriot's name at first—
Thus Pitt began, and thus begin his apes;
Thus devils when first raised take pleasing shapes.
But oh, poor Ireland! if revenge be sweet
For centuries of wrong, for dark deceit
And withering insult—for the Union thrown
Into thy bitter cup when that alone
Of slavery's draught was wanting[13]—if for this
Revenge be sweet, thou hast that daemon's bliss;
For sure 'tis more than hell's revenge to fee
That England trusts the men who've ruined thee:—
That in these awful days when every hour
Creates some new or blasts some ancient power,
When proud Napoleon like the enchanted shield
Whose light compelled each wondering foe to yield,
With baleful lustre blinds the brave and free
And dazzles Europe into slavery,—
That in this hour when patriot zeal should guide,
When Mind should rule and—Fox should not have died,
All that devoted England can oppose
To enemies made fiends and friends made foes,
Is the rank refuse, the despised remains
Of that unpitying power, whose whips and chains
Drove Ireland first to turn with harlot glance
Towards other shores and woo the embrace of France;—
Those hacked and tainted tools, so foully fit
For the grand artisan of mischief, Pitt,
So useless ever but in vile employ,
So weak to save, so vigorous to destroy—
Such are the men that guard thy threatened shore,
Oh England! sinking England! boast no more.
[1] England began very early to feel the effects of cruelty towards her dependencies. "The severity of her government [says Macpherson] contributed more to deprive her of the continental dominions of the family of the Plantagenet than the arms of France."—See his History, vol. i.
[2] "By the total reduction of the kingdom of Ireland in 1691[says Burke], the ruin of the native Irish, and in a great measure, too, of the first races of the English, was completely accomplished. The new English interested was settled with as solid a stability as anything in human affairs can look for. All the penal laws of that unparalleled code of oppression, which were made after the last event, were manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a conquered people, whom the victors delighted to trample upon, and were not at all afraid to provoke." Yet this is the era to which the wise Common Council of Dublin refer us for "invaluable blessings," etc.
[3] The drivelling correspondence between James I and his "dog Steenie" (the Duke of Buckingham), which we find among the Hardwicke Papers, sufficiently shows, if we wanted any such illustration, into what doting, idiotic brains the plan at arbitrary power may enter.
[4] Tacitus has expressed his opinion, in a passage very frequently quoted, that such a distribution of power as the theory of the British constitution exhibits is merely a subject of bright speculation, "a system more easily praised than practised, and which, even could it happen to exist, would certainly not prove permanent;" and, in truth, a review of England's annals would dispose us to agree with the great historian's remark. For we find that at no period whatever has this balance of the three estates existed; that the nobles predominated till the policy of Henry VII, and his successor reduced their weight by breaking up the feudal system of property; that the power of the Crown became then supreme and absolute, till the bold encroachments of the Commons subverted the fabric altogether; that the alternate ascendency of prerogative and privilege distracted the period which followed the Restoration; and that lastly, the Acts of 1688, by laying the foundation of an unbounded court- influence, have secured a preponderance to the Throne, which every succeeding year increases. So that the vaunted British constitution has never perhaps existed but in mere theory.
[5] The last great wound given to the feudal system was the Act of the 12th of Charles II, which abolished the tenure of knight's service in capite, and which Blackstone compares, for its salutary influence upon property, to the boasted provisions of Magna Charta itself. Yet even in this act we see the effects of that counteracting spirit which has contrived to weaken every effort of the English nation towards liberty.
[6] "They drove so fast [says Wellwood of the ministers of Charles I.], that it was no wonder that the wheels and chariot broke."—(Memoirs p. 86.)
[7] Among those auxiliaries which the Revolution of 1688 marshalled on the side of the Throne, the bugbear of Popery has not been the least convenient and serviceable. Those unskilful tyrants, Charles and James, instead of profiting by that useful subserviency which has always distinguished the ministers of our religious establishment, were so infatuated as to plan the ruin of this best bulwark of their power and moreover connected their designs upon the Church so undisguisedly with their attacks upon the Constitution that they identified in the minds of the people the interests of their religion and their liberties. During those times therefore "No Popery" was the watchword of freedom and served to keep the public spirit awake against the invasions of bigotry and prerogative.
[8] "It is a scandal [said Sir Charles Sedley in William's reign] that a government so sick at heart as ours is should look so well in the face."
[9] The senate still continued, during the reign of Tiberius, to manage all the business of the public: the money was then and long after coined by their authority, and every other public affair received their sanction.
[10] There is something very touching in what Tacitus tells us of the hopes that revived in a few patriot bosoms, when the death of Augustus was near approaching, and the fond expectation with which they already began "bona libertatis incassum disserere."
[11] Andrew Marvell, the honest opposer of the court during the reign of Charles the Second, and the last member of parliament who, according to the ancient mode, took wages from his constituents. The Commons have, since then, much changed their pay-masters.
[12] According to Xenophon, the chief circumstance which recommended these creatures to the service of Eastern princes was the ignominious station they held in society, and the probability of their being, upon this account, more devoted to the will and caprice of a master, from whose notice alone they derived consideration, and in whose favor they might seek refuge from the general contempt of mankind.
[13] Among the many measures, which, since the Revolution, have contributed to increase the influence of the Throne, and to feed up this "Aaron's serpent" of the constitution to its present healthy and respectable magnitude, there have been few more nutritive than the Scotch and Irish Unions.