2. CHAPTER II
HISTORY OF POLITICAL SOCIETY
The extent of the influence of political systems will be forcibly illustrated
by a concise recollection of the records of political society.
It is an old observation that the history of mankind is little else than
a record of crimes. Society comes recommended to us by its tendency to supply
our wants and promote our well being. If we consider the human species, as
they were found previously to the existence of political society, it is difficult
not to be impressed with emotions of melancholy. But, though the chief purpose
of society is to defend us from want and inconvenience, it effects this purpose
in a very imperfect degree. We are still liable to casualties, disease, infirmity
and death. Famine destroys its thousands, and pestilence its ten thousands.
Anguish visits us under every variety of form, and day after day is spent
in languor and dissatisfaction. Exquisite pleasure is a guest of very rare
approach, and not less short continuance.
But, though the evils that arise to us from the structure of the material
universe are neither trivial nor few, yet the history of political society
sufficiently shows that man is of all other beings the most formidable enemy
to man. Among the various schemes that he has formed to destroy and plague
his kind, war is the most terrible. Satiated with petty mischief and retail
of insulated crimes, he rises in this instance to a project that lays nations
waste, and thins the population of the world. Man directs the murderous engine
against the life of his brother; he invents with indefatigable care refinements
in destruction; he proceeds in the midst of gaiety and pomp to the execution
of his horrid purpose; whole ranks of sensitive beings, endowed with the
most admirable faculties, are mowed down in an instant; they perish by inches
in the midst of agony and neglect, lacerated with every variety of method
that can give torture to the frame.
This is indeed a tremendous scene! Are we permitted to console ourselves
under the spectacle of its evils by the rareness with which it occurs, and
the forcible reasons that compel men to have recourse to this last appeal
of human society? Let us consider it under each of these heads.
War has hitherto been found the inseparable ally of political institution.
The earliest records of time are the annals of conquerors and heroes, a Bacchus,
a Sesostris, a Semiramis and a Cyrus. These princes led millions of men under
their standard, and ravaged innumerable provinces. A small number only of
their forces ever returned to their native homes, the rest having perished
by diseases, hardship and misery. The evils they inflicted, and the mortality
introduced in the countries against which their expeditions were directed,
were certainly not less severe than those which their countrymen suffered.
No sooner does history become more precise than we are presented with
the four great monarchies, that is, with four successful projects, by means
of bloodshed, violence and murder, of enslaving mankind. The expeditions
of Cambyses against Egypt, of Darius against the Scythians, and of Xerxes
against the Greeks, seem almost to set credibility at defiance by the fatal
consequences with which they were attended. The conquests of Alexander cost
innumerable lives, and the immortality of Caesar is computed to have been
purchased by the death of one million two hundred thousand men.
Indeed the Romans, by the long duration of their wars, and their inflexible
adherence to their purpose, are to be ranked among the foremost destroyers
of the human species. Their wars in Italy continued for more than four hundred
years, and their contest for supremacy with the Carthaginians two hundred.
The Mithridatic war began with a massacre of one hundred and fifty thousand
Romans, and in three single actions five hundred thousand men were lost by
the Eastern monarch. Sylla, his ferocious conqueror, next turned his arms
against his country, and the struggle between him and Marius was attended
with proscriptions, butcheries and murders that knew no restraint from humanity
or shame. The Romans, at length, suffered the evils they had been so prompt
to inflict upon others; and the world was vexed for three hundred years by
the irruptions of Goths, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Huns and innumerable hordes
of barbarians.
I forbear to detail the victorious progress of Mahomet and the pious expeditions
of Charlemagne. I will not enumerate the crusades against the infidels, the
exploits of Tamerlane, Gengiskan and Aurungzebe, or the extensive murders
of the Spaniards in the new world. Let us examine Europe, the most civilized
and favoured quarter of the world, or even those countries of Europe which
are thought the most enlightened.
France was wasted by successive battles during a whole century, for the
question of the Salic law, and the claim of the Plantagenets. Scarcely was
this contest terminated, before the religious wars broke out, some idea of
which we may form from the siege of Rochelle, where, of fifteen thousand
persons shut up, eleven thousand perished of hunger and misery; and from
the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, in which the numbers assassinated were
forty thousand. This quarrel was appeased by Henry the fourth, and succeeded
by the thirty years war in Germany for superiority with the house of Austria,
and afterwards by the military transactions of Louis the fourteenth.
In England the war of Cressy and Agincourt only gave place to the civil
war of York and Lancaster, and again after an interval to the war of Charles
the first and his parliament. No sooner was the constitution settled by
the revolution than we were engaged in a wide field of continental hostilities
by king William, the duke of Marlborough, Maria Theresa and the king of
Prussia.
And what are in most cases the pretences upon which war is undertaken?
What rational man could possibly have given himself the least disturbance
for the sake of choosing whether Henry the sixth or Edward the fourth should
have the style of king of England? What English man could reasonably have
drawn his sword for the purpose of rendering his country an inferior dependency
of France, as it must necessarily have been if the ambition of the Plantagenets
had succeeded? What can be more deplorable than to see us first engage eight
years in war rather than suffer the haughty Maria Theresa to live with a
diminished sovereignty or in a private station; and then eight years more
to support the free-booter who had taken advantage of her helpless condition?
The usual causes of war are excellently described by Swift. "Sometimes
the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess
a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretends to any right. Sometimes
one prince quarrels with another, for fear the other should quarrel with
him. Sometimes a war is entered upon because the enemy is too strong; and
sometimes because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things
which we have, or have the things which we want; and we both fight, till
they take ours, or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable cause of war
to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed
by pestilence, or embroiled by factions among themselves. It is justifiable
to enter into a war against our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies
convenient for us, or a territory of land that would render our dominions
round and compact. If a prince sends forces into a nation where the people
are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put the half of them to death, and
make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their
barbarous way of living. It is a very kingly, honourable and frequent practice,
when one prince desires the assistance of another to secure him against an
invasion, that the assistant, when he has driven out the invader, should
seize on the dominions himself, and kill, imprison or banish the prince he
came to relieve."[1]
If we turn from the foreign transactions of states with each other to
the principles of their domestic policy, we shall not find much greater reason
to be satisfied. A numerous class of mankind are held down in a state of
abject penury, and are continually prompted by disappointment and distress
to commit violence upon their more fortunate neighbours. The only mode which
is employed to repress this violence, and to maintain the order and peace
of society, is punishment. Whips, axes and gibbets, dungeons, chains and
racks are the most approved and established methods of persuading men to
obedience, and impressing upon their minds the lessons of reason. There are
few subjects upon which human ingenuity has been more fully displayed than
in inventing instruments of torture. The lash of the whip a thousand times
repeated and flagrant on the back of the defenceless victim, the bastinado
on the soles of the feet, the dislocation of limbs, the fracture of bones,
the faggot and the stake, the cross, impaling, and the mode of drifting pirates
on the Volga, make but a small part of the catalogue. When Damiens, the maniac,
was arraigned for his abortive attempt on the life of Louis XV of France,
a council of anatomists was summoned to deliberate how a human being might
be destroyed with the longest protracted and most diversified agony. Hundreds
of victims are annually sacrificed at the shrine of positive law and political
institution.
Add to this the species of government which prevails over nine tenths
of the globe, which is despotism: a government, as Locke justly observes,
altogether "vile and miserable," and "more to be deprecated
than anarchy itself."[2]
Certainly every man who takes a dispassionate survey of this picture will
feel himself inclined to pause respecting the necessity of the havoc which
is thus made of his species, and to question whether the established methods
for protecting mankind against the caprices of each other are the best that
can be devised. He will be at a loss which of the two to pronounce most worthy
of regret, the misery that is inflicted, or the depravity by which it is
produced. If this be the unalterable allotment of our nature, the eminence
of our rational faculties must be considered as rather an abortion than a
substantial benefit; and we shall not fail to lament that, while in some
respects we are elevated above the brutes, we are in so many important ones
destined for ever to remain their inferiors.
[[1]]
Gulliver's Travels, Part IV, Chapter V.
[ [2]]
Locke on Government, Book I, Chapter i, section 1; and Book II, Chapter
vii., section 91.
Most of the above arguments may be found much more at large in Burke's
Vindication of Natural Society; a treatise in which the evils of the existing
political institutions are displayed with incomparable force of reasoning
and lustre of eloquence, while the intention of the author was to show that
these evils were to be considered as trivial.