XXIX. TO JOHN WARD, ESQ. Rugby, April 27, 1831. Your own articles I have carefully read over; and, in style, they more than answer all my expectations. Still, as we are beginning a work which must take its character chiefly from us two, I will fairly say that, considering for whom we are principally writing, I think the spirit too polemical. When I speak of the aristocracy of England bearing hard upon the poor, I always mean the whole class of gentlemen, and not the nobility or great landed and commercial proprietors. I cannot think that you or I suffer from any aristocracy above us, but we ourselves belong to a part of society which has not done its duty to the poor, although, with no intention to the contrary, but much the reverse. Again, I regard the Ministerial Reform Bill as a safe and a necessary measure, and I should, above all things, dread its rejection, but I cannot be so sanguine as you are about its good effects; because I think that the people are quite as likely to choose men who will commit blunders and injustice as the boroughmongers are, though not exactly of the same sort. Above all, in writing to the lower people, my object is much more to improve them morally than politically; and I would, therefore, carefully avoid exciting political violence in them. Now so far as the Register is concerned, I care comparatively little about the Reform Bill, but I should wish to explain, as you have done most excellently, the baseness of corruption on one hand, and as I think you might do, the mischief of party and popular excitement on the other. I should urge the duty of trying to learn the merits of the case, and that an ignorant vote is little better than a corrupt one, where the ignorance could in any degree be helped. But in such an address I would not assume that the Reform Bill would do all sorts of good, and that every honest man must be in favour of it: because such assertions, addressed to ignorant men, are doing the very thing I deprecate, i. e. trying rather to get their vote, than to make that vote, whether it be given for us or against us, really independent and respectable. Again, with the debt. It is surely a matter of importance to show that the greatest part of our burthens is owing to this, and not to present extravagance. It affords a memorable lesson against foolish and unjust wars, and the selfish carelessness with which they were waged. This you have put very well,' and have properly put down the nonsense of the "Debt being no harm." Urge all this as strongly as you will, to prevent any repetition of the loan system for the time to come. But the fundholders are not to blame for the Debt; they lent their money; and if the money was wasted, that was no fault of theirs. Pay the debt off, if you will and can, or make a fair adjustment of the advantages and disadvantages of different sorts of property, with a view of putting them all on equal terms; but surely the fundholder's dividends are as much his lawful property as a landholder's estate, or a merchant's or manufacturer's capital, liable justly, like all other property, to the claims of severe national distress; but only together with other property, and by no means as if it were more just in the nation to lay hands on the fundholder's dividends than on the profits of your law or of my school. Nor can the fundholders be fairly said to be living in idleness at the expense of the nation in any invidious sense, any more than your clients who borrowed my money could say it of me, if they had borrowed £10,000 of me instead of £300, and then choose to go and fool it away in fireworks and illuminations. If they had spent the principal no doubt they would find it a nuisance to pay the interest, but still, am I to be the loser, or can I fairly be said, if I get my interest duly paid, to be living at their On this he felt at all times strongly. "Woe be to that generation," he would say, "that is living in England when the coal-mines are exhausted and the National Debt not paid off." 185 expense? Besides, as a mere matter of policy, we should be ejected at once from most of the quarters where we might otherwise circulate, if we are thought to countenance in any degree the notion of a "sponge." The "tea monopoly," as you call it, involves the whole question of the Indian charter, and in fact of the Indian empire. The "timber monopoly " involves far more questions than I can answer, about Canada, and the shipping interest, and whether the economical principle of buying where you can buy cheapest, is always to be acted upon by a nation, merely because it is economically expedient. Even about the Corn Laws, there are difficulties connected with the question that are not to be despised, and I would rather not cut the knot so abruptly. . . . . . I wish to distinguish the Register from all other papers by two things: that politics should hold in it just that place which they should do in a well-regulated mind; that is, as one field of duty, but by no means the most important one; and that with respect to this field, our duty should rather be to soothe than to excite, rather to furnish facts, and to point out the difficulties of political questions, than to press forward our own conclusions. There are publications enough to excite the people to political reform; my object is moral and intellectual reform, which will be sure enough to work out political reform in the best way, and my writing on politics would have for its end, not the forwarding any political measure, but the so purifying, enlightening, sobering, and, in one word, Christianizing men's notions and feelings on political matters, that from the improved tree may come hereafter a better fruit. With any lower views, or for the sake of furthering any political measures, or advocating a political party, I should think it wrong to engage in the Register at all, and certainly would not risk my money in the attempt to set it afloat. XXX. TO HIS SISTER SUSANNAH ARNOLD. Rugby, April, 1831. I should like you to see -'s letter to me about the Register; the letter of a really good man and a thinking one, and a really liberal one. I wrote to him to thank him, and got the kindest of answers in return, in which he concludes by saying that he cannot help taking in the Register after all when it does make its appearance. Those are the men whom I would do every thing in my power to conciliate, because I honour and esteem them; but for the common Church and King Tories, I never would go one hair's breadth to please them; for their notions, principles they are not, require at all times and at all places to be denounced as founded on ignorance and selfishness, and as having been invariably opposed to truth and goodness from the days of the Jewish aristocracy downwards. It is therefore nothing but what I should most wish, that such opinions and mine should be diametrically opposite. much confidence any great benefits to result from the Reform Bill; but the Not that I anticipate with truth is, that we are arrived at one of those periods in the progress of society when the constitution naturally undergoes a change, just as it did two centuries ago. It was impossible then for the king to keep down the higher part of the middle classes; it is impossible now to keep down the middle and lower parts of them. All that resistance to these natural changes can effect is to derange their operation, and make them act violently and mischievously, instead of healthfully or at least harmlessly. The old state of things has gone past recall, and all the efforts of all the Tories cannot save it, but they may by their folly, as they did in France, get us a wild democracy, or a military despotism in the room of it, instead of letting it change 1 The proposal alluded to was the taxation of the funds distinctly from other property as in the plan proposed by Lord Althorp's first budget, quietly into what is merely a new modification of the old state. One would think that people who talk against change were literally as well as metaphorically blind, and really did not see that every thing in themselves and around them is changing every hour by the necessary laws of its being. XXXI. TO W. W. HULL, ESQ. Rugby, May 2, 1831. Every selfish motive would deter me from the Register"; it will be a pecuniary loss, it will bring me no credit, but much trouble and probably some abuse, and some of my dearest friends look on it not only coldly, but with aversion. But I do think it a most solemn duty to make the attempt. I feel our weakness, and that what I can hope to do is very little, and perhaps will be nothing; but if I can but excite others to follow the same plan, I shall rejoice to be superseded by them if they will do the thing more effectually. I have this morning been over to Coventry to make the required affidavit of Proprietorship, and to sign the bond for the payment of the advertisement duty. And No. 1 will really appear on Saturday with an opening Article of mine, and a religious one. The difficulty of the undertaking is indeed most serious; all the Tories turn from me as a Liberal, whilst the strong Reformers think me timid and half corrupt, because I will not go "Examiner "" or "Ballot." along with them or turn the Register into a new So that I dare say my fate will be that of rà μéoa τāv noмtāv from the days of Thucydides downwards. I wrote to Parker immediately on the receipt of your letter, proposing to him either to give up [Thucydides] altogether except the Appendices, putting all my materials of every sort into his hands freely to dispose of, or else to share with him all the expenses of the next volume, and to refund at once what I have already received for the first. I have told him often before, and now have told him again, that I cannot do it quickly; and that I never meant or would consent to devote to it every spare moment of my time, so as to leave myself no liberty for any other writing. I have written nothing for two years but Thucydides and Sermons for the boys; but though I will readily give up writing merely for my own amusement, or fame, or profit, I cannot abandon what I think is a positive duty, such as the attempting at least the Register. Parker wrote immediately a very kind letter, begging me to continue the Editorship as at present, and stating in express words "that though advantage might arise from the early completion of the book, no injury whatever has been sustained by him, or is likely to be sustained." I am proprietor of the Register, and will be answerable for it up to a certain point; but I cannot pretend to say that I shall see every thing that is inserted in it, or that I should expunge every thing with which I did not agree, although I certainly should, if the disagreement were great, or the opinions so differing seemed to me likely to be mischievous. I have no wish to conccal any thing about it, and if I cannot control it to my mind, or find the thing to be a failure, I will instantly withdraw it. Sed Dii meliora piis. XXXII. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. Rugby, June 11, 1831. I confess that your last letter a good deal grieved me, not at all personally, but as it seemed to me to give the death blow to my hopes of finding cooperators for the Register. That very article upon the Tories has been objected to as being too favourable to them, so what is a man to do? You will see by No. 5, that I do not think the Bill perfect, but still I like it as far as it goes, and especially in its disfranchisement clauses. But my great ob ject in the Register was to enlighten the poor generally in the best sense of the term; as it is, no one joins me, and of course my nephew and I cannot do it alone." What is everybody's business is nobody's," is true from the days of the Peloponnesian confederacy downwards. Unless a great change in our prospects takes place, Register will therefore undergo transmigration when the holidays begin; whether into a set of penny papers, or into a monthly magazine I cannot tell. But I cannot sit still without trying to do something for a state of things which often and often, far oftener I believe than any one knows of, comes with a real pang of sorrow to trouble my own private happiness. I know it is good to have these sobering reminders, and it may be my impatience, that I do not take them merely as awakeners and reminders to myself. Still ought we not to fight against evil, and is not moral ignorance, such as now so sadly prevails, one of the worst kinds of evil? 1 XXXIII. TO W. TOOKE, ESQ. Rugby, June 18, 1831. I must take the earliest opportunity of thanking you most heartily for your active kindness towards me, to which I am indebted for the most gratifying offer announced to me in your letter of yesterday. I feel doubly obliged to you both for your good opinion of me, and for your kind recollection of me. I trust that you will not think me the less grateful to you, because I felt that I ought not to avail myself of the Chancellor's offer. Engaged as I am here, I could not reside upon a living, and I would not be satisfied to hold one without residence. I have always strenuously maintained that the elergy engaged in education should have nothing to do with church benefices, and I should be very unwilling to let my own practice contradict what I really believe to be a very wholesome doctrine. But I am sure that I value the offer quite as much, and feel as heartily obliged both to the Chancellor and you for it, as if I had accepted it. In this day's number of the Register there is a letter on the "Cottage Evenings," condemning very decidedly their unchristian tone. It is not written by me, but I confess that I heartily agree with it. You know of old how earnestly I have wished to join your Useful Knowledge Society; and how heartily on many points I sympathize with them. This very work, the "Cottage Evenings," might be made every thing that I wish, if it were but decidedly Christian. I delight in its plain and sensible tone, and it might be made the channel of all sorts of information, useful and entertaining; but, as it is, so far from co-operating with it, I must feel utterly adverse to it. To enter into the deeper matters of conduct and principle, to talk of our main hopes and fears, and yet not to speak of Christ, is absolutely, to my mind, to circulate poison. In such points as this, "He that is not with us is against us." It has occurred to me that the circumstance of some of the principal members of the Useful Knowledge Society being now in the government, is in itself a strong reason why the Society should take a more decided tone on matters of religion. Undoubtedly their support of that Society, as it now stands, is a matter of deep grief and disapprobation to a large proportion of the best men in this kingdom, while it encourages the hopes of some of the very worst. And it would be, I do. verily think, one of the greatest possible public blessings, if, as they are honest, fearless, and enlightened against political corruption, and, as I hope they will prove, against ecclesiastical abuses also, so they would be no less honest and fearless and truly wise in labouring to Christianize the people, in spite of the sneers and 1 Viz., of a stall in Bristol Cathedral, with a living attached to it-offered to him by Lord Brougham. opposition of those who understand full well that, if men do not worship God, they at once by that very omission worship most surely the power of evil. You will smile at my earnestness or simplicity; but it does strongly excite me to see so great an engine as your Society, and one whose efforts I would so gladly co-operate with, and which could effect so easily what I alone am vainly struggling at, to see this engine at the very least neutralizing its power of doing good, and, I fear, doing in some respects absolute evil. On the other side, the Tories would not have my assistance in religious matters, because they so disapprove of my politics; and in the mean time the people, in this hour of their utmost need, get either the cold deism of the Cottage Evenings, or the folly of the Cottager's Monthly Visitor. Would the Committee accept my assistance for those "Cottage Evenings?" I would give a larger sum than I should be thought sane to mention, if I might but once see this great point effected. 2 XXXIV. TO MRS. FLETCHER. (After the death of her Son.) Rugby, August, 1831. I know that you are rich in friends, and it seems like presumption in me to say it; but I entreat you earnestly to remember that Mary and myself regard you and yours with such cordial respect and affection, that it would give us real pleasure, if either now or hereafter we can be of any use whatever in any arrangements to be made for your grandchildren. I feel that it would be a delight to me to be of any service to fatherless children, contemplating, as I often do, the possibility of myself or their dear mother being taken away from our own little ones. And I feel it the more, because I confess that I think evil days are threatening, insomuch that, whenever I hear of the death of any one that is dear to me, there mixes with my sense of my own loss a sort of joy that he is safe from the evil to come. Still more strong is my desire that all Christ's servants who are left should draw nearer every day to him, and to one another, in every feeling and every work of love. XXXV. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS. Skipton, July 11, 1831. The Register is now dead, to revive however in another shape; but I could not afford at once to pay all, and to write all, and my nephew's own business hindered him from attending to it sufficiently, and it thus devolved on the mere publisher, who put in things of which I utterly disapproved. But the thing has excited attention in some quarters, just as I wished; all the articles on the labourers were copied at length into one of the Sheffield papers, and, when the Register died, the Sheffield proprietor wrote up to our editor, wishing to engage the writer of those articles to con "There is something to me almost awful," he used to say, speaking of Lord Byron's Cain," in meeting suddenly in the works of such a man, so great and solemn a truth as is expressed in that speech of Lucifer, He who bows not to God hath bowed to me." From a later letter to the same." I cannot tell you how much I was delighted by the conclusion of the article on Mirabeau, in the Penny Magazine of May 12. The article is a specimen of what I wished to see, but done far better than I could do it. I never wanted articles on religious subjects half so much as articles on common subjects written with a decidedly Christian tone. History and Biography are far better vehicles of good, I think, than any direct comments on Scripture, or essays on Evidences." |