begin, is," as Mr. Burke truly says, "faint, obscure, and not easily definable. It is not a single act, or a single event, which determines it. Governments must be abused and deranged, indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past. When things are in that lamentable condition, the nature of the disease is to indicate the remedy, to those whom nature has qualified to administer, in extremities, this critical, ambiguous, bitter potion, to a distempered state. Times, and occasions, and provocations, will teach their own lessons. The wise, will determine from the gravity of the case,-the irritable, from sensibility to oppression,-the high-minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands-the brave and bold, from the love of honourable danger in a generous cause; but, with or without right, a revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good."* A revolution, indeed, even in such circumstances, as this eloquent writer well says, should be, and will be, the last resource of the thinking and good. But, though it will be the last resource, it still is a resource-a resource in those miserable circumstances, in which times, and occasions, and provocations, teach their terrible lesson. When the rare imperious cases do occur, in which the patriotism that before made obedience a duty, allows it no more to him who feels that he has now another duty to perform;-when he sees, with sorrow, that a cause which is good in itself, will demand the use of means from which, with any other motives, he would have shrunk with abhorrence, he will lift his voice sadly, indeed, but still loudly-he will lift his arm with reluctance, but, when it is lifted, he will wield it with all the force which the thought of the happiness of the world, as perhaps dependent on it, can give to its original vigour ;-he has made that calculation in which his own happiness, and his own life, have scarcely been counted as elements. If he survive and prevail, therefore, though in anticipating the prosperity which he has in part produced, he may sometimes look back on the past with melancholy, he cannot look back on it with regret ;—and, if he fall, he will think only of the aid which his life might have given to that general happiness which he sought,-not of his life itself, as an object of regard, or even as a thing which it would have been possible for him to preserve. LECTURE XCI. ON THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP-OBEDIENCE TO THE LAWS-DEFEND ING OUR COUNTRY-AUGMENTING THE GENERAL HAPPINESS. IN the close of my last Lecture, gentlemen, I had begun the consideration of those duties which we owe to the community of our fellow-citizens,-the duties understood as comprehended under the single term patriotism. These duties of man, as a citizen, are considered as referable to three kinds;-first, the duty of obedience to the particular system of laws, under which we may live ;-2dly, the duty of defending the social system under which he lives, from every species of violent aggression; and 3dly, the duty of increasing, to the best of his power, the means of public happiness * Burke's Works, Vol. V. p. 73. 8vo. Lond. 1803. in the nation, by every aid which he can give to its external or internal resources, and especially, as the most important of all ends, by every amelioration which it can be nationally prudent to attempt, of any existing evils, in its laws and general forms of polity. In examining the first of these duties, we were, of course, led to inquire into the nature of that principle, from which existing institutions derived a moral authority. Of the divine right, to which it was long the easy and courtly practice of almost all the writers on this subject, to refer what, as divinely constituted, was therefore, they contended, to be deemed sacred from all human interference of the governed, as truly sacred as religion itself,-I did not think it necessary to occupy your time with any long and serious confutation. "The right divine of kings to govern wrong," cannot be a right derived from the Divinity. He who attached the delightful feeling of moral approbation, to every wish of diffusing happiness, cannot give the sanction of his own pure authority to crimes, which, as established, have nothing to distinguish them from other crimes that have not been established, except that their atrocious oppression has been more lastingly and extensively injurious. When a whole nation is bowed down in misery, and intellectual and moral darkness,—which, by the length of its uniform and dreary continuance, marks only what principles it contains of a servitude that may be perpetuated for ages as uniformly wretched, if a single effort, the elevation of a single standard, the utterance of a single word, were all which was necessary to give to millions that exist, and millions of millions that are afterwards to exist, not the happiness of freedom only, but with freedom all that light of thought, and purity of generous devotion, which liberty never fails to carry along with it ;-would it be virtue to keep down that standard, to refrain from uttering that word so productive, and rather to say calmly to the world, be miserable still? The God, who is the God of happiness, and truth, and virtue, could not surely in such circumstances have made it guilt in the patriot to wish the single effort made; or guilt in him if he wish it made, to give his own heart, and arm, or voice, to that effort which he wished. It is vain for us, when our object is to discover, not what man has done, but what man ought to do, to think of the origin of power, as if this were sufficient to determine the duty of our present acquiescence. Where all were not equal in every physical energy, one individual must soon have begun to exercise authority over other individuals. If we consider a number of children at play, where all may, at first have the appearance of the most complete equality, we shall soon be able to discover how the stronger, in any period of life, or in any circumstances of society, might, in some cases, assume dominion which, in some other cases, might be given to superior skill. But, in whatever way power may have begun among mankind, it has usually, at least for many ages in countries that suffer under despotism, been perpetuated, by the submission on the part of the slave, to the mere might of its hereditary or casual possessors, the history of power is, therefore, the bistory of that to which men have generally or individually, considered it expedient to submit; but it is not on that account necessarily, the history of that to which it was the duty of man to submit. It leaves to the race of man, in every age, and in all the varying circumstances of their external and internal condition, to consider the duties of mankind in the same manner as they would have considered them in any former age; and the duty of man as a citizen, is not to prefer the happiness, or supposed happiness of one, to the happiness, or supposed happiness of many, but the happiness of many to the happiness of one, when these are opposed and incompatible. The happiness of many may, indeed, be best consulted, and truly is best consulted, by distinctions and honours, which may seem to the inconsiderate, as if existing only for the happiness of one or of a few. But still it is of the wider happiness produced by them of which the patriot is to think, when he establishes these very distinctions, or wishes them to be prolonged. It is vain, then, to have recourse to any fictions to prove the duty, either of obeying the sovereign power of the state, in ordinary circumstances, or in rare and unfortunate circumstances, of occasional resistance to it; since these duties must always be reducible to the paramount obligation on the citizen, to consult the good, not of a few of his fellow-citizens, but of all, or the greater number, an obligation, without which the fiction would be worse than absurd, and with which it is unnecessary. The theory of a social contract of the governed, and their governors, for example, in which certain rights were supposed to be abandoned for certain purposes of general advantage, we found to be, even when considered as a mere fiction, (and it is only as a mere poetic fiction, that it can be considered,) but an awkward circuitous mode of arriving at a truth, without the previous belief of which, the very contract supposed, would be absolutely nugatory. It assumes, in this contract, original rights of the community, which, but for the contract, it would have been unjust in the governors to arrogate to themselves; and, if these be assumed as inherent in the very nature of man, independently of all social institutions, we must still, as men, have the rights which mankind, simply as mankind, originally possessed. The feigned contract adds nothing, it presupposes every thing. The power which we obey, is a power which exists by our will-as much as the power which our earliest ancestors obeyed, existed only by the will of the subjects, who at once formed it, and gave it their obedience. The fiction of a social contract, then, as I have before said, is only a circuitous mode of asserting the original rights, which that very contract takes for granted in the contractors. Equally false is the supposed analogy, by which political writers would argue, from mere prescription in cases of property, for a similar prescriptive right to sovereign power, as implied in the long continued possession of it. There still remains the inquiry why prescription itself is legally recognised. It is for the good of the state, and only for the general good, to prevent the evil of insecure possession, and frequent litigation, that such a bar to judicial scrutiny is allowed,—and if it were for the good of all the citizens, that prescription should not operate, even in cases of property, there can be little doubt that it would not have been legally established. The legal authority of prescription then, when we trace it to its source, is not a proof of the moral right of the exerciser of hereditary tyranny, to continued violation of public happiness, and therefore, to unlimited submission, from the nation of slaves, the offspring of a nation of slaves. It is, on the contrary, a proof of the paramount obligation of that general good, which in the right of prescription, as in every other legal right, has been professedly the great object of legislation, and which, in some circumstances, may render resistance a duty, as, in the ordinary circumstances of society, it renders obedience a duty, and resistance a crime. That the power of the sovereign exists by our will, however, is not enough, of itself, to confer on us the right of disobeying it; and this, for a very plain 414 If I reason,―that, even when the government obeyed is not like that of our own noble constitution, one which is a source of greater happiness to him who obeys, than to him who governs, the disobedience may be productive of misery, which even the slave of a bad government has no right to produce. duties are not all dependent on our mere power, or our mere will. learn that my benefactor is in indigence, it depends on my will, whether I afford any relief to his wants; but it does not, therefore, follow, that I have a moral right to refuse relief. In like manner, I have no more right to produce that wild disorder, which mere disobedience to law, if general, would occasion, still less to produce the bloodshed, and the desolation, and the bad passions worse than mere bloodshed and desolation, which would be the inevitable consequence of long protracted civil dissensions. This general tendency of obedience to power and happiness, is, as I remarked in my last Lecture, the true right divine of authority; a right which is divine, because the virtue which loves the power and happiness of all is itself of divine obligation. Since the duty of political obedience, however, important as it is in the list of moral duties, is still a duty which derives its force from our general regard for the happiness of the community,-this happiness of the community which, in ordinary circumstances, gives obligation to the claim of mere power to our obedience, in other circumstances limits the obligation, and produces a moral duty that is altogether opposite. On the duties of the citizen, in circumstances so different from those in which our inestimable constitution has placed us, we may still ethically speculate, as, in our systems of meteorology, we treat, under our own temperate sky, of the sultry heats and hurricanes of a tropical climate. The cases, however, in which it is morally right to resist, by other means than those which the established constitution itself affords, the tyranny of a government, are, in any situation of society, but of rare occurrence; since it is not tyranny alone which justifies rebellion, but tyranny, in circumstances in which rebellion against its cruel and degrading power, affords a prospect of success, not merely in the removal of a single tyrant, but in the establishment of a happier system. In every insurrection against the most cruel despot, a certain quantity of evil must be produced; and the evil is sure while the good that is hoped is doubtful. If the insurrection fail, the evil is produced, and produced without any compensation, or rather, perhaps, serves only to render oppression more severe and the hearts of the oppressed more fearful. The tyrant, after he has crushed all the little virtue that existed within the sphere of his dark dominion, may do, in the insolence of his triumph, what before he would have feared to do, he may destroy at once, what by a little longer continuance, could scarcely have failed to diffuse a wider virtue, which his efforts would have been powerless to crush. The increased severity of the oppression, then, is one evil of such unsuccessful attempts; and it is not less an evil, that they render for ever after, as I have said, the oppressed more fearful. The image of past defeat rises with an enfeebling influence, on those who otherwise would have lifted a far stronger arm; while the remem brance of the treacheries which, probably, attended that defeat, and sometimes of the treacheries of those whose enthusiasm in the cause seemed most generous and daring, diminishes the confidence which man might The resistance which might speedily otherwise be inclined to place in man. have been successful, but for a rash attempt in unfortunate circumstances, may thus prove unsuccessful, merely because others had essayed and failed. Without the high probability, therefore, of a great preponderance of good, it cannot be morally right, in any circumstances, even of the most afflicting tyranny, to encourage a disobedience, which the good that is to flow from it alone can justify. In the despotisms of the East, and in all the savage despotisms in which men, accustomed to look on power only as something that is to be endured, obey as brutally as they are brutally governed, what virtue could there be in rousing a few wretches, to attempt what could not but fail in their hands, even if their number were comparatively greater, and in thus producing a few more murders, and a little more terror than would have existed, but for the foolish effort. "True fortitude is seen in great exploits, Which justice warrants, and which wisdom guides ;- In ages of extreme luxurious profligacy, it would be, in like manner, vain to call to those who have no virtues, to arm themselves, from a virtuous hatred of oppression, against a tyrant whom other tyrants would speedily replace. Truth in the one case, in the other case virtue, must be previously diffused; and if truth and virtue be diffused, their own silent operation may gradually succeed in producing that very amendment, which mere force, with all the additional evils which its violence produces, would have failed to effect. They form, indeed, the only useful, because the only permanent force, -operating on the mind, in which all real strength is, and operating on it for ever. The great evil is, that for the diffusion of truth and virtue, a certain portion of freedom is necessary, which may not every where be found; but, where there is not the truth or virtue, nor so much freedom, as would allow the diffusion of thein, what lover of the temperate liberty of mankind, could hope, by mere violence, to produce it! A single tyrant, indeed, may be hurled from his throne,-for this the very ministers of his power, by whom he has been what he was, themselves may do,-while they bow the knee the very moment after, to some new tyrant of their own number,-but it is tyranny which the patriot hates, and if that still subsists, the murder of a thousand tyrants would make tyranny an object only of more sickly loathing. It is enough, then, to find in the source of political authority, a justification of disobedience to it, in the extreme cases, in which alone it is morally allowable, or rather morally incumbent on the oppressed to disobey. It is in extreme cases only, that this sanction can be required; and, in all the ordinary circumstances of society, to yield to the authority which all have concurred in obeying, when every constitutional method of obviating or mitigating the evil has been exerted, is at once the most virtuous, as it is the simplest mode of conduct that can be pursued. The next patriotic duty, which I mentioned, was the duty of defending the state against every aggression. This duty of defending the land which we love, may, indeed, be considered, as implied, in the very love which we bear to it. It is not necessary, that we should think of what we have personally to lose, before we consider the invader of our country as our enemy. It is not necessary, * Tragedy of Cato. |