William Hazlitt

“ At this rate, the worse the Government, the more firmly it ought to be rooted: the greater the abuse of confidence, the more blind and unlimited the confidence ought to be: and any administration need only bring a nation to the brink of ruin, in order to have a right to plunge it into the depths of slavery. It is easy to keep the peace with the sword;—more flattering to the pride of power to crush resistance to oppression, than to remove the causes of it. To reduce a people to the alternative of rebellion or of arbitrary sway, does not require the talents of a great statesman. ”

“ We are all of us more or less the slaves of opinion. There is no one, however mean or insignificant, whose approbation is altogether indifferent to us; whose flattery does not please, whose contempt does not mortify us. There is an atmosphere of this sort always about us, from which we can no more withdraw ourselves than from the air we breathe. But the air of a Court is the concentrated essence of the opinion of the world. The atmosphere there is mephitic. It is subtle poison, the least exhalation of which taints the vitals of its victims. ”

“ Legitimacy answers every object of their meanness and malice—omne tulit punctum.—This mock-doctrine, this little Hunchback, which our resurrection-men, the Humane Society of Divine Right, have foisted on the altar of Liberty, is not only a phantom of the imagination, but a contradiction in terms; it is a prejudice, but an exploded prejudice; it is an imposture, that imposes on nobody; it is powerful only in impotence, safe in absurdity, courted from fear and hatred, a dead prejudice linked to the living mind; the sink of honour, the grave of liberty, a palsy in the heart of a nation ”

“ The French, under the old regime, made the glory of their Grand Monarque a set-off against rags and hunger, equally satisfied with shows or bread; and the poor Spaniard, delivered from temporary to permanent oppression, looks up once more with pious awe, to the time-hallowed towers of the Holy Inquisition. As the herd of mankind are stripped of every thing, in body and mind, so are they thankful for what is left; as is the desolation of their hearts and the wreck of their little all, so is the pomp and pride which is built upon their ruin, and their fawning admiration of it. ”

“ Without the common feelings of humanity in their own breasts, they have no regard for them in their aggregate amount and accumulating force. Reigning in contempt of the people, they would crush and trample upon all power but their own. They consider the claims of justice and compassion as so many impertinent interferences with the royal prerogative. They despise the millions of slaves whom they see linked to the foot of the throne; and they soon hate what they despise. They will sacrifice a kingdom for a caprice, and mankind for a bauble. ”

“ However, there is a sort of gallantry in eloquence as well as in love. To coquet with the muses, to dally with the fair forms of speech, to be full of nothing but apostrophes, interjections, interrogations, to be in raptures at the sight of a capital letter, and to take care never to lose a fine thought any more than a fine girl, for fear of putting a question, are the only means by which a man without imagination can hope to be an orator; as it is only by being a coxcomb, that a man who is not handsome can ever think of pleasing the women! ”

“ It is the principle of this set of men to cry ‘Long life to the conqueror,’ to feel a contempt for all obligations that are not founded in self-interest, and to consider all generous pursuits and the hope of unfading renown as romance and folly. ‘Virtue is not their habit, they are out of themselves in any course of conduct recommended only by conscience and glory.’ They would not give a hundred hogsheads of sugar or a half-year’s income for all the posthumous fame that was ever acquired in the world. ”

“ He who tells me this deprives me not only of the right, but of the very heart and will to be free, takes the breath out of the body of liberty, and leaves it a dead and helpless corse, destroys ‘at one fell swoop’ the dearest hopes, and blasts the fairest prospects of mankind through all ages and nations, sanctifies slavery, binds it as a spell on the understanding, and makes freedom a mockery, and the name a bye-word. The poor wretch immured in the dungeons of the Inquisition may breathe a sigh to liberty, may repeat its name, may think of it as a blessing, if not to himself, to others ”

“ His imagination first ran away with his understanding; and now, that he is getting old, his convenience, the influence of fashion, and the tide of opinion, rush in, and fill up all the void both of sense and imagination, driving him into the very vortex of court-sycophancy, the sinks and common sewers of corruption. Mr. Southey is not a man to hear reason at any time of his life. He thinks his change of opinion is owing to an increase of knowledge, because he has in fact no idea of any progress in intellect but exchanging one error for another. ”

“ But allow the people to be as gross and ignorant as you please, as base and stupid as you can make them or keep them, ‘duller than the fat weed that roots itself at ease on Lethe’s wharf,’—is nothing ever to rouse them? Grant that they are slow of apprehension—that they do not see till they feel. Is that a reason that they are not to feel then, neither? Would you blindfold them with the double bandages of bigotry, or quench their understandings with ‘the dim suffusion,’ ‘the drop serene,’ of Legitimacy, that ‘they may roll in vain and find no dawn’ of liberty, no ray of hope? ”

“ It was this that tickled his vanity more than his pension: it was this that raised his gratitude, that melted his obdurate pride, that opened the sluices of his heart to the poison of corruption, that exorcised the low, mechanic, vulgar, morose, sour principles of liberty clean out of him, left his mind ‘swept and garnished,’ parched and dry, fevered with revenge, bloated with adulation; and made him as shameless and abandoned in sacrificing every feeling of attachment or obligation to the people, as he had before been bold and prodigal in heaping insult and contumely upon the throne. ”

“ Shall we impiously renounce the goddess, because she has been personated by a strumpet? Reason is the queen of the moral world, 91the soul of the universe, the lamp of human life, the pillar of society, the foundation of law, the beacon of nations, the golden chain, let down from heaven, which links all animated and all intelligent natures in one common system—and in the vain strife between fanatic innovation, and fanatic prejudice we are exhorted to dethrone this queen of the world, to blot out this light of the mind, to deface this fair column, to break in pieces this golden chain! ”

“ They who get wealth and power from the people, who drive them like cattle to slaughter or to market, ‘and levy cruel wars, wasting the earth’; they who wallow in luxury, while the people are ‘steeped in poverty to the very lips,’ and bowed to the earth with unremitting labour, can have but little sympathy with those whose loss of liberty and property is their gain. What is it that the wealth of thousands is composed of? The tears, the sweat, and blood of millions. ”

“ Let no country go about to enslave another with impunity. For out of the very dregs of rottenness and debasement will arise a low creeping fog of servility, a stench of corruption to choak the life of liberty, wherever it comes—a race of fortune-hunting, dastard, busy, hungry, heartless slaves and blood-suckers, eager to fawn upon power and trample upon weakness, with no other pretensions than want of principle, and a hatred of those who possess what they want. Ireland has given us Castlereagh, Wellington, Burke. ”

“ The lacquey, mounted behind his master’s coach, looks down with contempt upon the mob, forgetting his own origin and his actual situation, and comparing them only with that standard of gentility which he has perpetually in his eye. The hireling of the press (a still meaner slave) wears his livery, and is proud of it. He measures the greatness of others by his own meanness; their lofty pretensions indemnify him for his servility; he magnifies the sacredness of their persons to cover the laxity of his own principles. He offers up his own humanity, and that of all men, at the shrine of royalty. ”

“ In common life we should think that a readiness to seize the first occasion of quarrel shewed a man to be either a bully or a coward; it would seem as if he was afraid that by deferring his resentment he should either want courage or opportunity for shewing it another time. Yet the great excuse for our going into the war was,—that by yielding any thing to the demands of the enemy, we should soon lose all power of resistance, and crouch in abject submission at his feet. This was not a proud confidence in ourselves, but a mean dread of our own pusillanimity and want of firmness. ”

“ Who is there in his senses that can withstand the gathering storm, or oppose himself to this torrent of opinion setting in upon him from the throne and absorbing by degrees every thing in its vortex—undermining every principle of independence, confounding every distinction of the understanding, and obliterating every trace of liberty? To argue against it, is like arguing against the motion of the world with which we are carried along: its influence is as powerful and as imperceptible. To question it, is folly; to resist it, madness. ”

“ He makes it his business neither to hoodwink his own understanding, nor to blind or gag others. He is a man of wit and fancy, but he does not sharpen his wit on the edge of human agony, like the House of Commons’ jester, nor strew the flowers of fancy, like the Jesuit Burke, over the carcase of corruption, for he is a man not only of wit and fancy, but of common sense and common humanity. He sees for himself, and he feels for others. ”

“ It is not a paper for a free people to endure, if a people that has oppressed the struggling liberties of another nation can dare to call itself free; or for the Sovereign of a free people to look at, if a Prince who had restored a despot to a throne, in contempt of the voice of the people, could be supposed to respect the rights of human nature more than his own power. ”

“ To love one’s country is to wish well to it; to prefer its interests to our own; to oppose every measure inconsistent with its welfare; and to be ready to sacrifice ease, health, and life itself in its defence. But there is a false kind of patriotism, loud and noisy, and ever ready to usurp that name from others, as an honourable covering either for selfish designs or blind zeal, to which I shall make no pretensions. It has been called patriotism, to flatter those in power at the expense of the people ”

“ Power is the grim idol that the world adore; that arms itself with destruction, and reigns by terror in the coward heart of man; that dazzles the senses, haunts the imagination, confounds the understanding, and tames the will, by the vastness of its pretensions, and the very hopelessness of resistance to them. Nay more, the more mischievous and extensive the tyranny—the longer it has lasted, and 174the longer it is likely to last—the stronger is the hold it takes of the minds of its victims, the devotion to it increasing with the dread. ”

“ Southey and the Quarterly Review? This modest gentleman and mild reformer, proposes to destroy at once the freedom of discussion, to prevent its ultimate loss; to make us free by first making us slaves; to put a gag in the mouths of the people instead of bread; to increase the comforts of the poor by laying on more taxes; to spread abroad the spirit of liberty and independence, by teaching the doctrines of Passive Obedience and Non-resistance; and to encourage the love of peace by crying up the benefits of war, and deprecating the loss of a war-establishment. ”

“ When we see a poor creature like Ferdinand VII., who can hardly gabble out his words like a human being, more imbecile than a woman, more hypocritical than a priest, decked and dandled in the long robes and swaddling-clothes of legitimacy, lullabied to rest with the dreams of superstition, drunk with the patriot blood of his country, and launching the thunders of his coward-arm against the rising liberties of a new world, while he claims the style and title of Image of the Divinity, we may laugh or weep, but there is nothing to wonder at. ”

“ Or if at any time the fainting resolution and exhausted strength of our adversaries seemed to promise us that repose which was so necessary to us, we saw the dying embers of war again eagerly rekindled by a country that, standing aloof from the contagion, shouted from her rocky shores to see the flames that consumed the vitals of Europe. The bitterest enmity that our early struggles in the cause of liberty had drawn down upon us was to be shewn by a people “that had long insulted the slavery of Europe, by the loudness of its boasts of freedom.” ”

“ He did not try to prove those truths which did not require any proof, but to make others feel them with the same force that he did; and to tear off the flimsy disguises with which the sycophants of power attempted to cover them.—The business of an orator is not to convince, but persuade; not to inform, but to rouse the mind; to build upon the habitual prejudices of mankind, (for reason of itself will do nothing,) and to add feeling to prejudice, and action to feeling. There is nothing new or curious or profound in Lord Chatham’s speeches. All is obvious and common ”