RESTRAINT ON POLITICAL LEADERS. 149 aside the extensive and real power of the king, as well as the numerous means he possesses of gratifying the ambition and hopes of individuals, and were to consider only the majesty of his title, and that kind of strength founded on public opinion which results from it, we shall find that advantage so considerable, that to attempt to enter into a competition with it, with the bare advantage of high birth, which itself has no other foundation than public opinion, and that too in a very subordinate degree, would be an attempt completely extravagant. If this difference is so great as to be thoroughly submitted to, even by those persons whose situation might incline them to disown it, much more so does it influence the minds of the people. And if, notwithstanding the value which every Englishman ought to set upon himself as a man, and a free man, there were any whose eyes were so very tender as to be dazzled by the appearance and the arms of a lord, they would be totally blinded when they came to turn them towards the royal majesty. The only man, therefore, who, to persons unacquainted with the constitution of England, might at first sight appear in a condition to put the government in danger, would be one who, by the greatness of his abilities and public services, might have acquired in a high degree the love of the people, and obtained a great influence in the House of Commons. But how great soever this enthusiasm of the public may be, barren applause is the only fruit which the man whom they favour can expect from it. He can hope neither for a dictatorship, nor a consulship, nor in general for any power under the shelter of which he may at once safely unmask that ambition with which we might suppose him to be actuated, or, if we suppose him to have been hitherto free from any, grow insensibly corrupt. The only door which the constitution leaves open to his ambition, of whatever kind it may be, is a place in the administration, during the pleasure of the king. If, by the continuance of his services, and the preservation of his influence, he becomes able to aim still higher, the only door which again opens to him is that of the House of Lords. But this advance of the favourite of the people towards the establishment of his greatness is at the same time a great step towards the loss of that power which might render him formidable. In the first place, the people seeing that he is become much less dependent on their favour, begin, from that very moment, to lessen their attachment to him. Seeing him moreover distinguished by privileges which are the objects of their jealousy, I mean their political jealousy, and member of a body whose interests are frequently opposite to theirs, they immediately conclude that this great and new dignity cannot have been acquired but through a secret agreement to betray them. Their favourite, thus suddenly transformed, is going, they make no doubt, to adopt a conduct entirely opposite to that which has till then been the cause of his advancement and high reputation, and in the compass of a few hours completely to renounce those principles which he has so long and so loudly professed. In this, certainly the people are mistaken; but yet neither would they be wrong, if they feared that a zeal hitherto so warm, so constant, I will even add so sincere, when it concurred with their favourite's private interest, would, by being thenceforth often in opposition to it, become gradually much abated. Nor is this all: the favourite of the people does not even find in his new dignity all the increase of greatness and éclat that might at first be imagined. Hitherto he was, it is true, only a private individual: but then he was the object in which the whole nation interested themselves; his actions and words were set forth in the public prints; and he everywhere met with applause and acclamation. All these tokens of public favour are, I know, sometimes acquired very lightly; but they never last long, whatever people may say, unless real services are performed: now, the title of benefactor to the nation, when deserved and universally bestowed, is certainly a very handsome title, and which does nowise require the assistance of outward pomp to set it off. Besides, though he was only a member of the inferior body of the legislature, we must observe, he was the first; and the word first is always a word of very great moment. But now that he is made a lord, all his greatness, which hitherto was indeterminate, becomes defined. By granting him privileges established and fixed by known laws, that POWER OF A POPULAR FAVOURITE. 151 uncertainty is taken from his lustre which is of so much importance in those things which depend on imagination; and his value is lowered, just because it is ascertained. Besides, he is a lord; but then there are several men who possess but small abilities, and few estimable qualifications, who also are lords; his lot is, nevertheless, to be seated among them; the law places him on exactly the same level with them; and all that is real in his greatness is thus lost in a crowd of dignitaries, hereditary and conventional. Nor are these the only losses which the favourite of the people is to suffer. Independently of those great changes which he descries at a distance, he feels around him alterations no less visible, and still more painful. Seated formerly in the assembly of the representatives of the people, his talents and continual success had soon raised him above the level of his fellow members; and, being carried on by the vivacity and warmth of the public favour, those who might have been tempted to set up as his competitors were reduced to silence, or even became his supporters. Admitted now into an assembly of persons invested with a perpetual and hereditary title, he finds men hitherto his superiors,- -men who see with a jealous eye the shining talents of the homo novus, and who are firmly resolved, that after having been the leading man in the House of Commons, he shall not be the first in theirs. In a word, the success of the favourite of the people was brilliant, and even formidable; but the constitution, in the very reward it prepares for him, makes him find a kind of ostracism. His advances were sudden, and his course rapid; he was, if you please, like a torrent ready to bear down every thing before it; but this torrent is compelled, by the general arrangement of things, finally to throw itself into a vast reservoir, where it mingles, and loses its force and direction.* * The statesmen alluded to were probably Mr. Putney, afterwards Earl of Bath, and especially Lord Chatham. They apply most directly to the latter; for when he was the only man in England who could form a ministry, and had the universal confidence of the country, he, instead of remaining at the head of that ministry, reserved only to himself a powerless office, and he indiscreetly or vainly accepted with a subordinate I know it may be said, that, in order to avoid the fatal step which is to deprive him of so many advantages, the favourite of the people ought to refuse the new dignity which is offered to him, and wait for more important successes, from his eloquence in the House of Commons, and his influence over the people. But those who give him this counsel have not sufficiently examined it. Without doubt there are men in England, who, in their present pursuit of a project which they think essential to the public good, would be capable of refusing for a while a dignity which would deprive their virtue of oppor tunities of exerting itself, or might more or less endanger it: but woe to him who should persist in such a refusal, with any pernicious design! and who, in a government where liberty is established on so solid and extensive a basis, should endeavour to make the people believe that their fate depends on the persevering virtue of a single citizen. His ambitious views being at last discovered (nor could it be long before they were so), his obstinate resolution to move out of the ordinary course of things would indicate aims, on his part, of such an extraordinary nature, that all men whatever, who have any regard for their country, would instantly rise up from all parts to oppose him, and he must fall overwhelmed with so much ridicule that it would be better for him to fall from the Tarpeian rock.* office a peerage. Lord Chesterfield, in one of his letters to his son, wrote "that people say William Pitt has had a fall up stairs, by leaving the House of Commons, in which he wielded the power of the realm, and going into that hospital of incurables the House of Lords." Sir Robert Peel was more sagacious.-Ed. * The reader will, perhaps, object, that no man in England can entertain such views as those I have suggested here: this is precisely what I intended to prove. The essential advantage of the English government above all those that have been called free, and which in many respects were but apparently so, is, that no person in England can entertain so much as a thought of ever rising to the level of the power charged with the execution of the laws. All men in the state, whatever may be their rank, wealth, or influence, are thoroughly convinced that they must, in reality as well as in name, continue to be subjects; and are thus compelled really to love, defend, and promote those laws which secure liberty to the subject. THE EXECUTIVE AND THE LAWS. 153 In fine, even though we were to suppose that the new lord might, after his exaltation, have preserved all his interest with the people, or, what would be no less difficult, that any lord whatever could, by dint of his wealth and high birth, rival the splendour of the crown itself, all these advantages, how great soever we may suppose them, as they would not of themselves be able to confer on him the least executive authority, must for ever remain mere showy unsubstantial advantages. Finding all the active powers of the state concentred in that very seat of power which we suppose him inclined to attack, and there secured by formidable provisions, his influence must always evaporate in ineffectual words; and after having advanced himself, as we suppose, to the very foot of the throne, finding no branch of independent power which he might so far appropriate to himself, as at last to give a reality to a political importance, he would soon see it, however great it might have at first appeared, decline and die away. God forbid, however, that I should mean that the people of England are so fatally tied down to inaction, by the nature of their government, that they cannot, in times of oppression, find means of appointing a leader! No; I only meant to say that the laws of England open no door to those accumulations of power, which have been the ruin of so many republics; that they offer to the ambitious no means of taking advantage of the inadvertence or even the gratitude of the people, to make themselves their tyrants; and that the public power, of which the king has been made the exclusive depository, must remain unshaken in his hands, so long as things continue in the legal order; which, it may be observed, is a strong inducement to him constantly to endeavour to maintain them in it.* * Several events in English history put in a very strong light this idea of the stability which the power of the crown gives to the state. One is, the facility with which the great Duke of Marlborough, and his party at home, were removed from their employments.-Hannibal, in circumstances nearly similar, had continued the war against the will of the senate of Carthage: Cæsar had done the same in Gaul: and when at last he was expressly required to deliver up his commission, he marched his army to Rome, and established a military despotism. But the |