As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean:
Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide;
Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit
To his full height.’
So, in speculation, refine as much as you please, intellectually and morally speaking, and you may do it with advantage. Reason is then the instrument you use, and you cannot raise the standard of perfection you fix upon and propose to others too high, or proceed with too much candour and moderation in the advancement of truth: but in practice, you have not your choice of ends or means. You have two things to decide between, the extreme, probably, of an evil and a considerable good, and if you will not make your mind up to take the best of the two with all its disadvantages and draw-backs you must be contented to take the worst: for as you cannot alter the state of the conflicting parties who are carrying their point by force, or dictate what is best by a word speaking; so by finding fault with the attainable good, and throwing cold water on it, you add fuel to your enemy’s courage and assist his success. ‘Those who are not for us are against us.’ You create a diversion in his favour, by distracting and enervating men’s minds, as much as by questioning the general’s orders, or drawing off a strong detachment in the heat of a battle. Political, is like military warfare. There are but two sides, and after you have once chosen your party, it will not do to stand in the midway, and say you like neither. There is no other to like, in the eye of common sense, or in the practical and inevitable result of the thing. As active partisans, we must take up with the best we can get in the circumstances, and defend it with all our might against a worse cause (which will prevail, if this does not) instead of ‘letting our frail thoughts dally with faint surmise;’—or, while dreaming of an ideal perfection, we shall find ourselves surprised into the train, and gracing the triumph, of the common enemy. It is sufficient if our objects and principles are sound and disinterested. If we were engaged in a friendly contest, where integrity and fair dealing were the order of the day, our means might be as unimpeachable as our ends; but in a struggle with the passions, interests, and prejudices of men, right reason, pure intention, are hardly competent to carry us through: we want another stimulus. The vices may be opposed to each other sometimes with advantage and propriety. A little of the alloy of human frailty may be allowed to lend its aid to the service of humanity; and if we have only so much obstinacy or insensibility as enables us to persevere in the path of public duty with more determination and effect, both our motives and conduct will be above the ordinary standard of political morality. To suppose that we can do much more than this, or that we can set up our individual opinion of what is best in itself, or of the best means of attaining it, and be listened to by the world at large, is egregiously to overrate their docility or our own powers of persuasion.
It is the same want of a centripetal force, of a ruling passion, of a moral instinct of union and co-operation for a general purpose, that makes men fly off into knots and factions, and each set up for the leader of a party himself. Where there is a strong feeling of interest at work, it reconciles and combines the most discordant materials, and fits them to their place in the social machine. But in the conduct and support of the public good, we see ‘nothing but vanity, chaotic vanity.’ There is no forbearance, no self-denial, no magnanimity of proceeding. Every one is seeking his own aggrandisement, or to supplant his neighbour, instead of advancing the popular cause. It is because they have no real regard for it but as it serves as a stalking-horse to their ambition, restless inquietude, or love of cabal. They abuse and vilify their own party, just as they do the Ministers.
‘Each lolls his tongue out at the other,
And shakes his empty noddle at his brother.’