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Sybil, or the Two Nations

B >> Benjamin Disraeli >> Sybil, or the Two Nations




But the other great whig families who had obtained this
honour, and who had done something more for it than spoliate
their church and betray their king, set up their backs against
this claim of the Egremonts. The Egremonts had done none of
the work of the last hundred years of political mystification,
during which a people without power or education, had been
induced to believe themselves the freest and most enlightened
nation in the world, and had submitted to lavish their blood
and treasure, to see their industry crippled and their labour
mortgaged, in order to maintain an oligarchy, that had neither
ancient memories to soften nor present services to justify
their unprecedented usurpation.

How had the Egremonts contributed to this prodigious result?
Their family had furnished none of those artful orators whose
bewildering phrase had fascinated the public intelligence;
none of those toilsome patricians whose assiduity in affairs
had convinced their unprivileged fellow-subjects that
government was a science, and administration an art, which
demanded the devotion of a peculiar class in the state for
their fulfilment and pursuit. The Egremonts had never said
anything that was remembered, or done anything that could be
recalled. It was decided by the Great Revolution families,
that they should not be dukes. Infinite was the indignation
of the lay Abbot of Marney. He counted his boroughs,
consulted his cousins, and muttered revenge. The opportunity
soon offered for the gratification of his passion.

The situation of the Venetian party in the wane of the
eighteenth century had become extremely critical. A young
king was making often fruitless, but always energetic,
struggles to emancipate his national royalty from the trammels
of the factious dogeship. More than sixty years of a
government of singular corruption had alienated all hearts
from the oligarchy; never indeed much affected by the great
body of the people. It could no longer be concealed, that by
virtue of a plausible phrase power had been transferred from
the crown to a parliament, the members of which were appointed
by an extremely limited and exclusive class, who owned no
responsibility to the country, who debated and voted in
secret, and who were regularly paid by the small knot of great
families that by this machinery had secured the permanent
possession of the king's treasury. Whiggism was putrescent in
the nostrils of the nation; we were probably on the eve of a
bloodless yet important revolution; when Rockingham, a
virtuous magnifico, alarmed and disgusted, resolved to revive
something of the pristine purity and high-toned energy of the
old whig connection; appealed to his "new generation" from a
degenerate age, arrayed under his banner the generous youth of
the whig families, and was fortunate to enlist in the service
the supreme genius of Edmund Burke.

Burke effected for the whigs what Bolingbroke in a preceding
age had done for the tories: he restored the moral existence
of the party. He taught them to recur to the ancient
principles of their connection, and suffused those principles
with all the delusive splendour of his imagination. He raised
the tone of their public discourse; he breathed a high spirit
into their public acts. It was in his power to do more for
the whigs than St John could do for his party. The oligarchy,
who had found it convenient to attaint Bolingbroke for being
the avowed minister of the English Prince with whom they were
always in secret communication, when opinion forced them to
consent to his restitution, had tacked to the amnesty a clause
as cowardly as it was unconstitutional, and declared his
incompetence to sit in the parliament of his country. Burke
on the contrary fought the whig fight with a two-edged weapon:
he was a great writer; as an orator he was transcendent. In a
dearth of that public talent for the possession of which the
whigs have generally been distinguished, Burke came forward
and established them alike in the parliament and the country.
And what was his reward? No sooner had a young and dissolute
noble, who with some of the aspirations of a Caesar oftener
realised the conduct of a Catiline, appeared on the stage, and
after some inglorious tergiversation adopted their colours,
than they transferred to him the command which had been won by
wisdom and genius, vindicated by unrivalled knowledge, and
adorned by accomplished eloquence. When the hour arrived for
the triumph which he had prepared, he was not even admitted
into the Cabinet, virtually presided over by his graceless
pupil, and who, in the profuse suggestions of his teeming
converse, had found the principles and the information which
were among the chief claims to public confidence of Mr Fox.

Hard necessity made Mr Burke submit to the yoke, but the
humiliation could never be forgotten. Nemesis favours genius:
the inevitable hour at length arrived. A voice like the
Apocalypse sounded over England and even echoed in all the
courts of Europe. Burke poured forth the vials of his hoarded
vengeance into the agitated heart of Christendom; he
stimulated the panic of a world by the wild pictures of his
inspired imagination; he dashed to the ground the rival who
had robbed him of his hard-earned greatness; rended in twain
the proud oligarchy that had dared to use and to insult him;
and followed with servility by the haughtiest and the most
timid of its members, amid the frantic exultation of his
country, he placed his heel upon the neck of the ancient
serpent.

Among the whig followers of Mr Burke in this memorable
defection, among the Devonshires and the Portlands, the
Spencers and the Fitzwi]liams, was the Earl of Marney, whom
the whigs would not make a duke.

What was his chance of success from Mr Pitt?

If the history of England be ever written by one who has the
knowledge and the courage, and both qualities are equally
requisite for the undertaking, the world would be more
astonished than when reading the Roman annals by Niebuhr.
Generally speaking, all the great events have been distorted,
most of the important causes concealed, some of the principal
characters never appear, and all who figure are so
misunderstood and misrepresented, that the result is a
complete mystification, and the perusal of the narrative about
as profitable to an Englishman as reading the Republic of
Plato or the Utopia of More, the pages of Gaudentio di Lucca
or the adventures of Peter Wilkins.

The influence of races in our early ages, of the church in our
middle, and of parties in our modern history, are three great
moving and modifying powers, that must be pursued and analyzed
with an untiring, profound, and unimpassioned spirit, before a
guiding ray can be secured. A remarkable feature of our
written history is the absence in its pages of some of the
most influential personages. Not one man in a thousand for
instance has ever heard of Major Wildman: yet he was the soul
of English politics in the most eventful period of this
kingdom, and one most interesting to this age, from 1640 to
1688; and seemed more than once to hold the balance which was
to decide the permanent form of our government. But he was
the leader of an unsuccessful party. Even, comparatively
speaking, in our own times, the same mysterious oblivion is
sometimes encouraged to creep over personages of great social
distinction as well as political importance.

The name of the second Pitt remains, fresh after forty years
of great events, a parliamentary beacon. He was the
Chatterton of politics; the "marvellous boy." Some have a
vague impression that he was mysteriously moulded by his great
father: that he inherited the genius, the eloquence, the state
craft of Chatham. His genius was of a different bent, his
eloquence of a different class, his state craft of a different
school. To understand Mr Pitt, one must understand one of the
suppressed characters of English history, and that is Lord
Shelburne.

When the fine genius of the injured Bolingbroke, the only peer
of his century who was educated, and proscribed by the
oligarchy because they were afraid of his eloquence, "the
glory of his order and the shame," shut out from Parliament,
found vent in those writings which recalled to the English
people the inherent blessings of their old free monarchy, and
painted in immortal hues his picture of a patriot king, the
spirit that he raised at length touched the heart of Carteret
born a whig, yet scepticai of the advantages of that patrician
constitution which made the Duke of Newcastle the most
incompetent of men, but the chosen leader of the Venetian
party, virtually sovereign of England. Lord Carteret had many
brilliant qualities: he was undaunted, enterprising, eloquent;
had considerable knowledge of continental politics, was a
great linguist, a master of public law; and though he failed
in his premature effort to terminate the dogeship of George
the Second, he succeeded in maintaining a considerable though
secondary position in public life. The young Shelburne
married his daughter. Of him it is singular we know less than
of his father-in-law, yet from the scattered traits some idea
may be formed of the ablest and most accomplished minister of
the eighteenth century. Lord Shelburne, influenced probably
by the example and the traditionary precepts of his eminent
father-in-law, appears early to have held himself aloof from
the patrician connection, and entered public life as the
follower of Bute in the first great effort of George the Third
to rescue the sovereignty from what Lord Chatham called "the
Great Revolution families." He became in time a member of
Lord Chatham's last administration: one of the strangest and
most unsuccessful efforts to aid the grandson of George the
Second in his struggle for political emancipation. Lord
Shelburne adopted from the first the Bolingbroke system: a
real royalty, in lieu of the chief magistracy; a permanent
alliance with France, instead of the whig scheme of viewing in
that power the natural enemy of England: and, above all, a
plan of commercial freedom, the germ of which may be found in
the long-maligned negotiations of Utrecht, but which in the
instance of Lord Shelburne were soon in time matured by all
the economical science of Europe, in which he was a
proficient. Lord Shelburne seems to have been of a reserved
and somewhat astute disposition: deep and adroit, he was
however brave and firm. His knowledge was extensive and even
profound. He was a great linguist; he pursued both literary
and scientific investigations; his house was frequented by men
of letters, especially those distinguished by their political
abilities or economical attainments. He maintained the most
extensive private correspondence of any public man of his
time. The earliest and most authentic information reached him
from all courts and quarters of Europe: and it was a common
phrase, that the minister of the day sent to him often for the
important information which the cabinet could not itself
command. Lord Shelburne was the first great minister who
comprehended the rising importance of the middle class; and
foresaw in its future power a bulwark for the throne against
"the Great Revolution families." Of his qualities in council
we have no record; there is reason to believe that his
administrative ability was conspicuous: his speeches prove
that, if not supreme, he was eminent, in the art of
parliamentary disputation, while they show on all the
questions discussed a richness and variety of information with
which the speeches of no statesman of that age except Mr Burke
can compare.

Such was the man selected by George the Third as his champion
against the Venetian party after the termination of the
American war. The prosecution of that war they had violently
opposed, though it had originated in their own policy. First
minister in the House of Lords, Shelburne entrusted the lead
in the House of Commons to his Chancellor of the Exchequer,
the youthful Pitt. The administration was brief, but it was
not inglorious. It obtained peace, and for the first time
since the Revolution introduced into modern debate the
legitimate principles on which commerce should be conducted.
It fell before the famous Coalition with which "the Great
Revolution families" commenced their fiercest and their last
contention for the patrician government of royal England.

In the heat of that great strife, the king in the second
hazardous exercise of his prerogative entrusted the perilous
command to Pitt. Why Lord Shelburne on that occasion was set
aside, will perhaps always remain a mysterious passage of our
political history, nor have we space on the present occasion
to attempt to penetrate its motives. Perhaps the monarch,
with a sense of the rising sympathies of his people, was
prescient of the magic power of youth in touching the heart of
a nation. Yet it would not be an unprofitable speculation if
for a moment we paused to consider what might have been the
consequences to our country if Mr Pitt had been content for a
season again to lead the Commons under Lord Shelburne, and
have secured for England the unrivalled knowledge and
dexterity of that statesman in the conduct of our affairs
during the confounding fortunes of the French revolution.
Lord Shelburne was the only English minister competent to the
task; he was the only public man who had the previous
knowledge requisite to form accurate conclusions on such a
conjuncture: his remaining speeches on the subject attest the
amplitude of his knowledge and the accuracy of his views: and
in the rout of Jena, or the agony of Austerlitz, one cannot
refrain from picturing the shade of Shelburne haunting the
cabinet of Pitt, as the ghost of Canning is said occasionally
to linger about the speaker's chair, and smile sarcastically
on the conscientious mediocrities who pilfered his hard-earned
honours.

But during the happier years of Mr Pitt, the influence of the
mind of Shelburne may be traced throughout his policy. It was
Lansdowne House that made Pitt acquainted with Dr Price, a
dissenting minister, whom Lord Shelburne when at the head of
affairs courageously offered to make his private secretary,
and who furnished Mr Pitt, among many other important
suggestions, with his original plan of the sinking fund. The
commercial treaties of '87 were struck in the same mint, and
are notable as the first effort made by the English government
to emancipate the country from the restrictive policy which
had been introduced by the "glorious revolution;" memorable
epoch, that presented England at the same time with a corn law
and a public debt.. But on no subject was the magnetic
influence of the descendant of Sir William Petty more decided,
than in the resolution of his pupil to curb the power of the
patrician party by an infusion from the middle classes into
the government of the country. Hence the origin of Mr Pitt's
famous and long-misconceived plans of parliamentary reform.
Was he sincere, is often asked by those who neither seek to
discover the causes nor are capable of calculating the effects
of public transactions. Sincere! Why, he was struggling for
his existence! And when baffled, first by the Venetian party,
and afterwards by the panic of Jacobinism, he was forced to
forego his direct purpose, he still endeavoured partially to
effect it by a circuitous process. He created a plebeian
aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He
made peers of second-rate squires and fat graziers. He caught
them in the alleys of Lombard Street, and clutched them from
the counting-houses of Cornhill. When Mr Pitt in an age of
bank restriction declared that every man with an estate of ten
thousand a-year had a right to be a peer, he sounded the knell
of "the cause for which Hampden had died on the field, and
Sydney on the scaffold."

In ordinary times the pupil of Shelburne would have raised
this country to a state of great material prosperity, and
removed or avoided many of those anomalies which now perplex
us; but he was not destined for ordinary times; and though his
capacity was vast and his spirit lofty, he had not that
passionate and creative genius required by an age of
revolution. The French outbreak was his evil daemon: he had
not the means of calculating its effects upon Europe. He had
but a meagre knowledge himself of continental politics: he was
assisted by a very inefficient diplomacy. His mind was lost
in a convulsion of which he neither could comprehend the
causes nor calculate the consequences; and forced to act, he
acted not only violently, but in exact opposition to the very
system he was called into political existence to combat; he
appealed to the fears, the prejudices, and the passions of a
privileged class, revived the old policy of the oligarchy he
had extinguished, and plunged into all the ruinous excesses of
French war and Dutch finance.

If it be a salutary principle in the investigation of
historical transactions to be careful in discriminating the
cause from the pretext, there is scarcely any instance in
which the application of this principle is more fertile in
results, than in that of the Dutch invasion of 1688. The real
cause of this invasion was financial. The Prince of Orange
had found that the resources of Holland, however considerable,
were inadequate to sustain him in his internecine rivalry with
the great sovereign of France. In an authentic conversation
which has descended to us, held by William at the Hague with
one of the prime abettors of the invasion, the prince did not
disguise his motives; he said, "nothing but such a
constitution as you have in England can have the credit that
is necessary to raise such sums as a great war requires." The
prince came, and used our constitution for his purpose: he
introduced into England the system of Dutch finance. The
principle of that system was to mortgage industry in order to
protect property: abstractedly, nothing can be conceived more
unjust; its practice in England has been equally injurious.
In Holland, with a small population engaged in the same
pursuits, in fact a nation of bankers, the system was adapted
to the circumstances which had created it. All shared in the
present spoil, and therefore could endure the future burthen.
And so to this day Holland is sustained, almost solely
sustained, by the vast capital thus created which still
lingers amongst its dykes. But applied to a country in which
the circumstances were entirely different; to a considerable
and rapidly-increasing population; where there was a numerous
peasantry, a trading middle class struggling into existence;
the system of Dutch finance, pursued more or less for nearly a
century and a half, has ended in the degradation of a fettered
and burthened multitude. Nor have the demoralizing
consequences of the funding system on the more favoured
classes been less decided. It has made debt a national habit;
it has made credit the ruling power, not the exceptional
auxiliary, of all transactions; it has introduced a loose,
inexact, haphazard, and dishonest spirit in the conduct of
both public and private life; a spirit dazzling and yet
dastardly: reckless of consequences and yet shrinking from
responsibility. And in the end, it has so overstimulated the
energies of the population to maintain the material
engagements of the state, and of society at large, that the
moral condition of the people has been entirely lost sight of.

A mortgaged aristocracy, a gambling foreign commerce, a home
trade founded on a morbid competition, and a degraded people;
these are great evils, but ought perhaps cheerfully to he
encountered for the greater blessings of civil and religious
liberty. Yet the first would seem in some degree to depend
upon our Saxon mode of trial by our peers, upon the
stipulations of the great Norman charters, upon the practice
and the statute of Habeas Corpus,--a principle native to our
common law, but established by the Stuarts; nor in a careful
perusal of the Bill of Rights, or in an impartial scrutiny of
the subsequent legislation of those times, though some
diminution of our political franchises must be confessed, is
it easy to discover any increase of our civil privileges. To
those indeed who believe that the English nation,--at all
times a religious and Catholic people, but who even in the
days of the Plantagenets were anti-papal,--were in any danger
of again falling under the yoke of the Pope of Rome in the
reign of James the Second, religious liberty was perhaps
acceptable, though it took the shape of a discipline which at
once anathematized a great portion of the nation, and
virtually establishing Puritanism in Ireland, laid the
foundation of those mischiefs which are now endangering the
empire.

That the last of the Stuarts had any other object in his
impolitic manoeuvres, than an impracticable scheme to blend
the two churches, there is now authority to disbelieve. He
certainly was guilty of the offence of sending an envoy openly
to Rome, who, by the bye, was received by the Pope with great
discourtesy; and her Majesty Queen Victoria, whose
Protestantism cannot be doubted, for it is one of her chief
titles to our homage, has at this time a secret envoy at the
same court: and that is the difference between them: both
ministers doubtless working however fruitlessly for the same
object: the termination of those terrible misconceptions,
political and religious, that have occasioned so many
martyrdoms, and so many crimes alike to sovereigns and to
subjects.

If James the Second had really attempted to re-establish
Popery in this country, the English people, who had no hand in
his overthrow, would doubtless soon have stirred and secured
their "Catholic and Apostolic church," independent of any
foreign dictation; the church to which they still regularly
profess their adherence; and being a practical people, it is
possible that they might have achieved their object and yet
retained their native princes; under which circumstances we
might have been saved from the triple blessings of Venetian
politics, Dutch finance, and French wars: against which, in
their happiest days, and with their happiest powers, struggled
the three greatest of English statesmen,--Bolingbroke,
Shelburne, and lastly the son of Chatham.

We have endeavoured in another work, not we hope without
something of the impartiality of the future, to sketch the
character and career of his successors. From his death to
1825, the political history of England is a history of great
events and little men. The rise of Mr Canning, long kept down
by the plebeian aristocracy of Mr Pitt as an adventurer, had
shaken parties to their centre. His rapid disappearance from
the scene left both whigs and tories in a state of
disorganization. The distinctive principles of these
connexions were now difficult to trace. That period of public
languor which intervenes between the breaking up of parties
and the formation of factions now transpired in England. An
exhausted sensualist on the throne, who only demanded from his
ministers repose, a voluptuous aristocracy, and a listless
people, were content, in the absence of all public conviction
and national passion, to consign the government of the country
to a great man, whose decision relieved the sovereign, whose
prejudices pleased the nobles, and whose achievements dazzled
the multitude.

The DUKE OF WELLINGTON brought to the post of first minister
immortal fame; a quality of success which would almost seem to
include all others. His public knowledge was such as might be
expected from one whose conduct already formed an important
portion of the history of his country. He had a personal and
intimate acquaintance with the sovereigns and chief statesmen
of Europe, a kind of information in which English ministers
have generally been deficient, but without which the
management of our external affairs must at the best be
haphazard. He possessed administrative talents of the highest
order.

The tone of the age, the temper of the country, the great
qualities and the high character of the minister, indicated a
long and prosperous administration. The only individual in
his cabinet who, from a combination of circumstances rather
than from any intellectual supremacy over his colleagues, was
competent to be his rival, was content to be his successor.
In his most aspiring moments, Mr Peel in all probability aimed
at no higher reach; and with youth and the leadership of the
House of Commons, one has no reason to be surprised at his
moderation. The conviction that the duke's government would
only cease with the termination of his public career was so
general, that the moment he was installed in office, the whigs
smiled on him; political conciliation became the slang of the
day, and the fusion of parties the babble of clubs and the
tattle of boudoirs.

How comes it then that so great a man, in so great a position,
should have so signally failed? Should have broken up his
government, wrecked his party, and so completely annihilated
his political position, that, even with his historical
reputation to sustain him, he can since only re-appear in the
councils of his sovereign in a subordinate, not to say
equivocal, character?

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