POLITICAL PAMPHLETS.*
Mn. SA INTSBURY'S little volume of Political Pamphlets, selected for Percival's Pocket Library of English Litera- ture, is as successful as his Political Verse was the reverse. The introduction, though it shows certain obvious defects of taste and style, is in intention just; while the selection made from the seven writers laid under contribution by Mr. Saints- bury is most happy. Every student of our political literature has his own favourites ; but it would, in our opinion, be im- possible to better Mr. Saintsbury's choice. His volume shows how entirely true it is that history repeats itself, and that the great civil controversies are never out of fashion. There is not a pamphlet in the book which does not contain a dozen shrewd things applicable to the present day. Take the first on the list, Halifax's inimitable " Letter to a Dissenter, upon the occasion of His Majesty's late gracious Declaration of Indulgence." It positively bristles with points for a speaker or writer bent upon showing the Dissenters of to-day that they should not be induced by the bribe of Disestablishment to desert their fellow Protestants in Ireland. For example, Halifax assures his Dissenter that "this alliance, between liberty and infallibility, is bringing together the two most contrary things that are in the world." Could anything be more applicable to the conjunction of Mr. Dillon and Mr. Labouchere, Archbishop Walsh and Mr. Price Hughes P Again, take his " Think a little how dangerous it is to build upon a foundation of paradoxes. Popery is now the only friend to liberty, and the known enemy to persecu- tion." Defoe's " Shortest Way with the Dissenters "- that strange farago of irony and exaggeration—affords less material for modern use. As a piece of English, how- ever, the " Shortest Way with the Dissenters " deserves to be read and re-read. Its short, sharp sentences sting like blood-knots on a piece of whipcord. Swift's Drapier's Letters," two of which are given hi the present volume, should supply the Home-rule Party with a cer- tain number of verbal arrows. It was for one of the numbers of this famous series that the great Dean twisted the whole doctrine and discipline of a national " boycott " into a single sentence : "Burn everything that comes from England, except her coal." Mr. Saintsbury could not have given a more representative or more worthy example of Burke's pamphlets than that he has selected,—the " Second Letter on a Regicide Peace." The whole composition is alive with genius. Those inspired political generalities in which Burke excelled are to be found on almost every page, and they are here lighted up by brilliant outbursts of irony and epigram. At the same time, the letter contains none of those purple patches which, however delightful to the ear, appear a little strangely in the course of a political disquisition. The " Second Letter on a Regicide Peace" maintains a steady march of close argument and apposite illustration which makes it a model political pamphlet. As an example of epigrammatic irony, take the passage which describes the hatred of religion—to which " every question of empire was subordinate" that reigned in the breasts of the Jacobin philosophers :—" They had rather domineer in a pariah of atheists, than rule over a Christian world." Though the pamphlet in question is addressed to so special and particular an object, it yet affords much in the way of argument that can be applied to our own times. Here is Burke's judgment on the oft-debated question whether financial embarrassments interfere with the power of a nation to levy war :— " Material resources never have supplied, nor ever can supply, the want of unity in design, and constancy in pursuit. But unity in design, and perseverance and boldness in pursuit, have never
• Political Pamphlets. Edited by George Saint:bury. London : Percival and Co. 1892.
wanted resources, and never will. We have not considered as we ought the dreadful energy of a state in which the property has nothing to do with the government. Reflect, my dear Sir, reflect again and again, on a government, in which the property is in complete subjection, and where nothing rules but the mind of desperate men. The condition of a commonwealth not governed by its property was a combination of things which the learned and ingenious speculator Harrington, who has tossed about society into all forms, never could imagine to be possible. We have seen it ; the world has felt it; and if the world will shut their eyes to this state of things, they will feel it more. The rulers there have found their resources in crimes. The discovery is dreadful; the mine exhaustless. They have everything to gain, and they have nothing to lose. They have a boundless inheritance in hope ; and there is no medium for them, betwixt the highest elevation, and death with infamy. Never can they, who, from the miserable servitude of the desk, have been raised to empire, again submit to the bondage of a starving bureau, or the profit of copying music, or writing plaidoyers by the sheet. It has made me often smile in bitterness, when I have heard talk of an indemnity to such men, provided they return to their allegiance."
The passage is extremely characteristic of the writer. Eloquent and far-seeing as it is, it leaves an exceedingly unpleasant impression. It is defaced by the scorn with which the humble origin of so many of the French Revolu- tionaires is referred to. What right has Burke, of all men, to use this weapon against his antagonists ? Such passages are little less than revolting, and show how well justi- fied was the contemporary opinion that Burke, in spite of all his wisdom and all his golden-tongued eloquence, had
in him too deep a trace of the vituperative bully to make it possible to regard him as in the best and highest sense a gentleman. Nothing is clearer than that the men among whom he moved could not instinctively accord him that title. How could they give it to a man who spoke of the prisoner he was prosecuting as Burke did of Warren Hastings ? It was thus Burke referred to his victim :—" For years he lay down upon that sty of disgrace, fattening in it, lying, feeding upon that offal of disgrace and excrement and everything that can be opprobrious to the human mind." He called Hastings, moreover, " a captain-general of iniquity, thief, tyrant, robber, cheat, sharper, swindler." This is, of course, mere foaming at the mouth ; but those who deserve the name of true gentle-
men do not foam at the month.
Sydney Smith's "Peter Plymley's Letters" show that the writer was well-nigh as great a pamphleteer as Burke. Hardly less able as a political philosopher and an immeasurably greater humourist, his writings were and are extraordinarily effec- tive. Poor Mr. Perceval is the butt of the letters, and never was butt more mercilessly handled :-
" You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present Prime Minister. Grant you all that you write—I say, I fear he will ruin Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true interest of his country : and then you tell me, he is faithful to Mrs. Perceval, and kind to the Master Percervals ! These are, undoubtedly, the first qualifications to be looked to in a time of the most serious public danger ; but somehow or another (if public and private virtues must always be incompatible), I should prefer that he destroyed the domestic happiness of Wood or Cockell, owed for the veal of the preceding year, whipped his boys, and saved his country. The late administration did not do right ; they did not build their measures upon the solid basis of facts. They should have caused several Catholics to have been dissected after death by surgeons of either religion ; and the re- port to have been published with accompanying plates. If the viscera, and other organs of life, had been found to be the same as in Protestant bodies ; if the provisions of nerves, arteries, cere- brum, and cerebellum, had been the same as we are provided with, or as the Dissenters are now known to possess; then, indeed, they might have met Mr. Perceval upon a proud eminence, and convinced the country at large of the strong probability that the Catholics are really human creatures, endowed with the feeling of men, and entitled to all their rights. But instead of this wise and prudent measure, Lord Howick, with his usual precipitation, brings forward a Bill in their favour, without offering the slightest proof to the country that they were anything more than horses and oxen. The person who shows the lama at the corner of Piccadilly has the precaution to write up—' Allowed by Sir Joseph Banks to be a real quadruped,' so his Lordship might have said—' Allowed by the bench of Bishops to be real human creatures.' "
Not less marvellously skilful in scorn is Sydney Smith when he explains that he attacks the Foreign Secretary—Mr. Canning—not because he hates him, or because he considers him specially wicked, "but from the love of utility, as a burgomaster hunts a rat in a Dutch dyke for fear it should
flood a province."
The last, but by no means the least, good of the Pamph- lets, is the "First Letter of Malachi Malagrowther." The letter is specially noticeable at the present time because of
its repeated allusions to Ireland. We are constantly told that we should never dare to treat Scotland as we treat and have treated Ireland, and that it is only because the poor people across St. George's Channel are so cowed and dispirited that we have ventured to misuse them for so many centuries. Sir Walter
Scott—the author of the "Malachi Malagrowther Letters"—
tells a very different story. In urging his countrymen to resist the withdrawal from the Scotch Banks of the right to issue one-pound notes, he constantly reproaches them with their sub- missiveness and lack of vigour when compared with the Irish " They would never have dared to treat the Irish thus," is a thought embroidered into the very texture of the pamphlet. " This gratification of his humours is gained by Pat's being up with the pike and shillelagh on any or no occasion." Indeed, this sacrificing of Scotland is carried so far that she is made " the whipping-boy " of the United Kingdom. " That is to say, if our• superiors of England and Ireland eat sour grapes, the Scottish teeth must be set on edge as well as their own." It must not be supposed, however, that Scott was any- thing but a good Unionist. Angry as he was, he most clearly and specifically declares that it would be better for Scotland to endure all her grievances " than remedy ourselves by even hinting the possibility of a rupture." The whole passage is worth quoting, and may fitly close our notice of this very in- teresting book. Would to Heaven the Irish could learn to cultivate the "national spirit" which Scott tried to evoke, instead of the hateful spirit of Parliamentary particularism which they now exhibit. No Unionist desires to see them give up their pride and sentiment of race, if only they will remember that even " hinting the possibility of a rupture " is the most grievous of crimes against the State :-
" We do not want to hear her [Scotland] prate of her number of millions of men, and her old military exploits. We had better remain in union with England, even at the risk of becoming a subordinate species of Northumberland, as far as national conse- quence is concerned, than remedy ourselves by even hinting the possibility of a rupture. But there is no harm in wishing Scot- land to have just so much ill-nature, according to her own proverb, as may keep her good-nature from being abused ; so much national spirit as may determine her to stand by her own rights, con- ducting her assertion of them with every feeling of respect and amity toward England."
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