lightened 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 shewn 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 excellencies, the activities of industry, the security of life and property, the peaceful energies of genius and manifold talent, the developement 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, a 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 where

fore?* I will suppose this question asked by an individual, who in his youth or earliest manhood had been enamoured of a system, which for him had combined at once the austere beauty of science with all the light and colours 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 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 concubinage-these, 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 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 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 for ever 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 II.

Truth I pursued, as fancy sketch'd 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

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