In September, he advanced with more depth of thought. “Wars have ever been clothed with the most gracious pretences—viz., reformation of religion, the laws of the land, the liberty of the subject, &c.; though the effects thereof have proved most destructive to every nation; making the sword, and not the people, the original of all authorities for many hundred years together, taking away each man’s birthright, and settling upon a few A CURSED PROPRIETY; the ground of all civil offences, and the greatest cause of most sins against the heavenly Deity. This tyranny and oppression running through the veins of many of our predecessors, and being too long maintained by the sword upon a royal foundation, at last became so customary, as to the vulgar it seemed most natural—the only reason why the people of this time are so ignorant of their birthright, their only freedom,” &c.
“The birthright” of citoyen Egalité to “a cursed propriety settled on a few,” was not, even among the French Jacobins, urged with more amazing force. Had things proceeded according to our “Moderate’s” plan, “the people’s slavery” had been something worse. In a short time the nation would have had more proprietors than property. We have a curious list of the spoliations of those members of the House of Commons, who, after their famous self-denying ordinances, appropriated among themselves sums of money, offices, and lands, for services “done or to be done.”
The most innocent of this new government of “the Majesty of the People,” were those whose talents had been limited by Nature to peddle and purloin; puny mechanics, who had suddenly dropped their needles, their hammers, and their lasts, and slunk out from behind their shop-counters; those who had never aspired beyond the constable of the parish, were now seated in the council of state; where, as Milton describes them, “they fell to huckster the commonwealth:” there they met a more rabid race of obscure lawyers, and discontented men of family, of blasted reputations; adventurers, who were to command the militia and navy of England,—governors of the three kingdoms! whose votes and ordinances resounded with nothing else but new impositions, new taxes, excises, yearly, monthly, weekly sequestrations, compositions, and universal robbery!
Baxter vents one deep groan of indignation, and presciently announces one future consequence of Reform! “In all this appeared the severity of God, the mutability of worldly things, and the fruits of error, pride, and selfishness, to be charged hereafter upon reformation and religion.” As a statesman, the sagacity of this honest prophet was narrowed by the horizon of his religious views; for he ascribes the whole as “prepared by Satan to the injury of the Protestant cause, and the advantage of the Papists!” But dropping his particular application to the devil and the Papists, honest Richard Baxter is perfectly right in his general principle concerning “Rumpers,”—“Sans-culottes,” and “Radicals.”
[325] History of Independency, Part II. p. 32.
[326] First collected and published in 1661, and afterwards reprinted in two small vols. 1731.
[327] The first collection ever formed of these political satires was printed in 1660, with the quaint title of “Ratts rhimed to Death; or, the Rump-parliament hang’d up in the Shambles.”
[328] In one of the popular political songs of the day, “The Rump” is aptly compared to
| “The foxes of Samson, that carried a brand In their tails, to destroy and to burn up the land.” |