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that after having been the leading man in the house of commons, he shall not be the first in their's.

In a word, the success of the favourite of the people was brilliant, and even formidable: but the constitution, in the very reward it prepares for him, makes him find a kind of ostracism. His advances were sudden, and his course rapid; he was, if you please, like a torrent ready to bear down every thing before it; but this torrent is compelled, by the general arrangement of things, finally to throw itself into a vast reservoir, where it mingles, and loses its force and direction.

I know it may be said, that in order to avoid the fatal step which is to deprive him of so many advantages, the favourite of the people ought to refuse the new dignity which is offered to him, and wait for more important successes from his eloquence in the house of commons, and his influence over the people.

But those who give him this counsel, have not sufficiently examined it. Without doubt there are men in England, who in their present pursuit of a project which they think essential to the public good, would be capable of refusing for a while a place which would deprive their virtue of opportunities of exerting itself, or might more or less endanger it. But woe to him who shall persist in such a refusal, with any pernicious design! and who, in a government where liberty is established on so solid and extensive a basis, should endeavour to make the people believe that their fate depends on the persevering virtue of a single citizen. His ambitious views being at last discovered (nor could it be long before they would be so,) his obstinate resolution to move out of the ordinary course of things, would indicate aims, on his part, of such an extraordinary nature, that all men whatever, who have any regard for their country, would instantly rise up from all parts to oppose him, and he must fall, overwhelmed with so much ridicule, that it would be better for him to fall from the Tarpeian rock.

The reader will perhaps object, that no man in England can possibly entertain such views as those I have supposed here: this is precisely what I intended to prove. The essential advantage of the English government above all those that have been called free, and which in many respects were but apparently so, is that no person in England can entertain so much as a thought of his

In fine, even though we were to suppose that the new lord might, after his exaltation, have preserved all his interest with the people, or, what would be no less difficult, that any lord whatever could, by dint of his wealth and high birth, rival the splendour of the crown itself, all these advantages, how great soever we may suppose them, as they would not of themselves be able to confer on him the least executive authority, must for ever remain mere showy unsubstantial advantages. Finding all the active powers in the state concentrated in that very seat of power which we suppose him inclined to attack, and there secured by the most formidable provisions, his influence must always evaporate in ineffectual words; and after having advanced himself, as we suppose, to the very foot of the throne, finding no branch of independent power which he might appropriate to himself, and thus at last give a reality to his political importance, he would soon see it, however great it might have at first appeared, decline and die away.

God forbid, however, that I should mean that the people of England are so fatally tied down to inaction, by the nature of their government, that they cannot, in times of oppression, find means of appointing a leader. No; I only meant to say that the laws of England open no door to those accumulations of power, which have been the ruin of so many republics; that they offer to the ambitious no possible means of taking advantage of the inadvertence, or even the gratitude, of the people, to make themselves their tyrants; and that the public power, of which the king has been made the executive depositary, must remain unshaken in his hands, so long as things continue to keep in their legal order; which, it may be observed, is a strong inducement to him constantly to endeavour to maintain them in it.f

ever rising to the level of the power charged with the execution of the laws. All men in the state, whatever may be their rank, wealth, or influence, are thoroughly convinced, that they shall in reality, as well as in name, continue to be subjects; and are thus really compelled to love, to defend, and to promote those laws which secure the liberty of the subject. This latter observation will be again introduced afterwards.

There are several events in the English history, which put in a very strong light this idea of the stability which the power of the crown gives to the state.

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CHAP. II.

THE SUBJECT CONCLUDED. THE EXECUTIVE POWER IS MORE EASILY CONFINED WHEN IT IS ONE.

ANOTHER great advantage, and which one would not at first expect, in this unity of the public power in England, in this union, and, if I may so express myself, in this coacervation, of all the branches of the execu tive authority, is the greater facility it affords of restraining it.

In those states where the execution of the laws is intrusted to several different hands, and to each with different titles and prerogatives, such division, and the changeableness of measures which must be the consequence of it, constantly hide the true cause of the evils of the state: in

The first is the facility with which the great duke of Marlborough, and his party at home, were removed from their several employments. Hannibal, in circumstances nearly similar, had continued the war against the will of the senate of Carthage: Cæsar had done the same in Gaul: and when at last he was expressly required to deliver up his commission, he marched his army to Rome, and established a military despotism. But the duke, though surrounded, as well as the above named generals, by a victorious army, and by allies in conjunction with whom he had carried on such a successful war, did not even hesitate to surrender his commission. He knew that all his soldiers were inseparably prepossessed in favour of that power against which he must have revolted he knew that the same prepossessious were deeply rooted in the minds of the whole nation, and that every thing among them concurred to support the same power: he knew that the very nature of the claims he must have set up, would instantly have made all his officers and captains turn themselves against him, and, in short, that in an enterprize of that nature, the arm of the sea he had to repass, was the smallest of the obstacles he would' have to encounter.

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The other event I shall mention here, is that of the revolution of 1689. If the long established power of the crown had not beforehand prevented the people from accustoming themselves to fix their eyes on some particular citizens, and in general had not prevented all men in the state from attaining any too considerable degree of power and greatness, the expulsion of James might have been followed by events similar to those which took place at Rome after the death of Cæsar.

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