March 20. 1831
Government — Earl Grey
Government is not founded on property, taken merely as such, in the abstract; it is founded on unequal property; the inequality is an essential term in the position. The phrases—higher, middle, and lower classes, with reference to this point of representation—are delusive; no such divisions as classes actually exist in society. There is an indissoluble blending and interfusion of persons from top to bottom; and no man can trace a line of separation through them, except such a confessedly unmeaning and unjustifiable line of political empiricism as 10_l_. householders. I cannot discover a ray of principle in the government plan, —not a hint of the effect of the change upon the balance of the estates of the realm,—not a remark on the nature of the constitution of England, and the character of the property of so many millions of its inhabitants. Half the wealth of this country is purely artificial,—existing only in and on the credit given to it by the integrity and honesty of the nation. This property appears, in many instances, a heavy burthen to the numerical majority of the people, and they believe that it causes all their distress: and they are now to have the maintenance of this property committed to their good faith—the lamb to the wolves!
Necker, you remember, asked the people to come and help him against the aristocracy. The people came fast enough at his bidding; but, somehow or other, they would not go away again when they had done their work. I hope Lord Grey will not see himself or his friends in the woeful case of the conjuror, who, with infinite zeal and pains, called up the devils to do something for him. They came at the word, thronging about him, grinning, and howling, and dancing, and whisking their long tails in diabolic glee; but when they asked him what he wanted of them, the poor wretch, frightened out his of wits, could only stammer forth,—“I pray you, my friends, be gone down again!” At which the devils, with one voice, replied,—
“Yes! yes! we’ll go down! we’ll go down!—
But we’ll take you with us to swim or to drown!”1
June 25. 1831.
Government — Popular Representation
The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are,—1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to acquirers; and; 3. Hope to all.
A nation is the unity of a people. King and parliament are the unity made visible. The king and the peers are as integral portions of this manifested unity as the commons.1
In that imperfect state of society in which our system of representation began, the interests of the country were pretty exactly commensurate with its municipal divisions. The counties, the towns, and the seaports, accurately enough represented the only interests then existing; that is say,—the landed, the shop-keeping or manufacturing, and the mercantile. But for a century past, at least, this division has become notoriously imperfect, some of the most vital interests of the empire being now totally unconnected with any English localities. Yet now, when the evil and the want are known, we are to abandon the accommodations which the necessity of the case had worked out for itself, and begin again with a rigidly territorial plan of representation! The miserable tendency of all is to destroy our nationality, which consists, in a principal degree, in our representative government, and to convert it into a degrading delegation of the populace. There is no unity for a people but in a representation of national interests; a delegation from the passions or wishes of the individuals themselves is a rope of sand. Undoubtedly it is a great evil, that there should be such an evident discrepancy between the law and the practice of the constitution in the matter of the representation. Such a direct, yet clandestine, contravention of solemn resolutions and established laws is immoral, and greatly injurious to the cause of legal loyalty and general subordination in the minds of the people. But then a statesman should consider that these very contraventions of law in practice point out to him the places in the body politic which need a remodelling of the law. You acknowledge a certain necessity for indirect representation in the present day, and that such representation has been instinctively obtained by means contrary to law; why then do you not approximate the useless law to the useful practice, instead of abandoning both law and practice for a completely new system of your own?
The malignant duplicity and unprincipled tergiversations of the specific Whig newspapers are to me detestable. I prefer the open endeavours of those publications which seek to destroy the church, and introduce a republic in effect: there is a sort of honesty in that which I approve, though I would with joy lay down my life to save my country from the consummation which is so evidently desired by that section of the periodical press.
Notes
1 Mr. Coleridge must have been thinking of that “very pithy and profitable” ballad by the Laureate, wherein is shown how a young man “would read unlawful books, and how he was punished:”—
“The young man, he began to read
He knew not what, but he would proceed,
When there was heard a sound at the door,
Which as he read on grew more and more.
“And more and more the knocking grew,
The young man knew not what to do:
But trembling in fear he sat within,
Till the door was broke, and the devil came in.
“‘What would’st thou with me?’ the wicked one cried;
But not a word the young man replied;
Every hair on his head was standing upright,
And his limbs like a palsy shook with affright.
“‘What would’st thou with me?’ cried the author of ill;
But the wretched young man was silent still,” &c.
The catastrophe is very terrible, and the moral, though addressed by the poet to young men only, is quite as applicable to old men, as the times show.
“Henceforth let all young men take heed
How in a conjuror’s books they read!”
Southey’s Minor Poems, vol. iii. p. 92.—ED.
1
Mr. Coleridge was very fond of quoting George Withers’s fine lines:—
“Let not your king and parliament in one,
Much less apart, mistake themselves for that
Which is most worthy to be thought upon:
Nor think they are, essentially, The STATE.
Let them not fancy that th’ authority
And privileges upon them bestown,
Conferr’d are to set up a majesty,
A power, or a glory, of their own!
But let them know, ’t was for a deeper life,
Which they but represent—
That there’s on earth a yet auguster thing,
Veil’d though it be, than parliament and king!”—ED.