The process of argument by which he overcame the difficulty, simple as it may seem, is worthy of all heed. Its very simplicity may be regarded as demonstrating the soundness of the understanding that originated and then acted upon it as a firm first principle, especially when we take into account the exquisitely nice character of the conscience which it had to satisfy. It is absolutely necessary for the wellbeing of society, argued Sir Matthew, that justice be administered between man and man; and the necessity exists altogether independently of the great political events which affect the sources of power, by changing dynasties or revolutionizing governments. The claim of the supreme ruler de facto may be a bad one; he may owe his power to some act of great political injustice––to an iniquitous war––to an indefensible revolution––to a foul conspiracy; but the flaw in his title cannot be regarded as weakening in the least the claim of the people under him to the administration of justice among them as the ordinance of God. The right of the honest man to be protected by the magistrate from the thief––the right of the peaceable man to be protected by the magistrate from the assassin––is not a conditional right, dependent on the title of the ruler: it is as clear and certain during those periods so common in history, when the supreme power is illegitimately vested, as during the happier periods of undisputed legitimacy. And to be a minister of God for the administration of justice, if the office be attainable without sin, is as certainly right at all times as the just exercise of the magistrate’s functions is right at all times. If it be right that society be protected by the magistrate, it is as unequivocally right in the magistrate to protect. But it is wrong to recognise as legitimate the supreme ruler of a country if his power be palpably usurped. English society, 265 under Cromwell, retains its right to have justice administered, wholly unaffected by the flaw in Cromwell’s title; but it would be wrong to recognise his title, contrary to one’s conviction, as void of any flaw. In short, to use the simple language of Burnet, Sir Matthew, ‘after mature deliberation, came to be of opinion, that as it was absolutely necessary to have justice and property kept up at all times, it was no sin to take a commission from usurpers, if there was declaration made of acknowledging their authority.’ Cromwell had breadth enough to demand no such declaration from Sir Matthew, and so the latter took his place on the bench. Nor is it necessary to say how he adorned it. In agreement with his political views, he declined taking any part in trials for offences against the State; but in cases of ordinary felonies, no one could act with more vigour and decision. During the trial of a Republican soldier, who had waylaid and murdered a Royalist, the colonel of the soldier came into court to arrest judgment, on the plea that his man had done only his duty, for that the person whom he had killed had been disobeying the Protector’s orders at the time; and to threaten the judge with the vengeance of the supreme authority, if he urged matters to an extremity against him. Sir Matthew listened coolly to his threats and his reasonings, and then, pronouncing sentence of death against the felon, agreeably to the finding of the jury, he ordered him out to instant execution, lest the course of justice should be interrupted by any interference on the part of Government. On another occasion, in which he had to preside in a trial in which the Protector was deeply concerned, he found that the jury had been returned, not by the sheriff or his lawful officer, but by order of the Protector himself. He immediately dismissed them, and, refusing to go on with the trial, broke up the court. Cromwell, says Burnet, was highly displeased with him on this occasion, and on his return from the circuit 266 in which it had occurred, told him in great anger that ‘he was not fit to be a judge.’ ‘Very true,’ replied Sir Matthew, whose ideas of the requirements of the office were of the most exalted character,––‘Very true;’ and so the matter dropped.
‘It is absolutely necessary,’ argued Sir Matthew, ‘to have justice kept up at all times,’ whatever flaws may exist in the title of the men in whom the supreme authority may chance to be vested. Never yet was there a simpler proposition; but there is sublimity in its breadth. It involves the true doctrine of subjection to the magistrate, as enforced by St. Paul. The New Testament furnishes us with no disquisitions on political justice: it does not say whether the title of Domitian to the supreme authority was a good title or no, or whether he should have been succeeded by Caligula, and Caligula by Claudius, or no; or whether or no the fact that Claudius was poisoned by the mother of Nero, derived to Nero any right to Claudius’s throne. We hear nothing of these matters. The magistracy described by St. Paul is the magistracy conceived of by Sir Matthew Hale ‘as necessary to be kept up at all times.’ An application of this simple principle to some of the more marked proceedings of our civil courts during the last two years will be found an admirable means of testing their degree of judicial wisdom. ‘It is absolutely necessary to have justice kept up at all times,’ and this not less necessary surely within than beyond the pale of the Church. It is necessary that a minister of the gospel ‘be blameless’––no drunkard, no swindler, no thief, no grossly obscene person; nor can any supposed flaw in the constitution of an ecclesiastical court disannul the necessity. A man may sit in that court in a judicial capacity whose competency to take his seat there may not have been determined by some civil court that challenges for itself an equivocal and disputed right to decide in the matter. 267 There may exist some supposed, or even some real, flaw in that supreme ecclesiastical authority of the country, through the exertion of which the Church is to be protected from the infection of vice and irreligion; but this flaw, real or supposed, furnishes no adequate cause why justice in the Church ‘should not be kept up.’ ‘Justice,’ said Sir Matthew, ‘must be kept up at all times,’ whatever the irregularities of title which may occur in the supreme authority. The great society of the Church has a right to justice, whether it be decided that the ministers of quoad sacra parishes have what has been termed a legal right to sit in ecclesiastical courts or no. The devout and honest church member has a right to be protected from the blasphemous profanities of the wretched minister who is a thief or wretched swindler; the chaste and sober have a right to be protected from the ministrations of the drunken and the obscene wretch, whose preaching is but mockery, and his dispensations of the sacrament sacrilege. The Church has a right to purge itself of such ministers; and these sacred rights no supposed, even no real, flaw in the constitution of its courts ought to be permitted to affect. ‘Justice may be kept up at all times.’ We have said that the principle of Sir Matthew Hale serves to throw a kind of historic light on the judicial talent of our country in the present age, as represented by the majority of our Lords of Session. It enables us, in some sort, to anticipate regarding it the decision of posterity. The list of cases of protection afforded by the civil court will of itself form a curious climax in the page of some future historian. Swindling will come after drunkenness in the series, theft will follow after swindling, and the miserable catalogue will be summed up by an offence which we must not name. And it will be remarked that all these gross crimes were fenced round and protected in professed ministers of the gospel by the interference of the civil courts, just because a majority of the 268 judges were men so defective in judicial genius that they lost sight of the very first principles of their profession, and held that ‘justice is not to be kept up at all times.’ But we leave our readers to follow up the subject. Some of the principles to which we have referred may serve to throw additional light on the remark of Lord Ivory, when recalling the interdict in the Southend case. ‘Even were the objection against the competency of quoad sacra ministers to be ultimately sustained,’ said his Lordship, ‘I am disposed to hold that the judicial acts and sentences of the General Assembly and its Commission, bona fide pronounced in the interim, should be given effect to notwithstanding.’
AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH.
We enjoyed the honour on Wednesday last of being present as a guest at the annual soiree of the Scottish Young Men’s Society, and derived much pleasure from the general appearance of the meeting, and the addresses of the members and their friends. The body of the great Waterloo Room was crowded on the occasion with a respectable, intellectual-looking audience, including from about a hundred and fifty to two hundred members of the Society, all of them young men banded together for mutual improvement, and most of them in that important decade of life––by far the most important of the appointed seven––which intervenes between the fifteenth and the five-and-twentieth year. The platform was equally well filled, and the Sheriff of Edinburgh occupied the chair. We felt a particular interest in the objects of the Society, and a deep sympathy with its members; for, as we listened to the various speakers, and our eyes glanced over the intelligent countenances that thronged the area of the apartment, we thought of past difficulties encountered in a cause similar to that which formed the uniting bond of the Society, and of not a few wrecks which we had witnessed of men who had set out in life from the humbler levels, with the determination of pressing their way upwards. And feeling somewhat after the manner that an old sailor would feel who saw a crew of young ones setting out to thread their way through some dangerous strait, the perils of which he had already encountered, or to sail round some formidable cape, which, after many an unsuccessful attempt, he had 270 doubled, we fancied ourselves in the position of one qualified to give them some little advice regarding the navigation of the seas on which they were just entering. But, be the fact of qualification as it may, we found ourselves, after leaving the room, addressing them, in imagination, in a few plain words, regarding some of the rocks, and shoals, and insidious currents, which we knew lay in their course. Men whose words come slowly and painfully when among their fellows, can be quite fluent enough when they speak inwards without breaking silence, and have merely an imaginary assemblage for their audience; and so our short address went off glibly, without break or interruption, in the style of ordinary conversational gossip. There are curious precedents on record for the printing of unspoken speeches. Rejecting, however, all the higher ones, we shall be quite content to take our precedent from the famous speech which the ‘indigent philosopher’ addresses, in one of Goldsmith’s Essays, to Mr. Bellowsmender and the Cateaton Club. The philosopher begins, it will be remembered, by telling his imaginary audience, that though Nathan Ben Funk, the rich Jew, might feel a natural interest in the state of the stocks, it was nothing to them, who had no money; and concludes by quoting the ‘famous author called Lilly’s Grammar.’
‘Members of the Scottish Young Men’s Society,’ we said, ‘it is rather late in life for the individual who now addresses you to attempt acquiring the art of the public speaker. Those who have been most in the habit of noticing the effect of the several mechanical professions on character and intellect, divide them into two classes––the sedentary and the laborious; and they remark, that while in the sedentary, such as the printing, weaving, tailoring, and shoemaking trades, there are usually a considerable proportion of fluent speakers, in the laborious trades, on the other hand, such as those of the mason, ship-carpenter, 271 ploughman, and blacksmith, one generally meets with but taciturn, slow-speaking men. We need scarce say in which of these schools we have been trained. You will at once see––to borrow from one of the best and most ancient of writers––that we are “not eloquent,” but “a man of slow speech, and of a slow tongue.” And yet we think we may venture addressing ourselves, in a few plain words, to an association of young men united for the purpose of mutual improvement. We ought and we do sympathize with you in your object; and we congratulate you on the facilities which your numbers, and your library, and your residence in one of the most intellectual cities in the world, cannot fail to afford you in its pursuit. We ourselves have known what it is to prosecute in solitude, with but few books, and encompassed by many difficulties, the search after knowledge; and we have seen year after year pass by, and the obstacles in our way remaining apparently as great as at first. And were we to sum up the condensed result of our experience in two brief words of advice, it would amount simply to this, “Never despair.” We are told of Commodore Anson––a man whose sense and courage ultimately triumphed over a series of perhaps the most appalling disasters man ever encountered, and who won for himself, by his magnanimity, sagacity, and cool resolution, the applauses of even his enemies, so that Rousseau and Voltaire eulogized him, the one in history, the other in romance,––we are told, we say, of this Anson, that when raised to the British peerage, he was permitted to select his own motto, and that he chose an eminently characteristic one––“Nil Desperandum.” By all means let it be your motto also––not as a thing to be paraded on some heraldic label, but to be engraved upon your hearts. We wish that, amid the elegancies of this hall, we could bring up before you some of the scenes of our past life. They would form a curious panorama, and might serve to teach that 272 in no circumstances, however apparently desperate, should men lose hope. Never forget that it is not necessary, in order to overcome gigantic difficulties, that one’s strength should be gigantic. Persevering exertion is much more than strength. We owe to shovels and wheelbarrows, and human muscles of the average size and vigour, the great railway which connects the capitals of the two kingdoms. And the difficulties which encompass the young man of humble circumstances and imperfect education, must be regarded as coming under the same category as difficulties of the purely physical kind. Interrupted or insulated efforts, however vigorous, will be found to be but of little avail. It is to the element of continuity that you must trust. There is a world of sense in Sir Walter Scott’s favourite proverb, “Time and I, gentlemen, against any two.” But though it be unnecessary, in order to secure success, that one’s efforts in the contest with gigantic difficulties should be themselves gigantic, it is essentially necessary that they should employ one’s whole strength. Half efforts never accomplish anything. “No man ever did anything well,” says Johnson, “to which he did not apply the whole bent of his mind.” And unless a man keep his head cool, and his faculties undissipated, he need not expect that his efforts can ever be other than half efforts, or other than of a desultory, fitful, non-productive kind. We do not stand here in the character of a modern Rechabite. But this we must say: Let no young man ever beguile himself with the hope that he is to make a figure in society, or rise in the world, unless, as the apostle expresses it, he be “temperate in all things.” Scotland has produced not a few distinguished men who were unfortunately not temperate; but it is well known that of one of the greatest of them all––perhaps one of the most vigorous-minded men our country ever produced––the intemperate habits were not formed early. Robert Burns, up till his twenty-sixth year, when 273 he had mastered all his powers, and produced some of his finest poems, was an eminently sober man. Climbing requires not only a steady foot, but a strong head; and we question whether any one ever climbed the perilous steep, where, according to Beattie, “Fame’s proud temple shines afar,” who did not keep his head cool during the process. So far as our own experience goes, we can truly state, that though we have known not a few working men, possessed some of them of strong intellects, and some of them of fine taste, and even of genius, not one have we ever known who rose either to eminence or a competency under early formed habits of intemperance. These indeed are the difficulties that cannot be surmounted, and the only ones. Rather more than thirty years ago, the drinking usages of the country were more numerous than they are now. In the mechanical profession in which we laboured they were many: when a foundation was laid, the workmen were treated to drink; they were treated to drink when the walls were levelled; they were treated to drink when the building was finished; they were treated to drink when an apprentice joined the squad; treated to drink when his apron was washed; treated to drink when his “time was out;” and occasionally they learned to treat one another to drink. At the first house upon which we were engaged as a slim apprentice boy, the workmen had a royal founding-pint, and two whole glasses of whisky came to our share. A full-grown man might not deem a gill of usquebhae an over-dose, but it was too much for a boy unaccustomed to strong drink; and when the party broke up, and we got home to our few books––few, but good, and which we had learned at even an earlier period to pore over with delight––we found, as we opened the page of a favourite author, the letters dancing before our eyes, and that we could no longer master his sense. The state was perhaps a not very favourable one for forming a 274 resolution in, but we believe the effort served to sober us. We determined in that hour that never more would we sacrifice our capacity of intellectual enjoyment to a drinking usage; and during the fifteen years which we spent as an operative mason, we held, through God’s help, by the determination. We are not sure whether, save for that determination, we would have had the honour of a place on this platform to-night. But there are other kinds of intoxication than that which it is the nature of strong drink or of drugs to produce. Bacon speaks of a “natural drunkenness.” And the hallucinations of this natural drunkenness must be avoided if you would prosper. Let us specify one of these. Never let yourselves be beguiled by the idea that fate has misplaced you in life, and that were you in some other sphere you would rise. It is true that some men are greatly misplaced; but to brood over the idea is not the best way of getting the necessary exchange effected. It is not the way at all. Often the best policy in the case is just to forget the misplacement. We remember once deeming ourselves misplaced, when, in a season of bad health and consequent despondency, we had to work among labourers in a quarry. But the feeling soon passed, and we set ourselves carefully to examine the quarry. Cowper describes a prisoner of the Bastile beguiling his weary hours by counting the nail-studs on the door of his cell, upwards, downwards, and across,––
“Wearing out time in numbering to and fro,
The studs that thick emboss his iron door;
Then downward and then upwards, then aslant
And then alternate; with a sickly hope
By dint of change to give his tasteless task
Some relish; till, the sum exactly found
In all directions, he begins again.”
It was idle work; for to reckon up the door-studs never so often was not the way of opening up the door. But in carefully 275 examining and recording for our own use the appearances of the stony bars of our prison, we were greatly more profitably employed. Nay, we had stumbled on one of the best possible modes of escaping from our prison. We were in reality getting hold of its bolts and its stancheons, and converting them into tools in the work of breaking out. We remember once passing a whole season in one of the dreariest districts of the north-western Highlands,––a district included in that unhappy tract of country, doomed, we fear, to poverty and suffering, which we find marked in the rain-map of Europe with a double shade of blackness. We had hard work, and often soaking rain, during the day; and at night our damp fuel filled the turf hut in which we sheltered with suffocating smoke, and afforded no light by which to read. Nor––even ere the year got into its wane, and when in the long evenings we had light––had we any books to read by it, or a single literary or scientific friend with whom to exchange an idea. We remember at another time living in an agricultural district in the low country, in a hovel that was open along the ridge of the roof from gable to gable, so that as we lay a-bed we could tell the hours of the night by the stars that were passing overhead across the chasm. There were about half-a-dozen farm-servants, victims to the bothie system, that ate and slept in the same place; and often, long after midnight, a disreputable poacher used to come stealthily in, and fling himself down on a lair of straw that he had prepared for himself in a corner. Now, both the Highland hut and the Lowland hovel, with their accompaniments of protracted and uncongenial labour, might be regarded as dreary prisons; and yet we found them to be in reality useful schools, very necessary to our education. And now, when we hear about the state of the Highlands, and the character of our poor Highlanders, and of the influence of the bothie system and of the game-laws, we 276 feel that we know considerably more about such matters than if our experience had been of a more limited or more pleasant kind. There are few such prisons in which a young man of energy and a brave heart can be placed, in which he will not gain more by taking kindly to his work, and looking well about him, than by wasting himself in convulsive endeavours to escape. If he but learn to think of his prison as a school, there is good hope of his ultimately getting out of it. Were a butcher’s boy to ask us––you will not deem the illustration too low, for you will remember that Henry Kirke White was once a butcher’s boy––were he to ask us how we thought he could best escape from his miserable employment, we would at once say, You have rare opportunities of observation; you may be a butcher’s boy in body, but in mind you may become an adept in one of the profoundest of the sciences, that of comparative anatomy;––think of yourself as not in a prison, but in a school, and there is no fear but you will rise. There is another delusion of that “natural drunkenness” referred to, against which you must also be warned. Never sacrifice your independence to a phantom. We have seen young men utterly ruin themselves through the vain belief that they were too good for their work. They were mostly lads of a literary turn, who had got a knack of versifying, and who, in the fond belief that they were poets and men of genius, and that poets and men of genius should be above the soil and drudgery of mechanical labour, gave up the profession by which they had lived, poorly mayhap, but independently, and got none other to set in its place. A mistake of this character is always a fatal one; and we trust all of you will ever remember, that though a man may think himself above his work, no man is, or no man ought to think himself, above the high dignity of being independent. In truth, he is but a sorry, weak fellow who measures himself by the conventional status of 277 the labour by which he lives. Our great poet formed a correcter estimate:
“What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hodden grey, and a’ that?
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A man’s a man for a’ that.”