"Voltaire."
We pass over a thousand triflings in the subsequent pages—the alarms of court ladies for the loss of a royal smile, the sickness of a favourite monkey, or the formidable "impossibility" of matching a set of old china. Such are the calamities of having nothing to do. We see in those pages instances of high-born men contented to linger round the court for life, performing some petty office which, however, required constant attendance on the court circle, and submitting, with many a groan, it must be confessed, to the miserable routine of trivial duties and meagre ceremonial, much fitter for their own footmen; while they left their own magnificent mansions to solitude, their noble estates unvisited, their tenantry uncheered, unprotected, and unencouraged by their residence in their proper sphere, and finally degenerated into feeble gossips, splenetic intriguers, and ridiculous encumbrances of the court itself.
Difficulty seems essential to the vigour of man. Difficulty seems essential even to the vigour of nations. The old theory, that luxury is the ruin of a state, was obviously untrue; for in no condition of the earth could luxury ever go down to the multitude. But the true evil of states is, the decay of the national activity, the chill of the national ardour, the adoption of a trifling, indolent, vegetative style of being. Into this life France had sunk, from the time of Louis XIV. Into this life Germany had sunk, from the peace of Westphalia. Into this life England was rapidly sinking, from the reign of Anne.
But the visitation came at last, at once to punish and to stimulate. France, Germany, and England were plunged into war together; and fearful as the plunge was, out of that raging torrent the three nations have struggled to shore, refreshed and invigorated by the struggle. England seems now to be entering on another career, more perilous than the exigencies of war—a moral and intellectual conflict, in which popular passions and rational principles will be ranged on opposite sides; and the question may involve the final shape which government shall assume in the British empire, or, perhaps, in the European world.
The characteristics of our time are wholly unshared with the past. In calling up the recollections of the great ages of English change, we can discover but slight evidence of their connexion with our own. To the stately, but religious, aspect of the Republic of 1641, we find no resemblance in the general features of our religious tolerance. To the ardent zeal for liberty which marked the Revolution of 1688, we can find no counterpart in the constitutional quietude of the present day. The fiery ferocity of Continental Revolution has certainly furnished no model to the professors of national regeneration, since the reform of 1830. And yet, a determination, a power and a progress of public change, is now the acknowledged principle of the most active, indefatigable, and unscrupulous portion of the mind of England.
And among the most remarkable and most menacing adjuncts of the crisis, is the singular sense of inadequacy to resist its career, which seems to paralyse the habitual defenders of the right cause. The consecrated guardians of the church seem only to wait the final blow. The great landholders in the peerage are contented with making protests. The agricultural interest, the boast of England, and the vital interest of the empire, has abandoned a resistance, too feeble to deserve the praise of fortitude, and too irregular to deserve the fruits of victory. The moneyed interest sees its gigantic opulence threatened by a hundred-handed grasp; but makes no defence, or makes that most dangerous of all defences, which calls in the invader as the auxiliary, bribes him with a portion of the spoils, and only provokes his appetite for the possession of the whole.
This condition of things cannot last. A few years, perhaps a few months, will ripen the bitter fruit, which the meekness of undecided governments has suffered to grow before their eyes. The Ballot, which offers a subterfuge for every fraud; Extended Suffrage, which offers a force for every aggression; the overthrow of all religious endowments, which offers a bribe to every desire of avarice—above all that turning of religion into a political tool, that indifference to the true, and that welcoming of the false, in whatever shape it may approach, however fierce and foul; however coldly contemptuous, or furiously fanatical, however grim or grotesque, whose first act must be to trample all principle under foot, and place on its altar the worship of the passions;—those are the demands which are already made, and those will be the trophies which the hands of political zealotry and personal rapine, in the first hour of their triumph, will raise on the grave where lies buried the Constitution.
Yet nothing is done by the natural defenders of the rights of Englishmen. No leader comes forward; no new followers are to be found; no banner is raised as the rallying point for the fugitives, already broken. We see the approach of the evil, as the men of the old world might have seen the approach of the Deluge; awaiting with folded hands, and feet rooted to the ground, the surges which nothing could resist; looking with an indolent despair at the mighty inundation, before which the plain and the mountain alike began to disappear; and sullenly submitting to an extinction, of which they had been long offered the means of escape, and perishing, with the pledge of security floating before their eyes.
We are by no means desirous of being prophets of public misfortune; but, with the tenets publicly avowed, in the elections which have just closed, with the strong popularity attached to the most daring opinions, with thirty pledged Repealers from Ireland, with the wildest doctrines of trade advocated by the popular representatives in England, with sixty subjects of the Pope sitting in a Protestant legislature, and with the evident determination to bring into that legislature individuals (and who shall limit their numbers, when its doors are once thrown open to their wealth?) who pronounce Christianity itself to be an imposture,—we can conjecture no consequences, however hazardous, which ought not to present themselves to the soberest friend of his country. That the worst consequences may not be inevitable, is only to hope in a higher protection; that even out of the evil good may come, is not unconformable to the ways of Providence; but that times are at hand in which the noblest energy of English statesmanship will be required to meet the conflict, we have no more doubt, than that the pilot who, in a storm, uses neither compass nor sail, must run his ship on shore; or that the man who walks about in clothes dipped in pestilence, will leave his corpse as a testimony to the fact of the contagion.
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