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settled on him taxes estimated to produce £1,200,000 a year. This they thought sufficient, as they allowed nothing for a standing army in time of peace. At the time of Charles's Jeath, the annual produce of these taxes certainly exceeded a million and a half; and the king who, during the years which immediately followed his accession, was perpetually in distress, and perpetually asking his Parliaments for money, was at last able to keep a considerable body of regular troops without any assistance from the House of Commons. If his reign had been as long as that of George the Third, he would probably before the close of it have been in the annual receipt of several millions over and above what the ordinary expenses of the state required; and of those millions he would have been as absolutely master as the king now is of the sum allowed for his privy-purse. He might have spent them in luxury, in corruption, in paying troops to overawe his people, or in carrying into effect wild schemes of foreign conquest. The authors of the Revolution applied a remedy to this great abuse. They settled on the king, not the fluc

Revolution produced was the final establishment of the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland. We shall not now inquire whether the Episcopal or the Calvinistic form of church government be more agreeable to primitive practice. Far be it from us to disturb with our doubts the repose of an Oxonian Bachelor of Divinity, who conceives that the English prelates, with their baronies and palaces, their purple and their fine linen, their mitred carriages and their sumptuous tables, are the true successors and exact resemblances of those ancient bishops who lived by catching fish and mending tents. We only say that the Scotch, doubtless from their own inveterate stupidity and malice, were not Episcopalians; that they could not be made Episcopalians; that the whole power of government had been in vain employed for the purpose of converting them; that the fullest instruction on the mysterious questions of the Apostolical succession, and the imposition | of hands, had been imparted to them by the very logical process of putting the legs of the students into wooden boots, and driving two or more wedges between their knees; that a course of divinity lectures, of the most edify-tuating produce of certain fixed taxes, but a ing kind, had been given in the Grass-market of Edinburgh; yet that, in spite of all the exertions of those great theological professors, Lauderdale and Dundee, the Covenanters were as obstinate as ever. The contest between the Scotch nation and the Anglican Church had produced near thirty years of the most frightful misgovernment ever seen in any part of Great Britain. If the Revolution had produced no other effect than that of freeing the Scotch from the yoke of an establishment which they detested, and giving them one to which they were attached, it would have been one of the happiest events in our history.

fixed sum sufficient for the support of his own royal state. They established it as a rule, that all the expenses of the army, the navy, and the ordnance, should be brought annually under the review of the House of Commons, and that every sum voted should be applied to the service specified in the vote. The direct effect of this change was important. The indirect ef fect has been more important still. From that time the House of Commons has been realy the paramount power in the state. It has, in truth, appointed and removed ministers, declared war, and concluded peace. No combination of the king and the Lords has ever been able to effect any thing against the Lower House, backed by its constituents. Three or four times, indeed, the sovereign has been able to break the force of an opposition, by dissolving the Parliament. But if that experiment should fail, if the people should be of the same mind with their representatives - he would clearly have no course left but to yield, to abdicate, or to fight.

The third great benefit which the country derived from the Revolution was the alteration in the mode of granting the supplies. It had been the practice to settle on every prince, at the commencement of his reign, the produce of certain taxes, which, it was supposed, would yield a sum sufficient to defray the ordinary expenses of government. The distribution of the revenue was left wholly to the sovereign. He might be forced by war, or by his own pro- The next great blessing which we owe to fusion, to ask for an extraordinary grant. But, the Revolution, is the purification of the adif his policy were economical and pacific, he ministration of justice in political cases. Of might reign many years without once being the importance of this change, no person can under the necessity of summoning his Parlia- judge who is not well acquainted with the earment, or of taking their advice when he had lier volumes of the State Trials. Those vosummoned them. This was not all. The na-lumes are, we do not hesitate to say, the most tural tendency of every society, in which pro- frightful record of baseness and depravity that perty enjoys tolerable security, is to increase is extant in the world. Our hatred is altoin wealth. With the national wealth, the pro-gether turned away from the crimes and the duce of the customs, the excise, and the postoffice, would of course increase; and thus it might well happen, that taxes which, at the beginning of a long reign, were barely sufficient to support a frugal government in time of peace, might, before the end of that reign, enable the sovereign to imitate the extravagance of Nero or Heliogabalus,—to raise great armies to carry on expensive wars. Something of this sort had actually happened under Charles the Second, though his reign lasted only twenty-five years. His first Parliament

criminals, and directed against the law and its ministers. We see villanies as black as ever were imputed to any prisoner at any bar, daily committed on the bench and in the jury-box. The worst of the bad acts which brought discredit on the old Parliaments of France,-the condemnation of Lally, for example, or even that of Calas,—may seem praiseworthy when compared with those which follow each other in endless succession, as we turn over that huge chronicle of the shame of England. The magistrates of Paris and Toulouse were blind

ed by prejudice, passion, or bigotry. But the abandoned judges of our own country committed murder with their eyes open. The cause of this is plain. In France there was no constitutional opposition. If a man held language offensive to the government, he was at once sent to the Bastile or to Vincennes. But in England, at least after the days of the Long Parliament, the king could not, by a mere act of his prerogative, rid himself of a troublesome politician. He was forced to remove those who thwarted him by means of perjured witnesses, packed juries, and corrupt, hardhearted, brow-beating judges. The Opposition naturally retaliated whenever they had the upper hand. Every time that the power passed from one party to the other, took place a proscription and a massacre, thinly disguised under the forms of judicial procedure. The tribunals ought to be sacred places of refuge, where, in all the vicissitudes of public affairs, the innocent of all parties may find shelter. They were, before the Revolution, an unclean public shambles, to which each party in its turn dragged its opponents, and where each found the same venal and ferocious butchers waiting for its custom. Papist or Protestant, Tory or Whig, Priest or Alderman, all was one to those greedy and savage natures, provided only there was money to earn and blood to shed.

the course adopted by Sir William Temple, by Evelyn, and by many other men, who were, in every respect, admirably qualified to serve the state. On the other hand, those resolute and enterprising spirits who put their heads and lands to hazard in the game of politics, naturally acquired, from the habit of playing for so deep a stake, a reckless and desperate turn of mind. It was, we seriously believe, as safe to be a highwayman as to be a distinguished leader of Opposition. This may serve to explain, and in some degree to excuse, the violence with which the factions of that age are justly reproached. They were fighting, not for office, but for life. If they reposed for a moment from the work of agitation, if they suffered the public excitement to flag, they were lost men. Hume, in describing this state of things, has employed an image which seems hardly to suit the general simplicity of his style, but which is by no means too strong for the occasion. "Thus," says he, "the two parties, actuated by mutual rage, but cooped up within the narrow limits of the law, levelled with poisoned daggers the most deadly blows against each other's breast, and buried in their factious divisions all regard to truth, honour, and humanity."

From this terrible evil the Revolution set us free. The law which secured to the judges their seats during life or good behaviour did Of course, these worthless judges soon something. The law subsequently passed for created around them, as was natural, a breed regulating trials in cases of treason did much of informers more wicked, if possible, than more. The provisions of that law show, inthemselves. The trial by jury afforded little deed, very little legislative skill. It is not or no protection to the innocent. The juries framed on the principle of securing the inno were nominated by the sheriffs. The sheriffs cent, but on the principle of giving a great were in most parts of England nominated by chance of escape to the accused, whether inthe crown. In London, the great scene of nocent or guilty. This, however, is decidedly political contention, those officers were chosen a fault on the right side. The evil produced by the people. The fiercest parliamentary by the occasional escape of a bad citizen is election of our time will give but a faint notion not to be compared with the evils of that Reign of the storm which raged in the city on the day of Terror, for such it was, which preceded the when two infuriated parties, each bearing its Revolution. Since the passing of this law, badge, met to select the men in whose hands scarcely one single person has suffered death were to be the issues of life and death for the in England as a traitor, who had not been concoming year. On that day nobles of the high-victed on overwhelming evidence, to the satisest descent did not think it beneath them to faction of all parties, of a really great crime canvass and marshal the livery, to head the against the state. Attempts have been made procession, and to watch the poll. On that in times of great excitement, to bring in perday, the great chiefs of parties waited in an sons guilty of high treason for acts which, agony of suspense for the messenger who was though sometimes highly blamable, did not to bring from Guildhall the news whether their necessarily imply a design of altering the golives and estates were, for the next twelve vernment by physical force. All those attempts months, to be at the mercy of a friend or of a have failed. For a hundred and forty years foe. In 1681, Whig sheriffs were chosen, and no statesman, while engaged in constitutional Shaftesbury defied the whole power of the go- opposition to a government, has had the axe vernment. In 1682, the sheriffs were Tories, before his eyes. The smallest minorities strugShaftesbury fled to Holland. The other chiefs gling against the most powerful majorities in of the party broke up their councils, and re- the most agitated times, have felt themselves tired in haste to their country-seats. Sydney perfectly secure. Pulteney and Fox were the on the scaffold told those sheriffs that his blood two most distinguished leaders of Opposition was on their heads Neither of them could since the Revolution. Both were personally deny the charge, and one of them wept with obnoxious to the court. But the utmost harm shame and remorse. that the utmost anger of the court could do to them, was to strike off the "Right Honourable" from before their names.

Thus every man who then meddled with public affairs took nis life in his hand. The consequence was, that men of gentle natures stood aloof from contests in which they could not engage without hazarding their own necks and the fortunes of their children. This was

But of all the reforms produced by the Revolution, the most important was the full esta blishment of the liberty of unlicensed printing. The censorship, which, under some form or

other had existed, with rare and short intermis- which has generally been most disposed to sions, under every government, monarchical magnify the prerogative, a great change took or republican, from the time of Henry VIII. downwards, expired, and has never since been renewed.

place. Bishopric after bishopric, and deanery after deanery, were bestowed on Whigs and Latitudinarians. The consequence was, that Whigism and Latitudinarianism were professed by the ablest and most aspiring churchmen.

We are aware that the great improvements which we have recapitulated were, in many respects, imperfectly and unskilfully executed. The authors of those improvements sometimes, while they removed or mitigated a great practical evil, continued to recognise the erroneous principle from which that evil had sprung. Sometimes, when they had adopted a sound principle, they shrank from following it to all the conclusions to which it would have led them. Sometimes they failed to perceive that the remedies which they applied to one disease of the state were certain to generate another disease, and to render another remedy necessary. Their knowledge was inferior to ours; nor were they always able to act up to their knowledge. The pressure of circumstances, the necessity of compromising differences of opinion, the power and violence of the party which was altogether hostile to the new settle-propagated and read as if they had equalled the ment, must be taken into the account. When these things are fairly weighed, there will, we think, be little difference of opinion among liberal and right-minded men as to the real value of what the great events of 1688 did for this country.

Hume has complained bitterly of this at the close of his history. "The Whig party," says he, "for a course of near seventy years, has almost without interruption enjoyed the whole authority of government, and no honours or offices could be obtained but by their countenance and protection. But this event, which in some particulars has been advantageous to the state, has proved destructive to the truth of history, and has established many gross falsehoods, which it is unaccountable how any civilized nation could have embraced with regard to its domestic occurrences. Compositions the most despicable, both for style and matter" (in a note he instances Locke, Sydney, Hoadley, and Rapin) "have been extolled and most celebrated remains of antiquity. And forgetting that a regard to liberty, though a laudable passion, ought commonly to be subservient to a reverence for established government, the prevailing faction has celebrated only the partisans of the former." We will not here enter into an argument about the merit of Rapin's history, or Locke's political speculations. We call Hume merely as evidence to a fact well known to all reading men, that the literature patronised by the English court and the English ministry, during the first half of the eighteenth century, was of that kind which courtiers and min sters generally do all in their power to discountenance, and tended to inspire zeal for the liberties of the people rather than respect for the authority of the government.

We have recounted what appear to us the most important of those changes which the Revolution produced in our laws. The changes which it produced in our laws, however, were not more important than the change which it indirectly produced in the public mind. The Whig party had, during seventy years, an almost uninterrupted possession of power. It had always been the fundamental doctrine of that party, that power is a trust for the people; that it is given to magistrates, not for their own, but for the public advantage; that, where it is abused by magistrates, even by the highest of all, it may lawfully be withdrawn. It is perfectly true, that the Whigs were not more exempt than other men from the vices and infirmities of our nature, and that, when they had power, they sometimes abused it. But still they stood firm to their theory. The theory was the badge of their party. It was something more. It was the foundation on which rested the power of the houses of Nassau and Brunswick. Thus, there was a government interested in propagating a class of opinions which most governments are interested in discouraging, a government which looked with complacency on all speculations tending to democracy, and with extreme aversion on all speculations favourable to arbitrary power. There was a king who decidedly preferred a republican to a believer in the divine right of kings; who considered every attempt to exalt his prerogative as an attack on his title; and who reserved all his favours for those who declaimed on the natural equality of men and the popular origin of government. This was the state of things from the Revolution till the death of George II. The effect was what might have been expected. Even in that profession we should set him down for something mor

VOL. III.-40

There was still a very strong Tory party in England. But that party was in opposition. Many of its members still held the doctrine of passive obedience. But they did not admit that the existing dynasty had any claim to such obedience. They condemned resistance. But by resistance they meant the keeping out of James III., and not the turning out of George II. No Radical of our times could grumble more at the expenses of the royal household, could exert himself more strenuously to reduce the military establishment, could oppose with more earnestness every proposition for arming the executive with extraordinary powers, or could pour more unmitigated abuse on placemen and courtiers. If a writer were now, in a massive Dictionary, to define a Pensioner as a traitor and a slave, the Excise as a hateful tax, the Commissioners of the excise as wretches,—if he were to write a satire full of reflections on men who receive "the price of boroughs and of souls," who "explain their country's dear bought rights away," or

"whom pensions can incite
To vote a patriot black, a courtier white,"

2 D

democratic than a Whig. Yet this was the language which Johnson, the most bigoted of Tories and High Churchmen, held under the administration of Walpole and Pelham.

Thus doctrines favourable to public liberty were inculcated alike by those who were in power, and by those who were in opposition. It was by means of these doctrines alone that the former could prove that they had a king de jure. The servile theories of the latter did not prevent them from offering every molestation to one whom they considered as merely a king de facto. The attachment of the one party to the house of Hanover, of the other to that of Stuart, induced both to talk a language much more favourable to popular rights than to monarchical power. What took place at the first representation of " Cato" is no bad illustration of the way in which the two great sections of the community almost invariably acted. A play, the whole merit of which consists in its stately rhetoric,—a rhetoric sometimes not unworthy of Lucan,-about hating tyrants and dying for freedom, is brought on the stage in a time of great political exciteinent. Both parties crowd to the theatre. Each affects to consider every line as a compliment to itself, and an attack on its opponents. The curtain falls amidst an unanimous roar of applause. The Whigs of the " Kit Cat" embrace the author, and assure him that he has rendered an inestimable service to liberty. The Tory Secretary of State presents a purse to the chief actor for defending the cause of liberty so well. The history of that night was, in miniature, the history of two generations.

We well know how much sophistry there was in the reasonings, and how much exaggeration in the declamations of both parties. But when we compare the state in which political science was at the close of the reign of George the Second, with the state in which it had been wher James the Second came to the throne, it is impossible not to admit that a prodigious

improvement had taken place. We are no admirers of the political doctrines laid down in Blackstone's Commentaries. But if we consider that those Commentaries were read with great applause in the very schools where, within the memory of some persons then living, books had been publicly burned by order of the University of Oxford, for containing the "damnable doctrine," that the English monarchy is limited and mixed, we cannot deny that a salutary change had taken place. "The Jesuits," says Pascal, in the last of his incomparable letters, "have obtained a Papal decree condemning Galileo's doctrine about the motion of the earth. It is all in vain. If the world is really turning round, all mankind together will not be able to keep it from turning, or to keep themselves from turning with it." The decrees of Oxford were as ineffectual to stay the great moral and political revolution, as those of the Vatican to stay the motion of our globe. That learned University found itself not only unable to keep the mass from moving, but unable to keep itself from moving along with the mass. Nor was the effect of the discussions and spe culations of that period confined to our own country. While the Jacobite party was in the last dotage and weakness of its paralytic old age, the political philosophy of England began to produce a mighty effect on France, and, through France, on Europe.

Here another vast field opens itself before us. But we must resolutely turn away from it. We will conclude by earnestly advising all our readers to study Sir James Mackintosh's invaluable Fragment; and by expressing the satisfaction we have received from learning, since this article was written, that the intelligent publishers of the volume before us have resolved to reprint the Fragment in a separate form, with out those accompaniments which have hitherto impeded its circulation. The resolution is as creditable to them as the publication is sure to be acceptable to the lovers of English history.

SIR JOHN MALCOLM'S LIFE OF LORD CLIVE.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW FOR JANUARY, 1840.]

guage, has never been very popular, and is now scarcely ever read.

We fear that Sir John Malcolm's volumes will not much attract those readers whom Orme and Mill have repelled. The materials placed at his disposal by the late Lord Powis were indeed of great value. But we cannot say that they have been very skilfully worked

ing our gratitude to the noble family to which the public owes so much useful and curious information.

We have always thought it strange that, while the history of the Spanish empire in America is so familiarly known to all the nations of Europe, the great actions of our own countrymen in the East should, even among ourselves, excite little interest. Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atabalipa. But we doubt whether one in ten, even among English gentlemen | up. It would, however, be unjust to criticise of highly cultivated minds, can tell who won with severity a work which, if the author had the battle of Buxar, who perpetrated the mas- lived to complete and revise it, would probasacre of Patna, whether Surajah Dowlah ruled bly have been improved by condensation and in Oude or in Travancore, or whether Holkar by a better arrangement. We are more diswas a Hindoo or a Mussulman. Yet the vic-posed to perform the pleasing duty of expresstories of Cortes were gained over savages who had no letters, who were ignorant of the use of metals, who had not broken in a single animal to labour, who wielded no better weapons than those which could be made out of sticks, flints, and fish-bones, who regarded a horsesoldier as a monster, half man and half beast, who took a harquebusier for a sorcerer able to scatter the thunder and lightning of the skies. The people of India when we subdued them were ten times as numerous as the vanquished Americans, and were at the same time quite as highly civilized as the victorious Spaniards. They had reared cities larger and fairer than Saragossa or Toledo, and buildings more beautiful and costly than the cathedral of Seville. They could show bankers richer than the richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz; viceroys whose splendour far surpassed that of Ferdinand the Catholic; myriads of cavalry and long trains of artillery which would have astonished the Great Captain. It might have been expected that every Englishman who takes any interest in any part of history would be curious to know how a handful of his countrymen, separated from their home by an immense ocean, subjugated, in the course of a few years, one of the greatest empires in the world. Yet, unless we greatly err, this subject is to most readers not only insipid, but positively distasteful.

Perhaps the fault lies partly with the historians. Mr. Mill's book, though it has undoubtedly great and rare merit, is not sufficiently animated and picturesque to attract those who read for amusement. Orme, inferior to no English historian in style and power of painting, is minute even to tediousness. In one volume he allots, on an average, a closely printed quarto page to the events of every forty-eight hours. The consequence is that his narrative, though one of the most authentic and one of the most finely written in our lan

The Life of Robert Lord Clive; collected from the Family Papers, communicated by the Earl of Powis. By Major-General Sir JOHN MALCOLM, K. C. B. 3 vols. 8vo. London. 1836.

The effect of the book, even when we make the largest allowance for the partiality of those who have furnished and of those who have digested the materials, is, on the whole, greatly to raise the character of Lord Clive. We are far indeed from sympathizing with Sir John Malcolm, whose love passes the love of biographers, and who can see nothing but wisdom and justice in the actions of his idol. But we are at least equally far from concurring in the severe judgment of Mr. Mill, who seems to us to show less discrimination in his account of Clive than in any other part of his valuable work. Clive, like most men who are born with strong passions, and tried by strong temptations, committed great faults. But every person who takes a fair and enlightened view of his whole career must admit that our island, so fertile in heroes and statesmen, has scarcely ever produced a man more truly great either in arms or in council.

The Clives had heen settled ever since the twelfth century on an estate of no great value near Market-Drayton, in Shropshire. In the reign of George the First this moderate but ancient inheritance was possessed by Mr. Richard Clive, who seems to have been a plain man of no great tact or capacity. He had been bred to the law, and divided his time between professional business and the avocations of a small proprietor. He married a lady from Manchester of the name of Gaskill and became the father of a very numerous family. His eldest son, Robert, the founder of the British empire in India, was born at the old seat of his ancestors on the 29th of September, 1725.

Some lineaments of the character of the man were early discerned in the child. There re main letters written by his relations when he was in his seventh year; and from these it appears that, even at that early age, his strong will and his fiery passions, sustained by a constitutional intrepidity which sometimes seemed

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