In jurisprudence much confusion has occurred in the uses of the term rights; yet the social union and human happiness are involved in the precision of the expression. When Montesquieu laid down, as the active principle of a republic, virtue, it seemed to infer that a republic was the best of governments. In the defence of his great work he was obliged to define the term; and it seems that by virtue he only meant political virtue, the love of the country.
In politics, what evils have resulted from abstract terms to which no ideas are affixed,—such as, “The Equality of Man—the Sovereignty or the Majesty of the People—Loyalty—Reform—even Liberty herself!—Public Opinion—Public Interest;” and other abstract notions, which have excited the hatred or the ridicule of the vulgar. Abstract ideas, as sounds, have been used as watchwords. The combatants will usually be found willing to fight for words to which, perhaps, not one of them has attached any settled signification. This is admirably touched on by Locke, in his chapter of “Abuse of Words.” “Wisdom, Glory, Grace, &c., are words frequent enough in every man’s mouth; but if a great many of those who use them should be asked what they mean by them, they would be at a stand, and know not what to answer—a plain proof that though they have learned those sounds, and have them ready at their tongue’s end, yet there are no determined ideas laid up in their minds which are to be expressed to others by them.”
When the American exclaimed that he was not represented in the House of Commons, because he was not an elector, he was told that a very small part of the people of England were electors. As they could not call this an actual representation, they invented a new name for it, and called it a virtual one. It imposed on the English nation, who could not object that others should be taxed rather than themselves; but with the Americans it was a sophism! and this virtual representation, instead of an actual one, terminated in our separation; “which,” says Mr. Flood, “at the time appeared to have swept away most of our glory and our territory; forty thousand lives, and one hundred millions of treasure!”
That fatal expression which Rousseau had introduced, l’Egalité des Hommes, which finally involved the happiness of a whole people, had he lived he had probably shown how ill his country had understood. He could only have referred in his mind to political equality, but not an equality of possessions, of property, of authority, destructive of social order and of moral duties, which must exist among every people. “Liberty,” “Equality,” and “Reform” (innocent words!) sadly ferment the brains of those who cannot affix any definite notions to them; they are like those chimerical fictions in law, which declare the “sovereign immortal, proclaim his ubiquity in various places,” and irritate the feelings of the populace, by assuming that “the king can never do wrong!” In the time of James the Second “it is curious,” says Lord Russell, “to read the conference between the Houses on the meaning of the words ‘deserted’ and ‘abdicated,’ and the debates in the Lords whether or no there is an original contract between king and people.” The people would necessarily decide that “kings derived their power from them;” but kings were once maintained by a “right divine,” a “confusion of words,” derived from two opposite theories, and both only relatively true. When we listen so frequently to such abstract terms as “the majesty of the people,” “the sovereignty of the people,” whence the inference that “all power is derived from the people,” we can form no definite notions: it is “a confusion of words,” contradicting all the political experience which our studies or our observations furnish; for sovereignty is established to rule, to conduct, and to settle the vacillations and quick passions of the multitude. Public opinion expresses too often the ideas of one party in place; and public interest those of another party out! Political axioms, from the circumstance of having the notions attached to them unsettled, are applied to the most opposite ends! “In the time of the French Directory,” observes an Italian philosopher of profound views, “in the revolution of Naples, the democratic faction pronounced that ‘Every act of a tyrannical government is in its origin illegal;’ a proposition which at first sight seems self-evident, but which went to render all existing laws impracticable.” The doctrine of the illegality of the acts of a tyrant was proclaimed by Brutus and Cicero, in the name of the senate, against the populace, who had favoured Cæsar’s perpetual dictatorship; and the populace of Paris availed themselves of it, against the National Assembly.
This “confusion of words,” in time-serving politics, has too often confounded right and wrong; and artful men, driven into a corner, and intent only on its possession, have found no difficulty in solving doubts, and reconciling contradictions. Our own history in revolutionary times abounds with dangerous examples from all parties; of specious hypotheses for compliance with the government of the day or the passions of parliament. Here is an instance in which the subtle confuser of words pretended to substitute two consciences, by utterly depriving a man of any! When the unhappy Charles the First pleaded that to pass the bill of attainder against the Earl of Strafford was against his conscience, that remarkable character of “boldness and impiety,” as Clarendon characterizes Williams, Archbishop of York, on this argument of conscience (a simple word enough), demonstrated “that there were two sorts of conscience, public and private; that his public conscience as a king might dispense with his private conscience as a man!” Such was the ignominious argument which decided the fate of that great victim of State! It was an impudent “confusion of words” when Prynne (in order to quiet the consciences of those who were uneasy at warring with the king) observed that the statute of twenty-fifth Edward the Third ran in the singular number—“If a man shall levy war against the king, and therefore could not be extended to the houses, who are many and public persons.” Later, we find Sherlock blest with the spirit of Williams, the Archbishop of York, whom we have just left. When some did not know how to charge and to discharge themselves of the oaths to James the Second and to William the Third, this confounder of words discovered that there were two rights, as the other had that there were two consciences; one was a providential right, and the other a legal right; one person might very righteously claim and take a thing, and another as righteously hold and keep it; but that whoever got the better had the providential right by possession; and since all authority comes from God, the people were obliged to transfer their allegiance to him as a king of God’s making; so that he who had the providential right necessarily had the legal one! a very simple discovery, which must, however, have cost him some pains; for this confounder of words was himself confounded by twelve answers by non-jurors! A French politician of this stamp recently was suspended from his lectureship for asserting that the possession of the soil was a right; by which principle, any king reigning over a country, whether by treachery, crime, and usurpation, was a legitimate sovereign. For this convenient principle the lecturer was tried, and declared not guilty—by persons who have lately found their advantage in a confusion of words. In treaties between nations, a “confusion of words” has been more particularly studied; and that negotiator has conceived himself most dexterous who, by this abuse of words, has retained an arrière-pensée which may fasten or loosen the ambiguous expression he had so cautiously and so finely inlaid in his mosaic of treachery. A scene of this nature I draw out of “Mesnager’s Negociation with the Court of England.” When that secret agent of Louis the Fourteenth was negotiating a peace, an insuperable difficulty arose respecting the acknowledgment of the Hanoverian succession. It was absolutely necessary, on this delicate point, to quiet the anxiety of the English public and our allies; but though the French king was willing to recognise Anne’s title to the throne, yet the settlement in the house of Hanover was incompatible with French interests and French honour. Mesnager told Lord Bolingbroke that “the king, his master, would consent to any such article, looking the other way, as might disengage him from the obligation of that agreement, as the occasion should present.” This ambiguous language was probably understood by Lord Bolingbroke: at the next conference his lordship informed the secret agent “that the queen could not admit of any explanations, whatever her intentions might be; that the succession was settled by act of parliament; that as to the private sentiments of the queen, or of any about her, he could say nothing.” “All this was said with such an air, as to let me understand that he gave a secret assent to what I had proposed, &c.; but he desired me to drop the discourse.” Thus two great negotiators, both equally urgent to conclude the treaty, found an insuperable obstacle occur, which neither could control. Two honest men would have parted; but the “skilful confounder of words,” the French diplomatist, hit on an expedient; he wrote the words which afterwards appeared in the preliminaries, “That Louis the Fourteenth will acknowledge the Queen of Great Britain in that quality, as also the succession of the crown according to the present settlement.” “The English agent,” adds the Frenchman, “would have had me add—on the house of Hanover, but this I entreated him not to desire of me.” The term present settlement, then, was that article which was looking the other way, to disengage his master from the obligation of that agreement, as occasion should present! that is, that Louis the Fourteenth chose to understand by the present settlement the old one, by which the British crown was to be restored to the Pretender! Anne and the English nation were to understand it in their own sense—as the new one, which transferred it to the house of Hanover!
When politicians cannot rely upon each other’s interpretation of one of the commonest words in our language, how can they possibly act together? The Bishop of Winchester has proved this observation, by the remarkable anecdote of the Duke of Portland and Mr. Pitt, who, with a view to unite parties, were to hold a conference on fair and equal terms. His grace did not object to the word fair, but the word equal was more specific and limited; and for a necessary preliminary, he requested Mr. Pitt to inform him what he understood by the word equal? Whether Pitt was puzzled by the question, or would not deliver up an arrière-pensée, he put off the explanation to the conference. But the duke would not meet Mr. Pitt till the word was explained; and this important negotiation was broken off by not explaining a simple word which appeared to require no explanation.
There is nothing more fatal in language than to wander from the popular acceptation of words; and yet this popular sense cannot always accord with precision of ideas, for it is itself subject to great changes.
Another source, therefore, of the abuse of words, is that mutability to which, in the course of time, the verbal edifice, as well as more substantial ones, is doomed. A familiar instance presents itself in the titles of tyrant, parasite, and sophist, originally honourable distinctions. The abuses of dominion made the appropriate title of kings odious; the title of a magistrate, who had the care of the public granaries of corn, at length was applied to a wretched flatterer for a dinner; and absurd philosophers occasioned a mere denomination to become a by-name. To employ such terms in their primitive sense would now confuse all ideas; yet there is an affectation of erudition which has frequently revived terms sanctioned by antiquity. Bishop Watson entitled his vindication of the Bible “an apology:” this word, in its primitive sense, had long been lost for the multitude, whom he particularly addressed in this work, and who could only understand it in the sense they are accustomed to. Unquestionably, many of its readers have imagined that the bishop was offering an excuse for a belief in the Bible, instead of a vindication of its truth. The word impertinent, by the ancient jurisconsults, or law-counsellors, who gave their opinion on cases, was used merely in opposition to pertinent—ratio pertinens is a pertinent reason, that is, a reason pertaining to the cause in question, and a ratio impertinens, an impertinent reason, is an argument not pertaining to the subject.[44] Impertinent then originally meant neither absurdity nor rude intrusion, as it does in our present popular sense. The learned Arnauld having characterised a reply of one of his adversaries by the epithet impertinent, when blamed for the freedom of his language, explained his meaning by giving this history of the word, which applies to our own language. Thus also with us the word indifferent has entirely changed: an historian, whose work was indifferently written, would formerly have claimed our attention. In the Liturgy it is prayed that “magistrates may indifferently minister justice.” Indifferently originally meant impartially. The word extravagant, in its primitive signification, only signified to digress from the subject. The Decretals, or those letters from the popes deciding on points of ecclesiastical discipline, were at length incorporated with the canon law, and were called extravagant by wandering out of the body of the canon law, being confusedly dispersed through that collection. When Luther had the Decretals publicly burnt at Wittemberg, the insult was designed for the pope, rather than as a condemnation of the canon law itself. Suppose, in the present case, two persons of opposite opinions. The catholic, who had said that the decretals were extravagant, might not have intended to depreciate them, or make any concession to the Lutheran. What confusion of words has the common sense of the Scotch metaphysicians introduced into philosophy! There are no words, perhaps, in the language which may be so differently interpreted; and Professor Dugald Stewart has collected, in a curious note in the second volume of his “Philosophy of the Human Mind,” a singular variety of its opposite significations. The Latin phrase, sensus communis, may, in various passages of Cicero, be translated by our phrase common sense; but, on other occasions, it means something different; the sensus communis of the schoolmen is quite another thing, and is synonymous with conception, and referred to the seat of intellect; with Sir John Davies, in his curious metaphysical poem, common sense is used as imagination. It created a controversy with Beattie and Reid; and Reid, who introduced this vague ambiguous phrase in philosophical language, often understood the term in its ordinary acceptation. This change of the meaning of words, which is constantly recurring in metaphysical disputes, has made that curious but obscure science liable to this objection of Hobbes, “with many words making nothing understood!”
Controversies have been keenly agitated about the principles of morals, which resolve entirely into verbal disputes, or at most into questions of arrangement and classification, of little comparative moment to the points at issue. This observation of Mr. Dugald Stewart’s might be illustrated by the fate of the numerous inventors of systems of thinking or morals, who have only employed very different and even opposite terms in appearance to express the same thing. Some, by their mode of philosophising, have strangely unsettled the words self-interest and self-love; and their misconceptions have sadly misled the votaries of these systems of morals; as others also by such vague terms as “utility, fitness,” &c.
When Epicurus asserted that the sovereign good consisted in pleasure, opposing the unfeeling austerity of the Stoics by the softness of pleasurable emotions, his principle was soon disregarded; while his word, perhaps chosen in the spirit of paradox, was warmly adopted by the sensualist. Epicurus, of whom Seneca has drawn so beautiful a domestic scene, in whose garden a loaf, a Cytheridean cheese, and a draught which did not inflame thirst,[45] was the sole banquet, would have started indignantly at