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I am so far from being convinced that any danger can arise from this inquiry, that I believe the nation can only be injured by a long neglect of such examinations; and that a minister is easily formidable, when he has exempted himself by a kind of prescription from exposing his accounts, and has long had an opportunity of employing the publick money in multiplying his dependants, enriching his hirelings, enslaving boroughs, and corrupting senates.
I was, however, in the first place, merely charged to make overtures to the Senates of each of these towns, and to point out the advantages they would derive from the protection of Napoleon in exchange for the small sacrifice of 6,000,000 francs in his favour.
Such a train of transactions, in which almost every court of France has been engaged, must have given occasion to many private conferences, and secret negotiations; many designs must have been discovered by informers who gave their intelligence at the hazard of their lives, and been defeated, sometimes by secret stipulations, and sometimes by a judicious distribution of money to those who presided in senates or councils.
On a bulk, in a cellar, or in a glass-house, among thieves and beggars, was to be found the author of "The Wanderer," the man of exalted sentiments, extensive views, and curious observations; the man whose remarks on life might have assisted the statesman, whose ideas of virtue might have enlightened the moralist, whose eloquence might have influenced senates, and whose delicacy might have polished courts.
In Campania indeed, Nuceria, Acerrae, and, after an obstinate siege prolonged into the following year , Casilinum also, the key of the Volturnus, were conquered by Hannibal, and the severest punishments were inflicted on the senates of these towns which had adhered to Rome.
These they would have paramount to all constitutions; they would not suffer monarchs, or senates, or popular assemblies, under pretences of dignity or authority or freedom, to shake off those moral riders which reason has appointed to govern every sort of rude power. These, in appearance loading them by their weight, do by that pressure augment their essential force.
Senates and states have had mottoes written over the doors of their meeting-places. Over the senate house of Rome was written, Ne quid respublica detrimenti capiat. I shall wish this may be written over your assembly-houses; but there is another which I would have written with it, Ne quid ecclesia detrimenti capiat. Be careful of both; let neither kirk nor state suffer hurt; let them go together.
A low murmur, that went to the heart of that one, with a noise which seemed to it louder and more terrible than the deepest peal that ever thundered through the firmament of heaven a low murmur, we say, of this description, arose from the beds, composed of those wailing sounds that mingle together as they proceed from the lips of weakness, pain, and famine, until they form that many-toned, incessant, and horrible voice of multiplied misery, which falls upon the ear with the echoes of the grave, and upon the heart as something wonderful in the accents of God, or, as we may suppose the voice of the accusing angel to be, whilst recording before His throne the official inhumanity of councils and senates, who harden their hearts and shut their ears to "the cry of the poor."
The true way to abuse them with effect, is to tell us some faults of theirs, that other men have not, or not so much of as they, &c. Might not any man speak full as bad of senates, diets, and parliaments, as he can do about councils; and as bad of princes, as he does of bishops?
You comprehend? the canaille quiescent is simply mud at the bottom of a stream; the canaille agitated is mud at the surface. But no man capable of three ideas builds the palaces and senates of civilised society out of mud, be it at the top or the bottom of an ocean.
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