others. A constitution in itself has no merit. Its only value is as a piece of working machinery, and it is to be tested not by the degree of its conformity to abstract principles, but by its practical effects.
Burke himself, in fact, destroyed his whole argument against "natural rights," not as a proposition of logic, but as a basis of political action. He admitted that men had certain "real" rights: "to justice," "to the fruits of their industry and to the means of making their industry fruitful," "to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life, and to consolation in death." But what is the difference between these "real" rights of Burke and the "natural" rights of Paine? How are these rights created and maintained, but by public opinion and current ideas of morality? And if these, why not others? "It is a thing," said Burke, "to be settled by convention." Tom Paine meant nothing else. But when Burke said, "As to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the State, that I must deny to be amongst the direct, original rights of man in civil society," Paine might have asked in what respect rights to justice and to the fruits of industry differed from rights to control government. If the rules of justice are defined by Government so that it becomes difficult, tedious, and expensive, how is the poor man to exercise his right to justice? If Government taxes the raw material of his industry, is not his right to the fruits of it being impaired? In his Present Discontents Burke had described clearly enough the consequences of absolute power, the corruption of the governor and the oppression of the governed. If government remains in the hands of a class, it will inevitably be conducted in the interests of that class, and the rules of justice and the regulation of industry will be contrived according to its interests and not according to those of the general community. In other words, the rights of the rest of society, however real, direct, and original, are always liable to be diminished or destroyed by the caprice of their governors.
Burke's admissions lead as inevitably to universal suffrage as the false assumptions of Paine.
It must not be assumed that Paine was a mere theorizer. So far as the interests of the mass of the people were concerned, he was the most practical of reformers. Tories and reactionary Whigs appealed to "the glorious Revolution of 1688."[[126]] Cartwright and the Radicals deduced liberty from abstract hypotheses without considering to what practical uses liberty was to be put. Paine came boldly forward with definite proposals for social reforms, and it was this practical application of his principles which made him to be detested where Cartwright was only despised. It was bad enough to assail aristocracy. Words could hardly express the feelings with which comfortable people listened to his attacks upon property. These would seem moderate to a generation which has grown accustomed to Socialism, as a creed if not as an institution, and his proposals were little more drastic than those of the present Liberal Government. He advocated graduated death duties, old-age pensions, maternity grants, the right to work, and international agreement for the limitation of armaments.[[127]] It is true that the language of his proposals was anything but reckless. He was far from being an advocate of violent methods. "It is always better to obey a bad law, making use at the same time of every argument to show its errors and procure its repeal, than forcibly to violate it; because the precedent of breaking a bad law might weaken the force, and lead to a discretionary violation of those which are good."[[128]] "The right of property being secured and inviolable, no one ought to be deprived of it, except in cases of evident public necessity, legally ascertained, and on condition of a previous just indemnity."[[129]] This is the language of temperance. But the owners of property have little capacity for reflection when their interests are attacked. They are seldom concerned to examine the justice
of any infringement of their privileges, and they find it difficult to distinguish between taxation and spoliation, between appeals to natural justice and the negation of law. Paine's adversaries did not believe in natural rights. But they believed in what were far worse. They believed in natural wrongs. It was monstrous to suggest that all men were entitled to equal opportunities. But it was quite reasonable that the vast majority should be kept in a situation where they could not be confident even of a bare subsistence. The good cause, if not the logical reasoning, was Paine's. The right to property is, like all his "natural" rights, or the "real" rights of Burke, a moral right, and its extent is to be determined upon the same principles as every other. Violent disturbances of it are bad, as violent disturbances of every right are bad, not because they are disturbances, but because they are violent. There is nothing more essentially vicious in a criticism of property in land or machinery than in a criticism of property in a negro. As Burke said, "It is a thing to be settled by convention."
Paine's suggestions for social reform were of little immediate importance, and it was a hundred years before the first of them, a graduated death duty, was passed into law. His value in his own day lay, not in his practical proposals, but in his insistence upon the equal value of individuals in the State. What the Whigs had practised partially and obscurely Paine preached universally and with precision. His Rights of Man was the principal textbook of the new school of politicians, who, by basing their politics upon individuality instead of class, eventually transformed the English theory of government. The Reformers found government the profession of a few families of landed proprietors, at the best prevented from active abuse by an imperfect system of representation of classes. They made it a thing of trust and responsibility, for which every man must prove his competence by his readiness to act directly for the benefit of those whom he governed. They found it an incident in the lives of men of leisure. They made it an expression of the life of men of all ranks alike. Omitting the false historical
assumption, there is nothing substantially untrue in Paine's contrast of the old spirit with the new. "Government on the old system was an assumption of power, for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new, a delegation of power for the common benefit of society."[[130]]
These new principles did not appear on the surface of politics until forty years later, and not a single institution was in the interval altered in the direction of Liberalism. The Whig Opposition broke into pieces, and the majority joined the Tories.[[131]] The Church of England found itself for once allied with the Wesleyans, whose Christianity was as much repelled by Paine's Age of Reason as its own aristocratic temper was repelled by his Rights of Man. The governing class was driven into a paroxysm of fear and rage by Paine's triple assault on aristocracy, property, and orthodox religion, and every Conservative instinct was roused in its defence. Every Reformer, moderate and extreme, was involved together in one denunciation. Their opinions admittedly came from France, and every atrocity which had taken place in France was due to those opinions. Voltaire was an atheist. Rousseau was a profligate. The French aristocracy had been massacred. The French Church had been stripped of its possessions. The French landed proprietors had been spoiled. All this had been done in the name of the rights of man. The English Reformers believed in the rights of man. These had been proved by events in France to be incompatible with law, order, religion, and morality. All who valued these must unite in their defence against the deadly opinions. Belief in the rights of man marked an Englishman like a contagious disease. Atheists, Theists, and Christians, Trinitarians and Unitarians, Churchmen and Dissenters, Reformers, Radicals, and Republicans, landowners, manufacturers, and artisans, people who believed in vested interests and people who did not, all were Jacobins, and all were swept away in one turbid flood of unreasoning invective.
Every proposal for change was opposed by the same arguments. Every institution, good, bad, or indifferent, became a foothold for shuddering Conservatism. Alteration became synonymous with evil; there was no good save in establishment. Even the Slave Trade was strengthened against pious Tory gentlemen like Wilberforce by the same arguments which defended the representative system against the profane Republican artisans of Lancashire. Thus Lord Abingdon claimed to have "incontrovertibly proved that the proposition for the abolition of the Slave Trade is a French proposition, that it is grounded in and founded upon French principles, that it means neither more nor less than liberty and equality, that it has Tom Paine's Rights of Man for its chief and best support ... that it has had in the colonies of France all the direful effects necessarily flowing from such principles, namely, those of insubordination, anarchy, confusion, murder, havock, devastation, and ruin."[[132]] Nearly thirty years after the publication of Paine's book, Lord Wellesley, denouncing universal suffrage, annual elections, and voting by ballot, said that, if carried into execution, they "would be the destruction of all regular government, the destruction of all religion, and the destruction of all private property."[[133]] But the most ludicrous expression of this fear of change occurs in one of Windham's speeches against the Bill to suppress bull-baiting. The House of Commons solemnly listened to a solemn assurance that the Bill was promoted by Methodists and Jacobins, and that it was directed to the destruction of the old English character by the abolition of all rural sports. "Out of the whole number of the disaffected, he questioned if a single bull-baiter could be found, or if a single sportsman had distinguished himself in the Corresponding Society ... the antiquity of the thing was deserving of respect, for antiquity was the best preservation of the Church and State."[[134]]