第89章

However corrupt he may be, however steeped in the habits of vice, and hardened in the practices of tyranny, if it be mildly, distinctly, emphatically enunciated, the colour will forsake his cheek, his speech will alter and be broken, and he will feel himself unable to turn it off lightly, as a thing of no impression and validity. In this way the erroneous man, the man nursed in the house of luxury, a stranger to the genuine, unvarnished state of things, stands a fair chance of being corrected.

But, if an opposite, and a truer way of thinking than that to which he is accustomed, is only brought to his observation by the reserve of him who entertains it, and who, while he entertains it, is reluctant to hold communion with his wealthier neighbour, who regards him as his adversary, and hardly admits him to be of the same common nature, there will be no general improvement.

Under this discipline the two ranks of society will be perpetually more estranged, view each other with eye askance, and will be as two separate and hostile states, though inhabiting the same territory. Is this the picture we desire to see of genuine liberty, philanthropic, desirous of good to all, and overflowing with all generous emotions?

I hate where vice can bolt her arguments, And virtue has no tongue to check her pride.

The man who interests himself for his country and its cause, who acts bravely and independently, and knows that he runs some risk in doing so, must have a strange opinion of the sacredness of truth, if the very consciousness of having done nobly does not supply him with courage, and give him that simple, unostentatious firmness, which shall carry immediate conviction to the heart.

It is a bitter lesson that the institution of ballot teaches, while it says, "You have done well; therefore be silent; whisper it not to the winds; disclose it not to those who are most nearly allied to you; adopt the same conduct which would suggest itself to you, if you had perpetrated an atrocious crime."

In no long time after the commencement of the war of the allies against France, certain acts were introduced into the English parliament, declaring it penal by word or writing to utter any thing that should tend to bring the government into contempt; and these acts, by the mass of the adversaries of despotic power, were in way of contempt called the Gagging Acts. Little did I and my contemporaries of 1795 imagine, when we protested against these acts in the triumphant reign of William Pitt, that the soi-disant friends of liberty and radical reformers, when their turn of triumph came, would propose their Gagging Acts, recommending to the people to vote agreeably to their consciences, but forbidding them to give publicity to the honourable conduct they had been prevailed on to adopt!

But all this reasoning is founded in an erroneous, and groundlessly degrading, opinion of human nature. The improvement of the general institutions of society, the correction of the gross inequalities of our representation, will operate towards the improvement of all the members of the community. While ninety-nine in an hundred of the inhabitants of England are carried forward in the scale of intellect and virtue, it would be absurd to suppose that the hundredth man will stand still, merely because he is rich. Patriotism is a liberal and a social impulse; its influence is irresistible; it is contagious, and is propagated by the touch; it is infectious, and mixes itself with the air that we breathe.