I know that it has been a cry usual on this occasion, as it has been upon occasions where such a cry could have less apparent justification, that great distress and misery have been the consequence of this war, by the burdens brought and laid upon the people. But to know where the burden really lies, and where it presses, we must divide the people. As to the common people, their stock is in their persons and in their earnings. I deny that the stock of their persons is diminished in a greater proportion than the common sources of populousness abundantly fill up: I mean constant employment; proportioned pay according to the produce of the soil, and, where the soil fails, according to the operation of the general capital; plentiful nourishment to vigorous labor; comfortable provision to decrepit age, to orphan infancy, and to accidental malady. I say nothing to the policy of the provision for the poor, in all the variety of faces under which it presents itself. This is the matter of another inquiry. I only just speak of it as of a fact, taken with others, to support me in my denial that hitherto any one of the ordinary sources of the increase of mankind is dried up by this war. I affirm, what I can well prove, that the waste has been less than the supply. To say that in war no man must be killed is to say that there ought to be no war. This they may say who wish to talk idly, and who would display their humanity at the expense of their honesty or their understanding. If more lives are lost in this war than necessity requires, they are lost by misconduct or mistake: but if the hostility be just, the error is to be corrected, the war is not to be abandoned.
That the stock of the common people, in numbers, is not lessened, any more than the causes are impaired, is manifest, without being at the pains of an actual numeration. An improved and improving agriculture, which implies a great augmentation of labor, has not yet found itself at a stand, no, not for a single moment, for want of the necessary hands, either in the settled progress of husbandry or in the occasional pressure of harvests. I have even reason to believe that there has been a much smaller importation, or the demand of it, from a neighboring kingdom, than in former times, when agriculture was more limited in its extent and its means, and when the time was a season of profound peace. On the contrary, the prolific fertility of country life has poured its superfluity of population into the canals, and into other public works, which of late years have been undertaken to so amazing an extent, and which have not only not been discontinued, but, beyond all expectation, pushed on with redoubled vigor, in a war that calls for so many of our men and so much of our riches. An increasing capital calls for labor, and an increasing population answers to the call. Our manufactures, augmented both for the supply of foreign and domestic consumption, reproducing, with the means of life, the multitudes which they use and waste, (and which many of them devour much more surely and much more largely than the war,) have always found the laborious hand ready for the liberal pay. That the price of the soldier is highly raised is true. In part this rise may be owing to some measures not so well considered in the beginning of this war; but the grand cause has been the reluctance of that class of people from whom the soldiery is taken to enter into a military life,—not that, but, once entered into, it has its conveniences, and even its pleasures. I have seldom known a soldier who, at the intercession of his friends, and at their no small charge, had been redeemed from that discipline, that in a short time was not eager to return to it again. But the true reason is the abundant occupation and the augmented stipend found in towns and villages and farms, which leaves a smaller number of persons to be disposed of. The price of men for new and untried ways of life must bear a proportion to the profits of that mode of existence from whence they are to be bought.
So far as to the stock of the common people, as it consists in their persons. As to the other part, which consists in their earnings, I have to say, that the rates of wages are very greatly augmented almost through the kingdom. In the parish where I live it has been raised from seven to nine shillings in the week, for the same laborer, performing the same task, and no greater. Except something in the malt taxes and the duties upon sugars, I do not know any one tax imposed for very many years past which affects the laborer in any degree whatsoever; while, on the other hand, the tax upon houses not having more than seven windows (that is, upon cottages) was repealed the very year before the commencement of the present war. On the whole, I am satisfied that the humblest class, and that class which touches the most nearly on the lowest, out of which it is continually emerging, and to which it is continually falling, receives far more from public impositions than it pays. That class receives two million sterling annually from the classes above it. It pays to no such amount towards any public contribution.
I hope it is not necessary for me to take notice of that language, so ill suited to the persons to whom it has been attributed, and so unbecoming the place in which it is said to have been uttered, concerning the present war as the cause of the high price of provisions during the greater part of the year 1796. I presume it is only to be ascribed to the intolerable license with which the newspapers break not only the rules of decorum in real life, but even the dramatic decorum, when they personate great men, and, like bad poets, make the heroes of the piece talk more like us Grub-Street scribblers than in a style consonant to persons of gravity and importance in the state. It was easy to demonstrate the cause, and the sole cause, of that rise in the grand article and first necessary of life. It would appear that it had no more connection with the war than the moderate price to which all sorts of grain were reduced, soon after the return of Lord Malmesbury, had with the state of politics and the fate of his Lordship's treaty. I have quite as good reason (that is, no reason at all) to attribute this abundance to the longer continuance of the war as the gentlemen who personate leading members of Parliament have had for giving the enhanced price to that war, at a more early period of its duration. Oh, the folly of us poor creatures, who, in the midst of our distresses or our escapes, are ready to claw or caress one another, upon matters that so seldom depend on our wisdom or our weakness, on our good or evil conduct towards each other!
An untimely shower or an unseasonable drought, a frost too long continued or too suddenly broken up with rain and tempest, the blight of the spring or the smut of the harvest will do more to cause the distress of the belly than all the contrivances of all statesmen can do to relieve it. Let government protect and encourage industry, secure property, repress violence, and discountenance fraud, it is all that they have to do. In other respects, the less they meddle in these affairs, the better; the rest is in the hands of our Master and theirs. We are in a constitution of things wherein "modo sol nimius, modo corripit imber."—But I will push this matter no further. As I have said a good deal upon it at various times during my public service, and have lately written something on it, which may yet see the light, I shall content myself now with observing that the vigorous and laborious class of life has lately got, from the bon-ton of the humanity of this day, the name of the "laboring poor." We have heard many plans for the relief of the "laboring poor." This puling jargon is not as innocent as it is foolish. In meddling with great affairs, weakness is never innoxious. Hitherto the name of poor (in the sense in which it is used to excite compassion) has not been used for those who can, but for those who cannot labor,—for the sick and infirm, for orphan infancy, for languishing and decrepit age; but when we affect to pity, as poor, those who must labor or the world cannot exist, we are trifling with the condition of mankind. It is the common doom of man, that he must eat his bread by the sweat of his brow,—that is, by the sweat of his body or the sweat of his mind. If this toil was inflicted as a curse, it is, as might be expected, from the curses of the Father of all blessings; it is tempered with many alleviations, many comforts. Every attempt to fly from it, and to refuse the very terms of our existence, becomes much more truly a curse; and heavier pains and penalties fall upon those who would elude the tasks which are put upon them by the great Master Workman of the world, who, in His dealings with His creatures, sympathizes with their weakness, and, speaking of a creation wrought by mere will out of nothing, speaks of six days of labor and one of rest. I do not call a healthy young man, cheerful in his mind and vigorous in his arms, I cannot call such a man poor; I cannot pity my kind as a kind, merely because they are men. This affected pity only tends to dissatisfy them with their condition, and to teach them to seek resources where no resources are to be found, in something else than their own industry and frugality and sobriety. Whatever may be the intention (which, because I do not know, I cannot dispute) of those who would discontent mankind by this strange pity, they act towards us, in the consequences, as if they were our worst enemies.
In turning our view from the lower to the higher classes, it will not be necessary for me to show at any length that the stock of the latter, as it consists in their numbers, has not yet suffered any material diminution. I have not seen or heard it asserted; I have no reason to believe it: there is no want of officers, that I have ever understood, for the new ships which we commission, or the new regiments which we raise. In the nature of things, it is not with their persons that the higher classes principally pay their contingent to the demands of war. There is another, and not less important part, which rests with almost exclusive weight upon them. They furnish the means
"how War may, best upheld,
Move by her two main nerves, iron and gold,
In all her equipage."
Not that they are exempt from contributing also by their personal service in the fleets and armies of their country. They do contribute, and in their full and fair proportion, according to the relative proportion of their numbers in the community. They contribute all the mind that actuates the whole machine. The fortitude required of them is very different from the unthinking alacrity of the common soldier or common sailor in the face of danger and death: it is not a passion, it is not an impulse, it is not a sentiment; it is a cool, steady, deliberate principle, always present, always equable,—having no connection with anger,—tempering honor with prudence,—incited, invigorated, and sustained by a generous love of fame,—informed, moderated, and directed by an enlarged knowledge of its own great public ends,—flowing in one blended stream from the opposite sources of the heart and the head,—carrying in itself its own commission, and proving its title to every other command by the first and most difficult command, that of the bosom in which it resides: it is a fortitude which unites with the courage of the field the more exalted and refined courage of the council,—which knows as well to retreat as to advance,—which can conquer as well by delay as by the rapidity of a march or the impetuosity of an attack,—which can be, with Fabius, the black cloud that lowers on the tops of the mountains, or, with Scipio, the thunderbolt of war,—which, undismayed by false shame, can patiently endure the severest trial that a gallant spirit can undergo, in the taunts and provocations of the enemy, the suspicions, the cold respect, and "mouth honor" of those from whom it should meet a cheerful obedience,—which, undisturbed by false humanity, can calmly assume that most awful moral responsibility of deciding when victory may be too dearly purchased by the loss of a single life, and when the safety and glory of their country may demand the certain sacrifice of thousands. Different stations of command may call for different modifications of this fortitude, but the character ought to be the same in all. And never, in the most "palmy state" of our martial renown, did it shine with brighter lustre than in the present sanguinary and ferocious hostilities, wherever the British arms have been carried. But in this most arduous and momentous conflict, which from its nature should have roused us to new and unexampled efforts, I know not how it has been that we have never put forth half the strength which we have exerted in ordinary wars. In the fatal battles which have drenched the Continent with blood and shaken the system of Europe to pieces, we have never had any considerable army, of a magnitude to be compared to the least of those by which in former times we so gloriously asserted our place as protectors, not oppressors, at the head of the great commonwealth of Europe. We have never manfully met the danger in front; and when the enemy, resigning to us our natural dominion of the ocean, and abandoning the defence of his distant possessions to the infernal energy of the destroying principles which he had planted there for the subversion of the neighboring colonies, drove forth, by one sweeping law of unprecedented despotism, his armed multitudes on every side, to overwhelm the countries and states which had for centuries stood the firm barriers against the ambition of France, we drew back the arm of our military force, which had never been more than half raised to oppose him. From that time we have been combating only with the other arm of our naval power,—the right arm of England, I admit,—but which struck almost unresisted, with blows that could never reach the heart of the hostile mischief. From that time, without a single effort to regain those outworks which ever till now we so strenuously maintained, as the strong frontier of our own dignity and safety no less than the liberties of Europe,—with but one feeble attempt to succor those brave, faithful, and numerous allies, whom, for the first time since the days of our Edwards and Henrys, we now have in the bosom of France itself,—we have been intrenching and fortifying and garrisoning ourselves at home, we have been redoubling security on security to protect ourselves from invasion, which has now first become to us a serious object of alarm and terror. Alas! the few of us who have protracted life in any measure near to the extreme limits of our short period have been condemned to see strange things,—new systems of policy, new principles, and not only new men, but what might appear a new species of men. I believe that any person who was of age to take a part in public affairs forty years ago (if the intermediate space of time were expunged from his memory) would hardly credit his senses, when he should hear from the highest authority that an army of two hundred thousand men was kept up in this island, and that in the neighboring island there were at least fourscore thousand more. But when he had recovered from his surprise on being told of this army, which has not its parallel, what must be his astonishment to be told again that this mighty force was kept up for the mere purpose of an inert and passive defence, and that in its far greater part it was disabled by its constitution and very essence from defending us against an enemy by any one preventive stroke or any one operation of active hostility? What must his reflections be, on learning further, that a fleet of five hundred men of war, the best appointed, and to the full as ably commanded as this country ever had upon the sea, was for the greater part employed in carrying on the same system of unenterprising defence? What must be the sentiments and feelings of one who remembers the former energy of England, when he is given to understand that these two islands, with their extensive and everywhere vulnerable coast, should be considered as a garrisoned sea-town? What would such a man, what would any man think, if the garrison of so strange a fortress should be such, and so feebly commanded, as never to make a sally,—and that, contrary to all which has hitherto been seen in war, an infinitely inferior army, with the shattered relics of an almost annihilated navy, ill-found and ill-manned, may with safety besiege this superior garrison, and, without hazarding the life of a man, ruin the place, merely by the menaces and false appearances of an attack? Indeed, indeed, my dear friend, I look upon this matter of our defensive system as much the most important of all considerations at this moment. It has oppressed me with many anxious thoughts, which, more than any bodily distemper, have sunk me to the condition in which you know that I am. Should it please Providence to restore to me even the late weak remains of my strength, I propose to make this matter the subject of a particular discussion. I only mean here to argue, that the mode of conducting the war on our part, be it good or bad, has prevented even the common havoc of war in our population, and especially among that class whose duty and privilege of superiority it is to lead the way amidst the perils and slaughter of the field of battle.
The other causes which sometimes affect the numbers of the lower classes, but which I have shown not to have existed to any such degree during this war,—penury, cold, hunger, nakedness,—do not easily reach the higher orders of society. I do not dread for them the slightest taste of these calamities from the distress and pressure of the war. They have much more to dread in that way from the confiscations, the rapines, the burnings, and the massacres that may follow in the train of a peace which shall establish the devastating and depopulating principles and example of the French Regicides in security and triumph and dominion. In the ordinary course of human affairs, any check to population among men in ease and opulence is less to be apprehended from what they may suffer than from what they enjoy. Peace is more likely to be injurious to them in that respect than war. The excesses of delicacy, repose, and satiety are as unfavorable as the extremes of hardship, toil, and want to the increase and multiplication of our kind. Indeed, the abuse of the bounties of Nature, much more surely than any partial privation of them, tends to intercept that precious boon of a second and dearer life in our progeny, which was bestowed in the first great command to man from the All-Gracious Giver of all,—whose name be blessed, whether He gives or takes away! His hand, in every page of His book, has written the lesson of moderation. Our physical well-being, our moral worth, our social happiness, our political tranquillity, all depend on that control of all our appetites and passions which the ancients designed by the cardinal virtue of temperance.
The only real question to our present purpose, with regard to the higher classes, is, How stands the account of their stock, as it consists in wealth of every description? Have the burdens of the war compelled them to curtail any part of their former expenditure?—which, I have before observed, affords the only standard of estimating property as an object of taxation. Do they enjoy all the same conveniences, the same comforts, the same elegancies, the same luxuries, in the same or in as many different modes as they did before the war?