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Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1

T >> Thomas Babington Macaulay >> Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1




To so conservative a frame of mind had the excesses of the French
Revolution brought the most illustrious reformers of that time.
And why is one person to be singled out from among millions, and
arraigned before posterity as a traitor to his opinions only
because events produced on him the effect which they produced on
a whole generation? People who, like Mr. Brothers in the last
generation, and Mr. Percival in this, have been favoured with
revelations from heaven, may be quite independent of the vulgar
sources of knowledge. But such poor creatures as Mackintosh,
Dumont, and Bentham, had nothing but observation and reason to
guide them; and they obeyed the guidance of observation and of
reason. How is it in physics? A traveller falls in with a berry
which he has never before seen. He tastes it, and finds it sweet
and refreshing. He praises it, and resolves to introduce it into
his own country. But in a few minutes he is taken violently sick;
he is convulsed; he is at the point of death. He of course
changes his opinion, denounces this delicious food a poison,
blames his own folly in tasting it, and cautions his friends
against it. After a long and violent struggle he recovers, and
finds himself much exhausted by his sufferings, but free from
some chronic complaints which had been the torment of his life.
He then changes his opinion again, and pronounces this fruit a
very powerful remedy, which ought to be employed only in extreme
cases and with great caution, but which ought not to be
absolutely excluded from the Pharmacopoeia. And would it not be
the height of absurdity to call such a man fickle and
inconsistent, because he had repeatedly altered his judgment? If
he had not altered his judgment, would he have been a rational
being? It was exactly the same with the French Revolution. That
event was a new phaenomenon in politics. Nothing that had gone
before enabled any person to judge with certainty of the course
which affairs might take. At first the effect was the reform of
great abuses; and honest men rejoiced. Then came commotion,
proscription, confiscation, bankruptcy, the assignats, the
maximum, civil war, foreign war, revolutionary tribunals,
guillotinades, noyades, fusillades. Yet a little while, and a
military despotism rose out of the confusion, and menaced the
independence of every state in Europe.

And yet again a little while, and the old dynasty returned,
followed by a train of emigrants eager to restore the old abuses.
We have now, we think, the whole before us. We should therefore
be justly accused of levity or insincerity if our language
concerning those events were constantly changing. It is our
deliberate opinion that the French Revolution, in spite of all
its crimes and follies, was a great blessing to mankind. But it
was not only natural, but inevitable, that those who had only
seen the first act should be ignorant of the catastrophe, and
should be alternately elated and depressed as the plot went on
disclosing itself to them. A man who had held exactly the same
opinion about the Revolution in 1789, in 1794, in 1804, in 1814,
and in 1834, would have been either a divinely inspired prophet,
or an obstinate fool. Mackintosh was neither. He was simply a
wise and good man; and the change which passed on his mind was a
change which passed on the mind of almost every wise and good man
in Europe. In fact, few of his contemporaries changed so little.
The rare moderation and calmness of his temper preserved him
alike from extravagant elation and from extravagant despondency.
He was never a Jacobin. He was never an Anti-Jacobin. His mind
oscillated undoubtedly, but the extreme points of the oscillation
were not very remote. Herein he differed greatly from some
persons of distinguished talents who entered into life at nearly
the same time with him. Such persons we have seen rushing from
one wild extreme to another, out-Paining Paine, out-
Castlereaghing Castlereagh, Pantisocratists, Ultra-Tories,
heretics, persecutors, breaking the old laws against sedition,
calling for new and sharper laws against sedition, writing
democratic dramas, writing Laureate odes panegyrising Marten,
panegyrising Laud, consistent in nothing but an intolerance which
in any person would be censurable, but which is altogether
unpardonable in men who, by their own confession, have had such
ample experience of their own fallibility. We readily concede to
some of these persons the praise of eloquence and poetical
invention; nor are we by any means disposed, even where they have
been gainers by their conversion, to question their sincerity. It
would be most uncandid to attribute to sordid motives actions
which admit of a less discreditable explanation. We think that
the conduct of these persons has been precisely what was to be
expected from men who were gifted with strong imagination and
quick sensibility, but who were neither accurate observers nor
logical reasoners. It was natural that such men should see in the
victory of the third estate of France the dawn of a new Saturnian
age. It was natural that the rage of their disappointment should
be proportioned to the extravagance of their hopes. Though the
direction of their passions was altered, the violence of those
passions was the same. The force of the rebound was proportioned
to the force of the original impulse. The pendulum swung
furiously to the left, because it had been drawn too far to the
right.

We own that nothing gives us so high an idea of the judgment and
temper of Sir James Mackintosh as the manner in which he shaped
his course through those times. Exposed successively to two
opposite infections, he took both in their very mildest form. The
constitution of his mind was such that neither of the diseases
which wrought such havoc all round him could in any serious
degree, or for any great length of time, derange his intellectual
health. He, like every honest and enlightened man in Europe, saw
with delight the great awakening of the French nation. Yet he
never, in the season of his warmest enthusiasm, proclaimed
doctrines inconsistent with the safety of property and the just
authority of governments. He, like almost every other honest and
enlightened man, was discouraged and perplexed by the terrible
events which followed. Yet he never in the most gloomy times
abandoned the cause of peace, of liberty, and of toleration. In
that great convulsion which overset almost every other
understanding, he was indeed so much shaken that he leaned
sometimes in one direction and sometimes in the other; but he
never lost his balance. The opinions in which he at last reposed,
and to which, in spite of strong temptations, he adhered with a
firm, a disinterested, an ill-requited fidelity, were a just mean
between those which he had defended with youthful ardour and with
more than manly prowess against Mr. Burke, and those to which he
had inclined during the darkest and saddest years in the history
of modern Europe. We are much mistaken if this be the picture
either of a weak or of a dishonest mind.

What the political opinions of Sir James Mackintosh were in his
later years is written in the annals of his country. Those annals
will sufficiently refute what the Editor has ventured to assert
in the very advertisement to this work. "Sir James Mackintosh,"
says he, "was avowedly and emphatically a Whig of the Revolution:
and since the agitation of religious liberty and parliamentary
reform became a national movement, the great transaction of 1688
has been more dispassionately, more correctly, and less highly
estimated." If these words mean anything, they must mean that the
opinions of Sir James Mackintosh concerning religious liberty and
parliamentary reform went no further than those of the authors of
the Revolution; in other words, that Sir James Mackintosh opposed
Catholic Emancipation, and approved of the old constitution of
the House of Commons. The allegation is confuted by twenty
volumes of Parliamentary Debates, nay, by innumerable passages in
the very fragment which this writer has defaced. We will venture
to say that Sir James Mackintosh often did more for religious
liberty and for parliamentary reform in a quarter of an hour than
most of those zealots who are in the habit of depreciating him
have done or will do in the whole course of their lives.

Nothing in the "Memoir" or in the "Continuation of the History"
has struck us so much as the contempt with which the writer
thinks fit to speak of all things that were done before the
coming in of the very last fashions in politics. We think that we
have sometimes observed a leaning towards the same fault in
writers of a much higher order of intellect. We will therefore
take this opportunity of making a few remarks on an error which
is, we fear, becoming common, and which appears to us not only
absurd, but as pernicious as almost any error concerning the
transactions of a past age can possibly be.

We shall not, we hope, be suspected of a bigoted attachment to
the doctrines and practices of past generations. Our creed is
that the science of government is an experimental science, and
that, like all other experimental sciences, it is generally in a
state of progression. No man is so obstinate an admirer of the
old times as to deny that medicine, surgery, botany, chemistry,
engineering, navigation, are better understood now than in any
former age. We conceive that it is the same with political
science. Like those physical sciences which we have mentioned, it
has always been working itself clearer and clearer, and
depositing impurity after impurity. There was a time when the
most powerful of human intellects were deluded by the gibberish
of the astrologer and the alchemist; and just so there was a time
when the most enlightened and virtuous statesmen thought it the
first duty of a government to persecute heretics, to found
monasteries, to make war on Saracens. But time advances; facts
accumulate; doubts arise. Faint glimpses of truth begin to
appear, and shine more and more unto the perfect day. The highest
intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch
and to reflect the dawn. They are bright, while the level below
is still in darkness. But soon the light, which at first
illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain
and penetrates to the deepest valley. First come hints, then
fragments of systems, then defective systems, then complete and
harmonious systems. The sound opinion, held for a time by one
bold speculator, becomes the opinion of a small minority, of a
strong minority, of a majority of mankind. Thus, the great
progress goes on, till schoolboys laugh at the jargon which
imposed on Bacon, till country rectors condemn the illiberality
and intolerance of Sir Thomas More.

Seeing these things, seeing that, by the confession of the most
obstinate enemies of innovation, our race has hitherto been
almost constantly advancing in knowledge, and not seeing any
reason to believe that, precisely at the point of time at which
we came into the world, a change took place in the faculties of
the human mind, or in the mode of discovering truth, we are
reformers: we are on the side of progress. From the great
advances which European society has made during the last four
centuries, in every species of knowledge, we infer, not that
there is no more room for improvement, but that, in every science
which deserves the name, immense improvements may be confidently
expected.

But the very considerations which lead us to look forward with
sanguine hope to the future prevent us from looking back with
contempt on the past We do not flatter ourselves with the notion
that we have attained perfection, and that no more truth remains
to be found. We believe that we are wiser than our ancestors. We
believe, also, that our posterity will be wiser than we. It would
be gross injustice in our grandchildren to talk of us with
contempt, merely because they may have surpassed us; to call Watt
a fool, because mechanical powers may be discovered which may
supersede the use of steam; to deride the efforts which have been
made in our time to improve the discipline of prisons, and to
enlighten the minds of the poor, because future philanthropists
may devise better places of confinement than Mr. Bentham's
Panopticon, and better places of education than Mr. Lancaster's
Schools. As we would have our descendants judge us, so ought we
to judge our fathers. In order to form a correct estimate of
their merits, we ought to place ourselves in their situation, to
put out of our minds, for a time, all that knowledge which they,
however eager in the pursuit of truth, could not have, and which
we, however negligent we may have been, could not help having. It
was not merely difficult, but absolutely impossible, for the best
and greatest of men, two hundred years ago, to be what
a very commonplace person in our days may easily be, and indeed
must necessarily be. But it is too much that the benefactors of
mankind, after having been reviled by the dunces of their own
generation for going too far, should be reviled by the dunces of
the next generation for not going far enough.

The truth lies between two absurd extremes. On one side is the
bigot who pleads the wisdom of our ancestors as a reason for not
doing what they in our place would be the first to do; who
opposes the Reform Bill because Lord Somers did not see the
necessity of Parliamentary Reform; who would have opposed the
Revolution because Ridley and Cranmer professed boundless
submission to the royal prerogative; and who would have opposed
the Reformation because the Fitzwalters and Mareschals, whose
seals are set to the Great Charter, were devoted adherents to
the Church of Rome. On the other side is the sciolist who speaks
with scorn of the Great Charter because it did not reform the
Church of the Reformation, because it did not limit the
prerogative; and of the Revolution, because it did not purify the
House of Commons. The former of these errors we have often
combated, and shall always be ready to combat. The latter, though
rapidly spreading, has not, we think, yet come under our notice.
The former error bears directly on practical questions, and
obstructs useful reforms. It may, therefore, seem to be, and
probably is, the more mischievous of the two. But the latter is
equally absurd; it is at least equally symptomatic of a shallow
understanding and an unamiable temper: and, if it should ever
become general, it will, we are satisfied, produce very
prejudicial effects. Its tendency is to deprive the benefactors
of mankind of their honest fame, and to put the best and the
worst men of past times on the same level. The author of a great
reformation is almost always unpopular in his own age. He
generally passes his life in disquiet and danger. It is therefore
for the interest of the human race that the memory of such men
should be had in reverence, and that they should be supported
against the scorn and hatred of their contemporaries by the hope
of leaving a great and imperishable name. To go on the forlorn
hope of truth is a service of peril. Who will undertake it, if it
be not also a service of honour? It is easy enough, after the
ramparts are carried, to find men to plant the flag on the
highest tower. The difficulty is to find men who are ready to go
first into the breach; and it would be bad policy indeed to
insult their remains because they fell in the breach, and did not
live to penetrate to the citadel.

Now here we have a book which is by no means a favourable
specimen of the English literature of the nineteenth century, a
book indicating neither extensive knowledge nor great powers of
reasoning. And, if we were to judge by the pity with which the
writer speaks of the great statesmen and philosophers of a former
age, we should guess that he was the author of the most original
and important inventions in political science. Yet not so: for
men who are able to make discoveries are generally disposed to
make allowances. Men who are eagerly pressing forward in pursuit
of truth are grateful to every one who has cleared an inch of the
way for them. It is, for the most part, the man who has just
capacity enough to pick up and repeat the commonplaces which are
fashionable in his own time who looks with disdain on the very
intellects to which it is owing that those commonplaces are not
still considered as startling paradoxes or damnable heresies.
This writer is just the man who, if he had lived in the
seventeenth century, would have devoutly believed that the
Papists burned London, who would have swallowed the whole of
Oates's story about the forty thousand soldiers, disguised as
pilgrims, who were to meet in Gallicia, and sail thence to invade
England, who would have carried a Protestant flail under his
coat, and who would have been angry if the story of the warming-
pan had been questioned. It is quite natural that such a man
should speak with contempt of the great reformers of that time,
because they did not know some things which he never would have
known but for the salutary effects of their exertions. The men to
whom we owe it that we have a House of Commons are sneered at
because they did not suffer the debates of the House to be
published. The authors of the Toleration Act are treated as
bigots, because they did not go the whole length of Catholic
Emancipation. Just so we have heard a baby, mounted on the
shoulders of its father, cry out, "How much taller I am than
Papa!"

This gentleman can never want matter for pride, if he finds it so
easily. He may boast of an indisputable superiority to all the
greatest men of all past ages. He can read and write: Homer
probably did not know a letter. He has been taught that the earth
goes round the sun: Archimedes held that the sun went round the
earth. He is aware that there is a place called New Holland:
Columbus and Gama went to their graves in ignorance of the fact.
He has heard of the Georgium Sidus: Newton was ignorant of the
existence of such a planet. He is acquainted with the use of
gunpowder: Hannibal and Caesar won their victories with sword
and spear. We submit, however, that this is not the way in
which men are to be estimated. We submit that a wooden spoon of
our day would not be justified in calling Galileo and Napier
blockheads, because they never heard of the differential
calculus. We submit that Caxton's press in Westminster Abbey,
rude as it is, ought to be looked at with quite as much respect
as the best constructed machinery that ever, in our time,
impressed the clearest type on the finest paper. Sydenham
first discovered that the cool regimen succeeded best in cases
of small-pox. By this discovery he saved the lives of hundreds
of thousands; and we venerate his memory for it, though he
never heard of inoculation. Lady Mary Montague brought inoculation
into use; and we respect her for it, though she never heard
of vaccination. Jenner introduced vaccination; we admire
him for it, and we shall continue to admire him for it, although
some still safer and more agreeable preservative should be
discovered. It is thus that we ought to judge of the events and
the men of other times. They were behind us. It could not be
otherwise. But the question with respect to them is not where
they were, but which way they were going. Were their faces set in
the right or in the wrong direction? Were they in the front or in
the rear of their generation? Did they exert themselves to help
onward the great movement of the human race, or to stop it? This
is not charity, but simple justice and common sense. It is the
fundamental law of the world in which we live that truth shall
grow, first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in
the ear. A person who complains of the men of 1688 for not having
been men of 1835 might just as well complain of a projectile for
describing a parabola, or of quicksilver for being heavier than
water.

Undoubtedly we ought to look at ancient transactions by the light
of modern knowledge. Undoubtedly it is among the first duties of
a historian to point out the faults of the eminent men of former
generations. There are no errors which are so likely to be drawn
into precedent, and therefore none which it is so necessary to
expose, as the errors of persons who have a just title to the
gratitude and admiration of posterity. In politics, as in
religion, there are devotees who show their reverence for a
departed saint by converting his tomb into a sanctuary for crime.
Receptacles of wickedness are suffered to remain undisturbed in
the neighbourhood of the church which glories in the relics of
some martyred apostle. Because he was merciful, his bones give
security to assassins. Because he was chaste, the precinct of his
temple is filled with licensed stews. Privileges of an equally
absurd kind have been set up against the jurisdiction of
political philosophy. Vile abuses cluster thick round every
glorious event, round every venerable name; and this evil
assuredly calls for vigorous measures of literary police. But the
proper course is to abate the nuisance without defacing the
shrine, to drive out the gangs of thieves and prostitutes without
doing foul and cowardly wrong to the ashes of the illustrious
dead.

In this respect, two historians of our own time may be proposed
as models, Sir James Mackintosh and Mr. Mill. Differing in most
things, in this they closely resemble each other. Sir James is
lenient. Mr. Mill is severe. But neither of them ever omits, in
the apportioning of praise and of censure, to make ample
allowance for the state of political science and political
morality in former ages. In the work before us, Sir James
Mackintosh speaks with just respect of the Whigs of the
Revolution, while he never fails to condemn the conduct of that
party towards the members of the Church of Rome. His doctrines
are the liberal and benevolent doctrines of the nineteenth
century. But he never forgets that the men whom he is describing
were men of the seventeenth century.

From Mr. Mill this indulgence, or, to speak more properly, this
justice, was less to be expected. That gentleman, in some of his
works, appears to consider politics not as an experimental, and
therefore a progressive science, but as a science of which all
the difficulties may be resolved by short synthetical arguments
drawn from truths of the most vulgar notoriety. Were this opinion
well founded, the people of one generation would have little or
no advantage over those of another generation. But though Mr.
Mill, in some of his Essays, has been thus misled, as we
conceive, by a fondness for neat and precise forms of
demonstration, it would be gross injustice not to admit that, in
his History, he has employed a very different method of
investigation with eminent ability and success. We know no writer
who takes so much pleasure in the truly useful, noble and
philosophical employment of tracing the progress of sound
opinions from their embryo state to their full maturity. He
eagerly culls from old despatches and minutes every expression in
which he can discern the imperfect germ of any great truth which
has since been fully developed. He never fails to bestow praise
on those who, though far from coming up to his standard of
perfection, yet rose in a small degree above the common level of
their contemporaries. It is thus that the annals of past times
ought to be written. It is thus, especially, that the annals of
our own country ought to be written.

The history of England is emphatically the history of progress.
It is the history of a constant movement of the public mind, of a
constant change in the institutions of a great society. We see
that society, at the beginning of the twelfth century, in a state
more miserable than the state in which the most degraded nations
of the East now are. We see it subjected to the tyranny of a
handful of armed foreigners. We see a strong distinction of caste
separating the victorious Norman from the vanquished Saxon. We
see the great body of the population in a state of personal
slavery. We see the most debasing and cruel superstition
exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and
benevolent minds. We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance,
and the studious few engaged in acquiring what did not deserve
the name of knowledge. In the course of seven centuries the
wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most
highly civilised people that ever the world saw, have spread
their dominion over every quarter of the globe, have scattered
the seeds of mighty empires and republics over vast continents of
which no dim intimation had ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo, have
created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of
an hour the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa
together, have carried the science of healing, the means of
locomotion and correspondence, every mechanical art, every
manufacture, everything that promotes the convenience of life, to
a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical, have
produced a literature which may boast of works not inferior to
the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us, have discovered
the laws which regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, have
speculated with exquisite subtilty on the operations of the human
mind, have been the acknowledged leaders of the human race in the
career of political improvement. The history of England is the
history of this great change in the moral, intellectual, and
physical state of the inhabitants of our own island. There is
much amusing and instructive episodical matter; but this is the
main action. To us, we will own, nothing is so interesting and
delightful as to contemplate the steps by which the England of
Domesday Book, the England of the Curfew and the Forest Laws, the
England of crusaders, monks, schoolmen, astrologers, serfs,
outlaws, became the England which we know and love, the classic
ground of liberty and philosophy, the school of all knowledge,
the mart of all trade. The Charter of Henry Beauclerk, the Great
Charter, the first assembling of the House of Commons, the
extinction of personal slavery, the separation from the See of
Rome, the Petition of Right, the Habeas Corpus Act, the
Revolution, the establishment of the liberty of unlicensed
printing, the abolition of religious disabilities, the reform of
the representative system, all these seem to us to be the
successive stages of one great revolution--nor can we fully
comprehend any one of these memorable events unless we look at it
in connection with those which preceded, and with those which
followed it. Each of those great and ever-memorable struggles,
Saxon against Norman, Villein against Lord, Protestant against
Papist, Roundhead against Cavalier, Dissenter against Churchman,
Manchester against Old Sarum, was, in its own order and season, a
struggle, on the result of which were staked the dearest
interests of the human race; and every man who, in the contest
which, in his time, divided our country, distinguished himself on
the right side, is entitled to our gratitude and respect.

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