There is nothing more contemptible than party spirit in one point of view; and yet it seems inseparable in practice from public principle. You cannot support measures unless you support men;—you cannot carry any point or maintain any system, without acting in concert with others. In theory, it is all very well. We may refine in our distinctions, and elevate our language to what point we please. But in carrying the most sounding words and stateliest propositions into effect, we must make use of the instrumentality of men; and some of the alloy and imperfection of the means may insinuate itself into the end. If we do not go all lengths with those who are embarked with us in the same views; if we are not hearty in the defence of their interests and motives; if we are not fully in their confidence and they in ours; if we do not ingraft on the stock of public virtue the charities and sentiments of private affection and esteem; if the bustle and anxiety and irritation of the state-affairs do not kindle into the glow of friendship as well as patriotism; if we look distant, suspicious, lukewarm at one another; if we criticise, carp at, pry into the conduct of our party with watchful, jealous eyes; it is to be feared we shall play the game into the enemy’s hands, and not co-operate together for the common good with all the steadiness and cordiality that might be wished. On the other hand, if we lend ourselves to the foibles and weaknesses of our friends; if we suffer ourselves to be implicated in their intrigues, their scrambles and bargainings for place and power; if we flatter their mistakes, and not only screen them from the eyes of others, but are blind to them ourselves; if we compromise a great principle in the softness of a womanish friendship; if we entangle ourselves in needless family-ties; if we sell ourselves to the vices of a patron, or become the mouthpiece and echo of a coterie; we shall be in that case slaves of a faction, not servants of the public, nor shall we long have a spark of the old Roman or the old English virtue left. Good-nature, conviviality, hospitality, habits of acquaintance and regard, favours received or conferred, spirit and eloquence to defend a friend when pressed hard upon, courtesy and good-breeding, are one thing—patriotism, firmness of principle, are another. The true patriot knows when to make each of these in turn give way to or control the other, in furtherance of the common good, just as the accomplished courtier makes all other interests, friendships, cabals, resentments, reconciliations, subservient to his attachment to the person of the king. He has the welfare of his country, the cause of mankind at heart, and makes that the scale in which all other motives are weighed as in a balance. With this inward prompter, he knows when to speak and when to hold his tongue, when to temporise, and when to throw away the scabbard, when to make men of service to principles, and when to make principles the sole condition of popularity,—nearly as well as if he had a title or a pension depending in reversion on his success: for it is true that ‘in their generation the children of this world are wiser than the children of light.’ In my opinion, Charles Fox had too much of what we mean by ‘the milk of human kindness’ to be a practical statesman, particularly in critical times, and with a cause of infinite magnitude at stake. He was too easy a friend, and too generous an enemy. He was willing to think better of those with whom he acted, or to whom he was opposed, than they deserved. He was the creature of temperament and sympathy, and suffered his feelings to be played upon, and to get the better of his principles, which were not of the most rigid kind—not ‘stuff o’ the conscience.’ With all the power of the crown, and all the strongholds of prejudice and venality opposed to him, ‘instead of a softness coming over the heart of a man,’ he should (in such a situation) have ‘turned to the stroke his adamantine scales that feared no discipline of human hands,’ and made it a struggle ad internecionem on the one side, as it was on the other. There was no place for moderation, much less for huckstering and trimming. Mr. Burke saw the thing right enough. It was a question about a principle—about the existence or extinction of human rights in the abstract. He was on the side of legitimate slavery; Mr. Fox on that of natural liberty. That was no reason he should be less bold or jealous in her defence, because he had every thing to contend against. But he made too many coalitions, too many compromises with flattery, with friendship, (to say nothing of the baits of power) not to falter and be defeated at last in the noble stand he had made for the principles of freedom.
Another sort are as much too captious and precise, as these are lax and cullible in their notions of political warfare. Their fault is an overweening egotism, as that of the former was too great a facility of temper. They will have every thing their own way to the minutest tittle, or they cannot think of giving it their sanction and support. The cause must come to them, they will not go to the cause. They stand upon their punctilio. They have a character at stake, which is dearer to them than the whole world. They have an idea of perfect truth and beauty in their own minds, the contemplation of which is a never-failing source of delight and consolation to them,
‘Though sun and moon were in the flat sea sunk,’
and which they will not soil by mixing it up with the infirmities of any cause or any party. They will not, ‘to do a great right, do a little wrong.’ They will let the lofty pillar inscribed to human liberty fall to the ground sooner than extend a finger to save it, on account of the dust and cobwebs that cling to it. It is not this great and mighty object they are thinking of all the time, but their own fantastic reputation and puny pretensions. While the world is tumbling about our ears, and the last hold of liberty, the ark containing our birth-right, the only possible barrier against barefaced tyranny, is tottering—instead of setting the engines and the mortal instruments at work to prop it, and fighting in the trenches to the last drop, they are washing their hands of all imaginary imperfections, and looking in the glass of their own vanity, with an air of heightened self-complacency. Alas! they do not foresee the fatal consequences; they have an eye only to themselves. While all the power, the prejudice, and ignorance of mankind are drawn up in deadly array against the advance of truth and justice, they owe it to themselves, forsooth! to state the naked merits of the question (heat and passion apart) and pick out all the faults of which their own party has been guilty, to fling as a make-weight into the adversary’s scale of unmeasured abuse and execration. They will not take their ready stand by the side of him who was ‘the very arm and burgonet of man,’ and like a demi-Atlas, could alone prop a declining world, because for themselves they have some objections to the individual instrument, and they think principles more important than persons. No, they think persons of more consequence than principles, and themselves most of all. They injure the principle, through the person most able to protect it. They betray the cause by not defending it as it is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and without remorse. When every thing is at stake, dear and valuable to man, as man; when there is but the one dreadful alternative of entire loss, or final recovery of truth and freedom, it is no time to stand upon trifles and moot-points; that great object is to be secured first, and at all hazards.
‘Entire affection scorneth nicer hands.’
But there is a third thing in their minds, a fanciful something which they prefer to both contending parties. It may be so; but neither they nor we can get it. We must have one of the two things imposed upon us, not by choice but by hard necessity. ‘Our bane and antidote are both before us:’ and if we do anything to neglect the one, we justly incur the heavy, intolerable, unredeemed penalty of the other. If our pride is stung, if we have received a blow or the lie in our own persons, we know well enough what to do: our blood is up, we have an actual feeling and object to satisfy; and we are not to be diverted from our purpose by sophistry or mere words. The quarrel is personal to ourselves; and we feel the whole stress of it, rousing every faculty and straining every nerve. But if the quarrel is general to mankind; if it is one in which the rights, freedom, hopes, and happiness of the whole world are embarked; if we see the dignity of our common nature prostrate, trampled upon and mangled before the brute image of power, this gives us little concern; our reason may disapprove, but our passions, our prejudices, are not touched; and therefore our reason, our humanity, our abstract love of right (not ‘screwed to the sticking place’ by some paltry interest of our own) are easily satisfied with any hollow professions of good-will, or put off with vague excuses, or staggered with open defiance. We are here, where a principle only is in danger, at leisure to calculate consequences, prudently for ourselves, or favourably for others: were it a point of honour (we think the honour of human nature is not our honour, that its disgrace is not our disgrace—we are not the rabble!) we should throw consideration and compassion to the dogs, and cry—‘Away to Heaven respective lenity, and fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!’ But charity is cold. We are the dupes of the flatteries of our opponents, because we are indifferent to our own object: we stand in awe of their threats, because in the absence of passion we are tender of our persons. They beat us in courage and in intellect, because we have nothing but the common good to sharpen our faculties or goad our will; they have no less an alternative in view than to be uncontrolled masters of mankind, or to be hurled from high,—
‘To grinning scorn a sacrifice,
And endless infamy!’
They do not celebrate the triumphs of their enemies as their own: it is with them a more feeling disputation. They never give an inch of ground that they can keep; they keep all that they can get; they make no concessions that can redound to their own discredit; they assume all that makes for them; if they pause, it is to gain time; if they offer terms, it is to break them: they keep no faith with enemies: if you relax in your exertions, they persevere the more: if you make new efforts, they redouble theirs. While they give no quarter, you stand upon more ceremony. While they are cutting your throat, or putting the gag in your mouth, you talk of nothing but liberality, freedom of inquiry, and douce humanité. Their object is to destroy you, your object is to spare them—to treat them according to your own fancied dignity. They have sense and spirit enough to take all advantages that will further their cause: you have pedantry and pusillanimity enough to undertake the defence of yours, in order to defeat it. It is the difference between the efficient and the inefficient; and this again resolves itself into the difference between a speculative proposition and a practical interest.
One thing that makes tyrants bold is, that they have the power to justify their wrong. They lay their hands upon the sword, and ask who will dispute their commands. The friends of humanity and justice have not in general this ark of confidence to recur to, and can only appeal to reason and propriety. They oppose power on the plea of right and conscience; and shall they, in pursuance of their claims, violate in the smallest tittle what is due to truth and justice? So that the one have no law but their wills, and the absolute extent of their authority, in attaining or securing their ends, because they make no pretensions to scrupulous delicacy: the others are cooped and cabined in, by all sorts of nice investigations in philosophy, and misgivings of the moral sense; that is, are deprived or curtailed of the means of succeeding in their ends, because those ends are not barefaced violence and wrong. It might as well be said that a man has a right to knock me on the head on the highway, and that I am only to use mildness and persuasion in return, as best suited to the justice of my cause; as that I am not to retaliate and make reprisals on the common enemies of mankind in their own style and mode of execution. Is not a man to defend his liberty, or the liberties of his fellow-men, as strenuously and remorselessly as he would his life or his purse? Men are Quakers in political principle, Turks and Jews in private conscience.