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storm. We were in the very act of putting up the head of the carriage and preparing for the coming rain, when the post-master, in answer to an observation of mine about the weather when I had passed through France a few weeks before, seemed to relieve himself by telling me of all the troubles that were then raging. His expression was, "Alles ist übel in Frankreich," the mere tumult and violence of political quarrels seeming to the inhabitant of a Tyrolese valley, as something shocking, because it was so unpeaceful. Hearing only indistinct accounts of what was going on, we resolved not to enter France immediately, but to go round by the Rhine through Wirtemberg and Baden; a plan which I shall now ever think of with pleasure, as otherwise I never should have seen Niebuhr. I was very glad, too, to see something more of Germany, only it was rather vexatious to be obliged to pass on so quickly, for I could not wait at Heidelberg long enough to see Creuzer, and my stay even at Bonn was only one afternoon. I had the happiness of sitting three hours with Niebuhr, and he introduced me to his poor wife and children. His conversation completely verified the impression which you had given me of his character, and has left me with no recollections but such as are satisfactory to think of now. The news' of the Duke of Orleans' accession to the French throne reached Bonn while I was with Niebuhr, and I was struck with the enthusiastic joy which he displayed on hearing it. I fully expected that the Revolution in France would lead to one in Belgium; and indeed, we passed through Brussels scarcely ten days before the insurrection broke out. You are so well acquainted with English politics, that you will take a deep interest in the fate of the Reform Bill now before Parliament. I believe that, if it passes now," Felix sæclorum nascitur ordo ;" that the aristocracy still retain a strong hold on the respect and regard of England, and if their excessive influence is curtailed, they will be driven to try to gain a more legitimate influence, to be obtained by the exercise of those great and good qualities which so many of them possess. At present this may be done; but five years hence the democratical spirit may, have gained such a height, that the utmost virtue on the part of the aristocracy will be unable to save it. And I think nearly the same with regard to the Church. Reform would now, I fully believe, prevent destruction; but every year of delayed reform strengthens those who wish not to amend, but to destroy. Meanwhile, the moral state of France is to me most awful; I sympathized fully with the Revolution in July, but, if this detestable warlike spirit gets head amongst the French people, I hope, and earnestly believe, that we shall see another and more effectual coalition of 1815 to put it down. Nothing can be more opposite than Liberalism and Bonapartism; and, I fear, the mass of the French people are more thirsting to renew the old career of spoliation and conquest than to establish or promote true liberty; "for who loves that, must first be wise and good." My hope is that, whatever domestic abuses may exist, Germany will never forget the glorious struggle of 1813, and will know that the tread of a Frenchman on the right bank of the Rhine is the worst of all pollutions to her soil. And I trust and think, that the general feeling in England is strong on this point, and that the whole power of the nation would be heartily put forth to strangle in the birth the first symptoms of

1) See Extracts from Journals, in 1830, in the Appendix.

Napoleonism. I was at a party at -, in the summer, at Geneva, where I met Thierry, the historian of " Les Gaulois," and the warlike spirit which I perceived, even then, in the French liberals, made a deep impression

on me.

XXVIII. TO JOHN WARD, ESQ.

(Co-Editor with him of the Englishman's Register.)

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 burdens 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

1) 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."

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 fire-works 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 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

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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 sooth 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.

XXIX. TO HIS SISTER SUSANNAH ARNOLD.

I should like you to see

Rugby, April, 1831. 's letter to me about the Reg

ister; 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

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.

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. . . . . . Not that I anticipate with much confidence any great benefits to result from the Reform Bill; but the 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 is 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 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.

XXX. 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 upon 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 along with them nor turn the Register into a new "Examiner" or Ballot." So that I dare say my fate will be that of rà μéoα Tŵv noditŵr 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 conceal 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.

XXXI. TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUblin.

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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 co-operators 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 object 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 every body'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 a 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?

XXXII. 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

1) Viz., of a stall in Bristol Cathedral, with a living attached to it-offered to him by Lord Brougham.

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