And you who bear authority over these benighted people, whether under the name of pasha, effendi, or mollah, let me advise you, although an unpromising subject for advice, not to act the stupid as well as barbarous part of riveting your nations in chains. Reflect, that the heavier you make the people's yoke, the more completely your own children, who cannot all of them be pashas, will be slaves. Surely you would not be so contemptible a wretch as to expose your whole posterity to groan in chains, for the sake of enjoying a subaltern tyranny for a few days! Oh, how great at present is the distance between an Englishman and a Bosnian!
SECTION VII.
The mixture now existing in the government of England—this concert between the commons, the lords, and the king—did not exist always. England was long a slave. She was so to the Romans, the Saxons, Danes, and French. William the Conqueror, in particular, ruled her with a sceptre of iron. He disposed of the properties and lives of his new subjects like an Oriental despot; he prohibited them from having either fire or candle in their houses after eight o'clock at night, under pain of death: his object being either to prevent nocturnal assemblies among them, or merely, by so capricious and extravagant a prohibition, to show how far the power of some men can extend over others. It is true, that both before as well as after William the Conqueror, the English had parliaments; they made a boast of them; as if the assemblies then called parliaments, made up of tyrannical churchmen and baronial robbers, had been the guardians of public freedom and happiness.
The barbarians, who, from the shores of the Baltic poured over the rest of Europe, brought with them the usage of states or parliaments, about which a vast deal is said and very little known. The kings were not despotic, it is true; and it was precisely on this account that the people groaned in miserable slavery. The chiefs of these savages, who had ravaged France, Italy, Spain, and England, made themselves monarchs. Their captains divided among themselves the estates of the vanquished; hence, the margraves, lairds, barons, and the whole series of the subaltern tyrants, who often contested the spoils of the people with the monarchs, recently advanced to the throne and not firmly fixed on it. These were all birds of prey, battling with the eagle, in order to suck the blood of the doves. Every nation, instead of one good master, had a hundred tyrants. The priests soon took part in the contest. From time immemorial it had been the fate of the Gauls, the Germans, and the islanders of England, to be governed by their druids and the chiefs of their villages, an ancient species of barons, but less tyrannical than their successors. These druids called themselves mediators between God and men; they legislated, they excommunicated, they had the power of life and death. The bishops gradually succeeded to the authority of the druids, under the Goth and Vandal government. The popes put themselves at their head; and, with briefs, bulls, and monks, struck terror into the hearts of kings, whom they sometimes dethroned and occasionally caused to be assassinated, and drew to themselves, as nearly as they were able, all the money of Europe. The imbecile Ina, one of the tyrants of the English heptarchy, was the first who, on a pilgrimage to Rome, submitted to pay St. Peter's penny—which was about a crown of our money—for every house within his territory. The whole island soon followed this example; England gradually became a province of the pope; and the holy father sent over his legates, from time to time, to levy upon it his exorbitant imposts. John, called Lackland, at length made a full and formal cession of his kingdom to his holiness, by whom he had been excommunicated; the barons, who did not at all find their account in this proceeding, expelled that contemptible king, and substituted in his room Louis VIII., father of St. Louis, king of France. But they soon became disgusted with the new-comer, and obliged him to recross the sea.
While the barons, bishops, and popes were thus harassing and tearing asunder England, where each of the parties strove eagerly to be the dominant one, the people, who form the most numerous, useful, and virtuous portion of a community, consisting of those who study the laws and sciences, merchants, artisans, and even peasants, who exercise at once the most important and the most despised of occupations; the people, I say, were looked down upon equally by all these combatants, as a species of beings inferior to mankind. Far, indeed, at that time, were the commons from having the slightest participation in the government: they were villeins, or serfs of the soil; both their labor and their blood belonged to their masters, who were called "nobles." The greater number of men in Europe were what they still continue to be in many parts of the world—the serfs of a lord, a species of cattle bought and sold together with the land. It required centuries to get justice done to humanity; to produce an adequate impression of the odious and execrable nature of the system, according to which the many sow, and only the few reap; and surely it may even be considered fortunate for France that the powers of these petty robbers were extinguished there by the legitimate authority of kings, as it was in England by that of the king and nation united.
Happily, in consequence of the convulsions of empires by the contests between sovereigns and nobles, the chains of nations are more or less relaxed. The barons compelled John (Lackland) and Henry III to grant the famous charter, the great object of which, in reality, was to place the king in dependence on the lords, but in which the rest of the nation was a little favored, to induce it, when occasion might require, to range itself in the ranks of its pretended protectors. This great charter, which is regarded as the sacred origin of English liberties, itself clearly shows how very little liberty was understood. The very title proves that the king considered himself absolute by right, and that the barons and clergy compelled him to abate his claim to this absolute power only by the application of superior force. These are the words with which Magna Charta begins: "We grant, of our free will, the following privileges to the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, and barons, of our kingdom," etc. Throughout the articles of it, not a word is said of the house of commons; a proof that it did not then exist, or that it existed without power. The freemen of England are specified in it, a melancholy demonstration that there were men who were not free. We perceive, from the thirty-seventh article, that the pretended freemen owed service to their lord. Liberty of such a description had but too strong a similarity to bondage. By the twenty-first article, the king ordains that henceforward his officers shall not take away the horses and ploughs of freemen, without paying for them. This regulation was considered by the people as true liberty, because it freed them from a greater tyranny. Henry VII., a successful warrior and politician, who pretended great attachment to the barons, but who cordially hated and feared them, granted them permission to alienate their lands. In consequence of this, the villeins, who by their industry and skill accumulated property, in the course of time became purchasers of the castles of the illustrious nobles who had ruined themselves by their extravagance, and, gradually, nearly all the landed property of the kingdom changed masters.
The house of commons now advanced in power every day. The families of the old nobility became extinct in the progress of time; and, as in England, correctly speaking, peers only are nobles, there would scarcely have been any nobles in the country, if the kings had not, from time to time, created new barons, and kept up the body of peers, whom they had formerly so much dreaded, to counteract that of the commons, now become too formidable. All the new peers, who compose the upper house, receive from the king their title and nothing more, since none of them have the property of the lands of which they bear the names. One is duke of Dorset, without possessing a single foot of land in Dorsetshire; another is an earl under the name of a certain village, yet scarcely knowing where that village is situated. They have power in the parliament, and nowhere else.
You hear no mention, in this country, of the high, middle, and low courts of justice, nor of the right of chase over the lands of private citizens, who have no right to fire a gun on their own estates.
A man is not exempted from paying particular taxes because he is a noble or a clergyman. All imposts are regulated by the house of commons, which, although subordinate in rank, is superior in credit to that of the lords. The peers and bishops may reject a bill sent up to them by the commons, when the object is to raise money, but they can make no alteration in it: they must admit it or reject it, without restriction. When the bill is confirmed by the lords, and assented to by the king, then all the classes of the nation contribute. Every man pays, not according to his rank—which would be absurd—but according to his revenue. There is no arbitrary faille or capitation, but a real tax on lands. These were all valued in the reign of the celebrated King William. The tax exists still unaltered, although the rents of lands have considerably increased; thus no one is oppressed, and no one complains. The feet of the cultivator are not bruised and mutilated by wooden shoes; he eats white bread; he is well clothed. He is not afraid to increase his farming-stock, nor to roof his cottage with tiles, lest the following year should, in consequence, bring with it an increase of taxation. There are numerous farmers who have an income of about five or six hundred pounds sterling, and still disdain not to cultivate the land which has enriched them, and on which they enjoy the blessing of freedom.