The text is taken from my copy of the fourth edition, 1842. This
version of Political Justice, originally published in 1793, is based on
the corrected third edition, published in 1798.
BOOK V
OF Legislative and Executive Power
CHAPTER V
OF COURTS AND MINISTERS
Systematical monopoly of confidence. - Charac-
ter of ministers and their dependents. -
Dupticiy of courts. - Venality and corruption.
- Universality of this principle.
WE shall be better enabled to judge of the dispositions with which
information is communicated, and measures are executed, in monarchical
countries, if we reflect upon another of the ill consequences attendant
upon this species of government, the existence and corruption of
courts.
The character of this, as well as of every other human institution,
arises out of the circumstances with which it is surrounded. Ministers
and favourites are a sort of people who have a state prisoner in their
custody, the whole management of whose understanding and actions they
can easily engross. This they completely effect with a weak and
credulous master, nor can the most cautious and penetrating entirely
elude their machinations. They unavoidably desire to continue in the
administration of his functions, whether it be emolument, or the love of
homage, or any more generous motive, by which they are attached to it.
But, the more they are confided in by the sovereign, the greater will be
the permanence of their situation; and, the more exclusive is their
possession of his ear, the more implicit will be his confidence. The
wisest of mortals are liable to error; the most-judicious projects are
open to specious and superficial objections; and it can rarely happen
but a minister will find his ease and security in excluding, as much as
possible, other and opposite advisers, whose acuteness and ingenuity are
perhaps additionally whetted by a desire to succeed to his office.
Ministers become a sort of miniature kings in their turn. Though
they have the greatest opportunity of observing the impotence and
unmeaningness of the character, they envy it. It is their trade
perpetually to extol the dignity and importance of the master they
serve; and men cannot long anxiously endeavour to convince others of the
truth of any proposition without becoming half convinced of it
themselves. They feel themselves dependent for all that they most
ardently desire, upon this man's arbitrary will; but a sense of
inferiority is perhaps the never failing parent of emulation or envy.
They assimilate themselves therefore, of choice, to a man to whose
circumstances their own are considerably similar.
In reality the requisites without which monarchical government cannot
be preserved in existence are by no means sufficiently supplied by the
mere intervention of ministers. There must be the ministers of
ministers, and a long beadroll of subordination, descending by tedious
and complicated steps. Each of these lives on the smile of the
minister, as he lives on the smile of the sovereign. Each of these has
his petty interests to manage, and his empire to employ under the guise
of servility. Each imitates the vices of his superior, and exacts from
others the adulation he is obliged to pay.
It has already appeared that a king is necessarily, and almost
unavoidably, a despot in his heart.1 He has been used to hear those
things only which were adapted to give him pleasure; and it is with a
grating and uneasy sensation that he listens to communications of a
different sort. He has been used to unhesitating compliance; and it is
with difficulty he can digest expostulation and opposition. Of
consequence the honest and virtuous character, whose principles are
clear and unshaken, is least qualified for his service; he must either
explain away the severity of his principles, or he must give place to a
more crafty and temporizing politician. The temporizing politician
expects the same pliability in others that he exhibits in himself, and
the fault which he can least forgive is an ill timed an inauspicious
scrupulosity.
Expecting this compliance from all the coadjutors and instruments of his
designs, he soon comes to set it up as a standard by which to judge of
the merit of other men. He is deaf to every recommendation but that of a
fitness for the secret service of government, or a tendency to promote
his interest, and extend the sphere of his influence. The worst man,
with this argument in his favour, will seem worthy of encouragement; the
best man, who has no advocate but virtue to plead for him, will be
treated with superciliousness and neglect. The genuine criterion of
human desert can scarcely indeed be superseded and reversed. But it will
appear to be reversed, and appearance will produce many of the effects
of reality. To obtain honour, it will be thought necessary to pay a
servile court to administration, to bear, with unaltered patience, their
contumely and scorn, to flatter their vices, and render ourselves useful
to their private gratification. To obtain honour, it will be thought
necessary, by assiduity and intrigue, to make ourselves a party, to
procure the recommendation of lords, and the good word of women of
pleasure, and clerks in office. To obtain honour, it will be thought
necessary to merit disgrace. The whole scene conflicts in hollowness,
duplicity and falsehood. The minister speaks fair to the man he
despises, and the slave pretends a generous attachment, while he thinks
of nothing but his personal interest. That these principles are
interspersed, under the worst governments, with occasional deviations
into better, it would be folly to deny; that they do not form the great
prevailing features, wherever a court and a monarch are to be found, it
would be madness to assert.
There is one feature above all others which has never escaped the
most superficial delineator of the manners of a court; I mean the
profound dissimulation which is there cultivated. The minister has, in
the first place, to deceive the sovereign, continually to pretend to
feel whatever his master feels, to ingratiate himself by an uniform
insincerity, and to make a show of the most unreserved affection and
attachment. His next duty, is to cheat his dependents and the
candidates for office; to keep them in a perpetual fever of desire and
expectation. Recollect the scene of a ministerial levee. To judge by
the external appearance, we should suppose this to be the chosen seat of
disinterested kindness. All that is erect and decisive in man is
shamelessly surrendered. No professions of submission can be so base,
no forms of adulation so extravagant, but that they are eagerly
practised by these voluntary prostitutes. Yet it is notorious that, in
this scene above all others, hatred has fixed its dwelling; jealousy
rankles in every breast; and the most of its personages would rejoice in
the opportunity of ruining each other for ever. Here it is that
promises, protestations and oaths are so wantonly multiplied as almost
to have lost their meaning. There is scarcely a man so weak as, when he
has received a court promise, not to tremble, lest it should be found as
false and unsubstantial by him, as it has proved to so many others.
At length, by the constant practice of dissimulation, the true
courtier comes to be unable to distinguish, among his own sentiments,
the pretended from the real. He arrives at such proficiency in his art
as to have neither passions nor attachments. Personal kindness, and all
consideration for the merit of others, are swallowed up in a narrow and
sordid ambition; not that generous ambition for the esteem of mankind,
which reflects a sort of splendour upon vice itself, but an ambition of
selfish gratification and illiberal intrigue. Such a man has bid a long
farewell to every moral restraint, and thinks his purposes cheaply
promoted by the sacrifice of honour, sincerity and justice. His chief
study and greatest boast are to be impenetrable; that no man shall be
able to discover what he designs; that, though you discourse with him
for ever, he shall constantly elude your detection. Consummate in his
art, he will often practise it without excuse or necessity. Thus
history records her instances of the profuse kindness and endearment
with which monarchs have treated those they had already resolved to
destroy. A gratuitous pride seems to have been placed in exhibiting the
last refinement of profligacy and deceit. Ministers of this character
are the mortal enemies of virtue in others. A cabal of such courtiers
is in the utmost degree deadly. They destroy by secret ways that give
no warning, and leave no trace. If they have to do with a blunt, just
man who knows no disguise, or a generous spirit that scorns to practise
dissimulation and artifice, they mark him their certain victim. No good
or liberal character can escape their machinations; and the immorality
of the court, which throws into shade all other wickedness, spreads its
contagion through the land, and emasculates the sentiments of the most
populous nation.
A fundamental disadvantage in monarchical government is that it
renders things of the most essential importance, subject, through
successive gradations, to the caprice of individuals. The suffrage of a
body of electors will always bear a resemblance, more or less remote, to
the public sentiment. The suffrage of an individual will depend upon
caprice, personal convenience or pecuniary corruption. If the king be
himself inaccessible to injustice, if the minister disdain a bribe, yet
the fundamental evil remains, that kings and ministers, fallible
themselves, must, upon a thousand occasions, depend upon the
recommendation of others. Who will answer for these, through all their
classes, officers of state, and deputies of office, humble friends, and
officious valets, wives and daughters, concubines and confessors?
It is supposed by many that the existence of permanent hereditary
distinction is necessary to the maintenance of order, among beings so
imperfect as the human species. But it is allowed by all that permanent
hereditary distinction is a fiction of policy, not an ordinance of
immutable truth. Wherever it exists, the human mind, so far as relates
to political society, is prevented from settling upon its true
foundation. There is a constant struggle between the genuine sentiments
of the understanding, which tell us that all this is an imposition, and
the imperious voice of government, which bids us, Reverence and obey.
In this unequal contest, alarm and apprehension will perpetually haunt
the minds of those who exercise usurped power. In this artificial state
of man, powerful engines must be employed to prevent him from rising to
his true level. It is the business of the governors to persuade the
governed that it is their interest to be slaves. They have no other
means by which to create this fictitious interest but those which they
derive from the perverted understandings, and burdened property, of the
public, to be returned in titles, ribands and bribes. Hence that system
of universal corruption without which monarchy could not exist.
It has sometimes been supposed that corruption is particularly
incident to a mixed government. 'In such a government the people
possess a portion of freedom; privilege finds its place as well as
prerogative; a certain sturdiness of manner, and consciousness of
independence, are the natives of these countries. The country-gentleman
will not abjure the dictates of his judgement without a valuable
consideration. There is here more than one road to success; popular
favour is as sure a means of advancement as courtly patronage. In
despotic countries the people may be driven like sheep: however
unfortunate is their condition, they know no other, and they submit to
it as an inevitable calamity. Their characteristic feature is a torpid
dullness, in which all the energies of man are forgotten. But, in a
country calling itself free, the minds of the inhabitants are in a
perturbed and restless state, and extraordinary means must be employed
to calm their vehemence.' It has sometimes happened to men whose hearts
have been pervaded with the love of virtue, of which pecuniary
prostitution is the most odious corruption, to prefer, while they have
contemplated this picture, an acknowledged despotism to a state of
specious and imperfect liberty.
But the picture is not accurate. As much of it as relates to a mixed
government must be acknowledged to be true. But the features of
despotism are too favourably touched. Whether privilege be conceded by
the forms of the constitution or no, a whole nation cannot be kept
ignorant of its force. No people were ever yet so sunk in stupidity as
to imagine one man, because he bore the appellation of a king, literally
equal to a million. In a whole nation, as monarchical nations at least
must be expected to be constituted, there will be nobility and
yeomanry, rich and poor. There will be persons who, by their situation,
their wealth, or their talents, form a middle rank between the monarch
and the vulgar, and who, by their confederacies and their intrigues, can
hold the throne in awe. These men must be bought or defied. There is
no disposition that clings so close to despotism as incessant terror and
alarm. What else gave birth to the armies of spies, and the numerous
state prisons, under the old government of France? The eye of the tyrant
is never dosed. How numerous are the precautions and jealousies that
these terrors dictate? No man can go out or come into the country, but
he is watched. The press must issue no productions that have not the
imprimatur of government. All coffee houses, and places of public
resort, are objects of attention. Twenty people cannot be collected
together, unless for the purposes of superstition, but it is immediately
suspected that they may be conferring about their rights. Is it to be
supposed that, where the means of jealousy are employed, the means of
corruption will be forgotten? Were it so indeed, the case would not be
much improved. No picture can be more disgustful, no state of mankind
more depressing, than that in which a whole nation is held in obedience
by the mere operation of fear, in which all that is most eminent among
them, and that should give example to the rest, is prevented, under the
severest penalties, from expressing its real sentiments, and, by
necessary consequence, from forming any sentiments that are worthy to be
expressed. But, in reality, fear was never the only instrument employed
for these purposes. No tyrant was ever so unsocial as to have no
confederates in his guilt. This monstrous edifice will always be found
supported by all the various instruments for perverting the human
character, severity, menaces, blandishments, professions and bribes. To
this it is, in a great degree, owing that monarchy is so costly an
establishment. It is the business of the despot to distribute his
lottery of seduction into as many prizes as possible. Among the
consequences of a pecuniary polity these are to be reckoned the
foremost that every man is supposed to have his price, and that, the
corruption being managed in an underhand manner, many a man who appears
a patriot may be really a hireling; by which means virtue itself is
brought into discredit, is either regarded as mere folly and romance, or
observed with doubt and suspicion, as the cloak of vices, which are only
the more humiliating the more they are concealed.
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