Secondly, they have made the king the prime mover in all this political wickedness: they have made the king tell his people that they were deprived of their rights, and, by direct and necessary implication, that they and their ancestors for a century past had been slaves; they have made the king vilify the memory of his own brother and father. Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man. No! they were too wise for that. They took good care to refer their claims to custom and prescription, and boldly-sometimes very impudently asserted them upon traditionary and constitutional grounds. The Bill is bad enough, God knows; but the arguments of its advocates, and the manner of their advocacy, are a thousand times worse than the Bill itself; and you will live to think so. I am far, very far, from wishing to indulge in any vulgar abuse of the vulgar. I believe that the feeling of the multitude will, in most cases, be in favour of something good; but this it is which I perceive, that they are always under the domination of some one feeling or view;whereas truth, and above all, practical wisdom, must be the result of a wide comprehension of the more and the less, the balance and the counterbalance. A DECEMBER 3, 1831. RELIGION, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both: not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy;-nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are the symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History. DECEMBER 17, 1831. Union with Ireland.-Irish Church. I AM quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by England from the disannexing and independence of Ireland at all comparable with the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to England by the Union.1 We have never received one particle of advantage from our association with Ireland, whilst we have in many most vital particulars violated the principles of the British constitution solely for the purpose of conciliating the Irish agitators, and of endeavouring-a vain endeavour-to find room for them under the same government. Mr. Pitt has received great credit for effecting the Union; but I believe it will sooner or later be discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon which, he effected it, made it the most fatal blow that ever was levelled against the peace and prosperity of England. From it came the Catholic Bill. From the Catholic Bill has come this Reform Bill! And what next? The case of the Irish Church is certainly anomalous, and full of practical difficulties. On the one hand, it is the only church which the constitution can admit; on the other, such are the circumstances, it is a church that cannot act as a church towards five-sixths of the persons nominally and legally within its care. DECEMBER 18, 1831. A State.-Persons and Things.-History. THE HE difference between an inorganic and an organic body lies in this :-In the first—a sheaf of corn-the whole is nothing more than a collection of the individual parts or phenomena. In the second—a man—the whole is the effect of, or results from, the parts; it—the whole-is everything, and the parts are nothing. A State is an idea intermediate between the two-the 1 See Feb. 5, 1833. L whole being a result from, and not a mere total of, the parts, and yet not so merging the constituent parts in the result, but that the individual exists integrally within it. Extremes, especially in politics, meet. In Athens each individual Athenian was of no value; but taken altogether, as Demus, they were everything in such a sense that no individual citizen was anything. In Turkey there is the sign of unity put for unity. The Sultan seems himself the State; but it is an illusion; there is in fact in Turkey no State at all: the whole consists of nothing but a vast collection of neighbourhoods. When the government and the aristocracy of this country had subordinated persons to things, and treated the one like the other the poor, with some reason, and almost in selfdefence, learned to set up rights above duties. The code of a Christian society is, Debeo, et tu debes-of Heathens or Barbarians, Teneo, teneto et tu, si potes. If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us! THE DECEMBER 27, 1831. Beauty.-Genius.—Facts.* 'HE old definition of beauty in the Roman school of painting was, il più nell' uno-multitude in unity; and there is no doubt that such is the principle of beauty. And as one of the most characteristic and infallible criteria of 1 "And this, again, is evolved out of the yet higher idea of person in contradistinction from thing, all social law and justice being grounded on the principle that a person can never, but by his own fault, become a thing, or, without grievous wrong, be treated as such; and the distinction consisting in this, that a thing may be used altogether, and merely as the means to an end; but the person must always be included in the end; his interest must always form a part of the object,- -a mean to which he, by consent, that is, by his own act, makes himself. We plant a tree, and we fell it; we breed the sheep, and we shear, or we the different ranks of men's intellects, observe the instinctive habit which all superior minds have of endeavouring to bring, and of never resting till they have brought, into unity the scattered facts which occur in conversation, or in the statements of men of business. To attempt to argue any great question upon facts only, is absurd; you cannot state any fact before a mixed audience, which an opponent as clever as yourself cannot with ease twist towards another bearing, or at least meet by a contrary fact, as it is called. I wonder why facts were ever called stubborn things: I am sure they have been found pliable enough lately in the House of Commons and elsewhere. Facts, you know, are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premisses, but in the nature and parts of premisses. The truth depends on, and is only arrived at, by a legitimate deduction from all the facts which are truly material. DECEMBER 28, 1831. EVEN to a church, the only pure democracy, because in it persons are alone considered, and one person à priori is equal to another person,—even to a church, discipline is an essential condition. But a state regards classes,1 and classes as they represent classified property; and to introduce a system of representation which must inevitably render all discipline impossible, what is it but madnessthe madness of ignorant vanity, and reckless obstinacy? I have known, and still know, many Dissenters, who kill it,-in both cases wholly as means to our ends: for trees and animals are things. The woodcutter and the hind are likewise employed as means; but on agreement, and that too an agreement of reciprocal advantage, which includes them as well as their employer in the end; for they are persons. And the government under which the contrary takes place is not worthy to be called a state, if, as in the kingdom of Dahomey, it be unprogressive; or only by anticipation, where, as in Russia, it is in advance to a better and more man-worthy order of things."-Church and State, p. 10.-H. N. C. 1 See Sept. 10, 1830. profess to have a zeal for Christianity; and I dare say they have. But I have known very few Dissenters indeed, whose hatred to the Church of England was not a much more active principle of action with them than their love for Christianity. The Wesleyans, in uncorrupted parts of the country, are nearly the only exceptions. There never was an age since the days of the apostles, in which the catholic spirit of religion was so dead, and put aside for love of sects and parties, as at present. JANUARY 1, 1832. Gracefulness of Children.—Dogs. HOW inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance! There seems a sort of sympathy between the more generous dogs and little children. I believe an instance of a little child being attacked by a large dog is very rare indeed. THE JANUARY 28, 1832. HE ideal Tory and the ideal Whig (and some such there have really been) agreed in the necessity and benefit of an exact balance of the three estates: but the Tory was more jealous of the balance being deranged by the people; the Whig, of its being deranged by the Crown. But this was a habit, a jealousy only; they both agreed in the ultimate preservation of the balance; and accordingly they might each, under certain circumstances, without the slightest inconsistency, pass from one side to the other, as the ultimate object required it. This the Tories did at the Revolution, but remained Tories as before. I have half a mind to write a critical and philosophical essay on Whiggism, from Dryden's Achitophel (Shaftesbury), the first Whig (for, with Dr. Johnson's leave, the devil is no such cattle), down to who I trust, in |