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At that time party-spirit still respected the old-fashioned notions, that a self-governing nation must be ruled by its own majority, not minority; that a minority which cried out before it was hurt, and "cut the connection" rather than the balance in its own favor, was likely to be a factious and misguided minority; and that a new commonwealth, whose raison d'être was Slavery, had little claim to the sympathies of Englishmen or of civilization.
Socrates was condemned to drink the hemlock at Athens in his seventy-second year, because his lofty teaching ran counter to the prejudices and party-spirit of his age. He was charged by his accusers with corrupting the youth of Athens by inciting them to despise the tutelary deities of the state.
Nevertheless, his mind was strongly cast in the mould of the orator and the pleader: and the vivid contrasts, antitheses, and even paradoxes which were his natural forms of expression do not always tend to secure a judicial view of the matter in hand. Consequently he has been accused by some critics of party-spirit, inaccuracy, and prejudice.
He loved England with an intense and personal love. He believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till England learned to believe in herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs, her defeats his defeats. Her dangers lifted him high above all thought of self or party-spirit. "Be one people," he cried to the factions who rose to bring about his fall: "forget everything but the public!
Society in France, such as it had been once, the far-famed model for all Europe, had ceased to exist. The ambition which had once been identified with the cares of office or the dangers of war now found sufficient food in the bickerings of party-spirit, and revenged itself by salon jokes and salon impertinence for the loss of a lead it either could not or would not take in Parliament.
The greater part of the crimes which disgraced the revolution sprung indeed from the relaxation of law, from popular ignorance, from the remembrance of past oppression, from the fear of foreign conquest, from rapacity, from ambition, from party-spirit.
Were there such a Combination of honest Men, who without any Regard to Places would endeavour to extirpate all such furious Zealots as would sacrifice one half of their Country to the Passion and Interest of the other; as also such infamous Hypocrites, that are for promoting their own Advantage, under Colour of the Publick Good; with all the profligate immoral Retainers to each Side, that have nothing to recommend them but an implicit Submission to their Leaders; we should soon see that furious Party-Spirit extinguished, which may in time expose us to the Derision and Contempt of all the Nations about us.
Its worldly affairs gave him no concern, and party-spirit was loathsome to him as the very antichrist. He was a servant of the church universal, of all that believed or ever would believe in the Lord Christ, therefore of all men, of the whole universe and first, of every man, woman, and child in his own parish. But though he was the servant of the boundless church, no church was his master.
All smiled who understood, and mirth admitted of her crew all who smiled, and party-spirit fled. But there were foreigners present. Foreigners cannot well understand our local allusions; our Cruikshank is to them unintelligible, and Hood's "Sorrows of Number One" quite lost upon them.
Party-spirit was running high, and a political revolution was much to be dreaded in so grave a position of affairs, both in England and Holland. The arrangements and particularly the secret arrangements which he made at his departure were the most fatal measures of all; but these will be described in the following chapter.
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