peace of Amiens, yet it was not till the Spanish insurrection that Englishmen of all parties recurred, in toto, to the old English principles, and spoke of their Hampdens, Sidneys, and Miltons with the old enthusiasm. During the last war, an acquaintance of mine-least of all men a political zealot-had named a vessel which he had just built-The Liberty; and was seriously admonished by his aristocratic friends to change it for some other name. What? replied the owner very innocently—should I call it The Freedom? That (it was replied) would be far better, as people might then think only of freedom of trade; whereas Liberty had a jacobinical sound with it! Alas! (and this is an observation of Denham and of Burke) is there then no medium between an ague-fit and a frenzy-fever?

I have said that to withstand the arguments of the lawless, the anti-Jacobins proposed to suspend the law, and by the interposition of a particular statute to eclipse the blessed light of the universal sun, that spies and informers might tyrannize and escape in the ominous darkness. Oh! if these mistaken men, intoxicated with alarm and bewildered by that panic of property, which they themselves were the chief agents in exciting, had ever lived in a country where there was indeed a general disposition to change and rebellion! Had they ever travelled through Sicily, or through France at the first coming on of the revolution, or even, alas! through too many of the provinces of a sister-land, they could not but have shrunk from their own declarations concerning the state of feeling and opinion at that time predominant throughout Great Britain. There was a time-Heaven grant that that time may have passed by !-when by crossing a narrow strait they might have learned the true symptoms of approaching danger, and have secured themselves from mistaking the meetings and idle rant of such sedition as shrank appalled from the sight of a constable, for the dire murmuring and strange consternation which precedes the storm or earthquake of national discord. Not only in coffee-houses and public theatres, but even at the tables of the wealthy, they would have heard the advocates of existing government defend their cause in the language and with the tone of men, who are conscious that they are in a minority. But in England, when the alarm was at the highest, there was not a city, no, not a town, in which a man suspected of holding democratic principles could move abroad without re

ceiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred in which his supposed opinions were held by the great majority of the people : and the only instances of popular excess and indignation, were on the side of the government and the established church. But why need I appeal to these invidious facts? Turn over the pages of history, and seek for a single instance of a revolution having been effected without the concurrence of either the nobles, or the ecclesiastics, or the moneyed classes, in any country in which the influences of property had ever been predominant, and where the interests of the proprietors were interlinked! Examine the revolution of the Belgic provinces under Philip II.; the civil wars of France in the preceding generation, the history of the American revolution, or the yet more recent events in Sweden and in Spain; and it will be scarcely possible not to perceive, that in England, from 1791 to the peace of Amiens, there were neither tendencies to confederacy nor actual confederacies, against which the existing laws had not provided both sufficient safeguards and an ample punishment. But alas! the panic of property had been struck in the first instance for party purposes; and when it became general, its propagators caught it themselves, and ended in believing their own lie;-even as the bulls in Borodale are said sometimes to run mad with the echo of their own bellowing. The consequences were most injurious. Our attention was concentred on a monster which could not survive the convulsions in which it had been brought forth,—even the enlightened Burke himself too often talking and reasoning as if a perpetual and organized anarchy had been a possible thing! Thus while we were warring against French doctrines, we took little heed whether the means by which we attempted to overthrow them were not likely to aid and augment the far more formidable evil of French ambition. Like children, we ran away from the yelping of a cur, and took shelter at the heels of a vicious war-horse.

The conduct of the aristocratic party was equally unwise in private life and to individuals, especially to the young and inexperienced, who were surely to be forgiven for having had their imagination dazzled, and their enthusiasm kindled, by a novelty so specious, that even an old and tried statesman, Mr. Fox, had pronounced it a stupendous monument of human wisdom and human happiness. This was indeed a gross delusion, but assuredly for young men at least, a very venial one. To hope too boldly

of human nature is a fault which all good men have an interest in forgiving. Nor was it less removable than venial, if the party had taken the only way by which the error could be, or even ought to have been removed. Having first sympathized with the warm benevolence and the enthusiasm for liberty, which had consecrated it, they should have then shown the young enthusiasts that liberty was not the only blessing of society; that, though desirable, even for its own sake, it yet derived its main value as the means of calling forth and securing other advantages and excellences, the activities of industry, the security of life and property, the peaceful energies of genius and manifold talent, the development of the moral virtues, and the independence and dignity of the nation in its relations to foreign powers: and that neither these nor liberty itself could subsist in a country so various in its soils, so long inhabited, and so fully peopled as Great Britain, without difference of ranks and without laws which recognized and protected the privileges of each. But instead of thus winning them back from the snare, they too often drove them into it by angry contumelies, which being in contradiction with each other could only excite contempt for those that uttered them. To prove the folly of the opinions, they were represented as the crude fancies of unfledged wit and school-boy statesmen; but when abhorrence was to be expressed, the self-same unfledged school-boys were invested with all the attributes of brooding conspiracy and hoary-headed treason. Nay, à sentence of absolute reprobation was passed on them; and the speculative error of Jacobinism was equalized to the mysterious sin in Scripture, which in some inexplicable manner excludes not only mercy but even repentance. It became the watch-word of the party, once a Jacobin always a Jacobin. And wherefore ?* I will suppose this question asked by an individual, who in his youth or earliest manhood had been enamored of a system, which for him had combined at once the austere beauty of science with all the light and colors of imagination, and with all the warmth of wide religious charity, and who, overlooking its ideal essence, had dreamed of actually building a government on personal and natural rights

* The passage which follows was first published in the Morning Post, in the year 1800, and contained, if I mistake not, the first philosophical appropriation of a precise import to the word Jacobin, as distinct from republican, democrat, and demagogue. [The article appeared Oct. 21, 1802. S. C.]

alone. And wherefore? Is Jacobinism an absurdity, and have we no understanding by which to detect it? Is it productive of all misery and all horrors, and have we no natural humanity to make us turn away with indignation and loathing from it? Uproar and confusion, insecurity of person and of property, the tyranny of mobs or the domination of a soldiery; private houses changed to brothels, the ceremony of marriage but an initiation to harlotry, and marriage itself degraded to mere concubinagethese, the wiser advocates of aristocracy have said, and truly said, are the effects of Jacobinism! In private life, an insufferable licentiousness, and abroad an intolerable despotism. Once a Jacobin, always a Jacobin-O wherefore? Is it because the creed which we have stated is dazzling at first sight to the young, the innocent, the disinterested, and to those, who judging of men in general from their own uncorrupted hearts, judge erroneously, and expect unwisely? Is it, because it deceives the mind in its purest and most flexible period? Is it, because it is. an error, that every day's experience aids to detect? An error against which all history is full of warning examples? Or is it because the experiment has been tried before our eyes and the error made palpable?

From what source are we to derive this strange phænomenon, that the young and the enthusiastic, who, as our daily experience informs us, are deceived in their religious antipathies, and grow wiser; in their friendships, and grow wiser; in their modes of pleasure, and grow wiser; should, if once deceived in a question of abstract politics, cling to the error forever and ever? And this too, although in addition to the natural growth of judgment and information with increase of years, they live in the age in which the tenets have been acted upon; and though the consequences have been such, that every good man's heart sickens, and his head turns giddy at the retrospect.

ESSAY VI.

Truth I pursued, as fancy sketched the way,
And wiser men than I went worse astray.

I was never myself, at any period of my life, a convert to the Jacobinical system.* From my earliest manhood, it was an axiom in politics with me, that in every country where property prevailed, property must be the grand basis of the government; and that that government was the best, in which the power or political influence of the individual was in proportion to his property, provided that the free circulation of property was not impeded by any positive laws or customs, nor the tendency of wealth to accumulate in abiding masses unduly encouraged. I perceived, that if the people at large were neither ignorant nor immoral, there could be no motive for a sudden and violent change of government; and if they were, there could be no hope but of a change for the worse. The temple of despotism, like that of the Mexican God, would be rebuilt with human skulls, and more firmly, though in a different style of architecture.† Thanks to the excellent education which I had received, my reason was too clear not to draw this circle of power round me, and my spirit too honest to attempt to break through it. My feelings, however, and imagination did not remain unkindled in this general conflagration; and I confess I should be more inclined to be ashamed than proud of myself, if they had. I was a sharer in the general vortex, though my little world described the path of its revolution in an orbit of its own. What I dared not expect from constitutions of government and whole nations, I hoped from religion and a small company of chosen individuals. I formed a plan, as harmless as it was extravagant, of trying the experiment of human

* See Essay XVI. of this volume.--Ed.

To the best of my recollection, these were Mr. Southey's words in the year 1794.