"If this doctrine was to be laid down, that the Crown could give orders to the military to interfere, when, where, and for what length of time it pleases, then we might bid farewell to freedom. If this was the law, we should then be reduced to a military government of the very worst species, in which we should have all the evils of a despotic state, without the discipline or the security. But we were given to understand, that we had the best protection against this evil, in the virtue, the moderation, and the constitutional principles of the sovereign. No man upon earth thought with more reverence than himself of the virtues and moderation of the sovereign; but this was a species of liberty which he trusted would never disgrace an English soil. The liberty that rested on the virtuous inclinations of any one man, was but suspended despotism; the sword was not indeed upon their necks, but it hung by the small and brittle thread of human will."
The following passage of this speech affords an example of that sort of antithesis of epithet, which, as has been already remarked, was one of the most favorite contrivances of his style:—
"Was not the conduct of that man or men criminal, who had permitted those Justices to continue in the commission? Men of tried inability and convicted deficiency! Had no attempt been made to establish some more effectual system of police, in order that we might still depend upon the remedy of the bayonet, and that the military power might be called in to the aid of contrived weakness and deliberate inattention?"
One of the few instances in which he ever differed with his friend, Mr. Fox, occurred during this session, upon the subject of a Bill which the latter introduced for the Repeal of the Marriage Act, and which he prefaced by a speech as characteristic of the ardor, the simplicity, the benevolence and fearlessness of his disposition, as any ever pronounced by him in public. Some parts, indeed, of this remarkable speech are in a strain of feeling so youthful and romantic, that they seem more fit to be addressed to one of those Parliaments of Love, which were held during the times of Chivalry, than to a grave assembly employed about the sober realities of life, and legislating with a view to the infirmities of human nature.
The hostility of Mr. Fox to the Marriage Act was hereditary, as it had been opposed with equal vehemence by his father, on its first introduction in 1753, when a debate not less memorable took place, and when Sir Dudley Ryder, the Attorney-general of the day, did not hesitate to advance, as one of his arguments in favor of the Bill, that it would tend to keep the aristocracy of the country pure, and prevent their mixture by intermarriage with the mass of the people. However this anxiety for the "streams select" of noble blood, or views, equally questionable, for the accumulation of property in great families, may have influenced many of those with whom the Bill originated,—however cruel, too, and mischievous, some of its enactments may be deemed, yet the general effect which the measure was intended to produce, of diminishing as much as possible the number of imprudent marriages, by allowing the pilotage of parental authority to continue till the first quicksands of youth are passed, is, by the majority of the civilized world, acknowledged to be desirable and beneficial. Mr. Fox, however, thought otherwise, and though—"bowing," as he said, "to the prejudices of mankind,"—he consented to fix the age at which young people should be marriageable without the consent of parents, at sixteen years for the woman and eighteen for the man, his own opinion was decidedly for removing all restriction whatever, and for leaving the "heart of youth" which, in these cases, was "wiser than the head of age," without limit or control, to the choice which its own desires dictated.
He was opposed in his arguments, not only by Mr. Sheridan, but by Mr. Burke, whose speech on this occasion was found among his manuscripts after his death, and is enriched, though short, by some of those golden sentences, which he "scattered from his urn" upon every subject that came before him. [Footnote: In alluding to Mr. Fox's too favorable estimate of the capability of very young persons to choose for themselves, he pays the following tribute to his powers:—"He is led into it by a natural and to him inevitable and real mistake, that the ordinary race of mankind advance as fast towards maturity of judgment and understanding as he has done." His concluding words are:—"Have mercy on the youth of both sexes; protect them from their ignorance and inexperience; protect one part of life by the wisdom of another; protect them by the wisdom of laws and the care of nature.">[ Mr. Sheridan, for whose opinions upon this subject the well-known history of his own marriage must have secured no ordinary degree of attention, remarked that—
"His honorable friend, who brought in the bill, appeared not to be aware that, if he carried the clause enabling girls to marry at sixteen, he would do an injury to that liberty of which he had always shown himself the friend, and promote domestic tyranny, which he could consider only as little less intolerable than public tyranny. If girls were allowed to marry at sixteen, they would, he conceived, be abridged of that happy freedom of intercourse, which modern custom had introduced between the youth of both sexes; and which was, in his opinion, the best nursery of happy marriages. Guardians would, in that case, look on their wards with a jealous eye, from a fear that footmen and those about them might take advantage of their tender years and immature judgment, and persuade them into marriage, as soon as they attained the age of sixteen."
It seems somewhat extraordinary that, during the very busy interval which passed between Mr. Sheridan's first appearance in Parliament and his appointment under Lord Rockingham's administration in 1782, he should so rarely have taken a part in the debates that occurred— interesting as they were, not only from the importance of the topics discussed, but from the more than usual animation now infused into the warfare of parties, by the last desperate struggles of the Ministry and the anticipated triumph of the Opposition. Among the subjects, upon which he appears to have been rather unaccountably silent, was the renewal of Mr. Burke's Bill for the Regulation of the Civil List,—an occasion memorable as having brought forth the maiden speech of Mr. Pitt, and witnessed the first accents of that eloquence which was destined, ere long, to sound, like the shell of Misenus, through Europe, and call kings and nations to battle by its note. The debate upon the legality of petitions from delegated bodies, in which Mr. Dunning sustained his high and rare character of a patriot lawyer;—the bold proposal of Mr. Thomas Pitt, that the Commons should withhold the supplies, till pledges of amendment in the administration of public affairs should be given;—the Bill for the exclusion of Excise Officers and Contractors from Parliament, which it was reserved for a Whig Administration to pass;—these and other great constitutional questions, through which Mr. Burke and Mr. Fox fought, side by side, lavishing at every step the inexhaustible ammunition of their intellect, seem to have passed away without once calling into action the powers of their new and brilliant auxiliary, Sheridan.
The affairs of Ireland, too, had assumed at this period, under the auspices of Mr. Grattan and the example of America, a character of grandeur, as passing as it was bright,—but which will long be remembered with melancholy pride by her sons, and as long recall the memory of that admirable man, to whose patriotism she owed her brief day of freedom, and upon whose name that momentary sunshine of her sad history rests. An opportunity of adverting to the events, which had lately taken place in Ireland, was afforded by Mr. Fox in a motion for the re-commitment of the Mutiny Bill; and on this subject, perhaps, the silence of Mr. Sheridan may be accounted for, from his reluctance to share the unpopularity attached by his countrymen to those high notions of the supremacy of England, which, on the great question of the independence of the Irish Parliament, both Mr. Fox and Mr. Burke were known to entertain. [Footnote: As the few beautiful sentences spoken by Burke on this occasion, in support of his friend's motion, have been somewhat strangely omitted in the professed collection of all his speeches, I shall give them here as they are reported in the Parliamentary History:—"Mr. Burke said, so many and such great revolutions had happened of late, that he was not much surprised to hear the Right Hon. Gentleman (Mr. Jenkinson) treat the loss of the supremacy of this country over Ireland as a matter of very little consequence. Thus, one star, and that the brightest ornament of our orrery, having been suffered to be lost, those who were accustomed to inspect and watch our political heaven ought not to wonder that it should be followed by the loss of another.—
So star would follow star, and light light,
Till all was darkness and eternal night.">[