Historical Characters

After the delivery of this speech, which, after being translated by Madame de Staël, was read with admiration not only in England, but also on the Continent, Mr. Mackintosh, though he lost his cause, was considered no less promising as a pleader, than after the publication of the “Vindiciæ Gallicæ” he had been considered as a pamphleteer. In both instances, however, the sort of effort he had made seemed to have exhausted him, and three months had not elapsed, when, with the plaudits of the public, and the praise of Erskine, still ringing in his ears, he accepted the Recordership of Bombay from Mr. Addington, and retired with satisfaction to the well-paid and knighted indolence of India. His objects in so doing were, he said, to make a fortune, and to write a work.

We shall thoroughly understand the man when we see what he achieved towards the attainment of these two objects. He did not make a fortune; he did not write a work. The greater part of his time seems to have been employed in a restless longing after society, and a perpetual dawdling over books; during the seven years he was absent, he speaks continually of his projected work as “always to be projected.” “I observe” he says, in one of his letters to Mr. Sharpe, “that you touch me once or twice with the spur about my books on Morals. I felt it gall me, for I have not begun.”

Part II

HIS STAY IN INDIA AND HIS CAREER IN PARLIAMENT

Goes to India. – Pursuits there. – Returns home dissatisfied with himself. – Enters Parliament on the Liberal side. – Reasons why he took it. – Fails in first speech. – Merits as an orator. – Extracts from his speeches. – Modern ideas. – Excessive punishments. – Mackintosh’s success as a law reformer. – General parliamentary career.

I

Sir James Mackintosh, in accepting a place in India, abdicated the chances of a brilliant and useful career in England; still his presence in one of our great dependencies was not without its use – for his literary reputation offered him facilities in the encouragement of learned and scientific pursuits – which, when they tend to explore and illustrate the history and resources of a new empire, are, in fact, political ones; while his attempts to obtain a statistical survey, as well as to form different societies, the objects of which were the acquirement and communication of knowledge, though not immediately successful, did not fail to arouse in Bombay, and to spread much farther, a different and a far more enlightened spirit than that which had hitherto prevailed amongst our speculating settlers, or rather sojourners in the East. The mildness of his judicial sway, moreover, and a wish to return to Europe with, if possible, a “bloodless ermine,”87 contributed not only to extend the views, but to soften the manners of the merchant conquerors, and to lay thereby something like a practical foundation for subsequent legislative improvement.

To himself, however, this distant scene seems to have possessed no interest, to have procured no advantage. Worn by the climate, wearied by a series of those small duties and trifling exertions which, unattended by fame, offer none of that moral excitement which overcomes physical fatigue; but little wealthier than when he undertook his voyage, having accomplished none of those works, and enjoyed little of that ease, the visions of which cheered him in undertaking it; a sick, a sad, and, so far as the acceptance of his judgeship was concerned, a repentant man, he (in 1810) took his way homewards.

“It has happened,” he observes in one of his letters – “it has happened by the merest accident that the ‘trial of Peltier’ is among the books in the cabin; and when I recollect the way in which you saw me opposed to Perceval on the 21st of February, 1803 (the day of the trial), and that I compare his present situation – whether at the head of an administration or an opposition – with mine, scanty as my stock is of fortune, health, and spirits, in a cabin nine feet square, on the Indian Ocean, I think it enough that I am free from the soreness of disappointment.”

There is, indeed, something melancholy in the contrast thus offered between a man still young, hopeful, rising high in the most exciting profession, just crowned with the honours of forensic triumph, and the man prematurely old, who in seven short years had become broken, dispirited, and was now under the necessity of beginning life anew, with wasted energies and baffled aspirations.

But Sir James Mackintosh deceived himself in thinking that if the seven years to which he alludes had been passed in England, they would have placed him in the same position as that to which Mr. Perceval had ascended within the same period. Had he remained at the bar, or entered Parliament instead of going to India, he might, indeed, have made several better speeches than Mr. Perceval, as he had already made one; but he would not always have been speaking well, like Mr. Perceval, nor have pushed himself forward in those situations, and at those opportunities, when a good speech would have been most wanted or most effective. At all events, his talents for active life were about to have a tardy trial; the object of his early dreams and hopes was about to be attained – a seat in the House of Commons. He took his place amongst the members of the Liberal opposition; and many who remembered the auspices under which he left England, were somewhat surprised at the banner under which he now enlisted.

II

Here is the place at which it may be most convenient to consider Sir James Mackintosh’s former change; as well as the circumstances which led him back to his old connections. He had entered life violently democratical, – a strong upholder of the French Revolution; he became, so to speak, violently moderate, and a strong opponent of this same Revolution. He altered his politics, and this alteration was followed by his receiving an appointment.

Such is the outline which malignity might fill up with the darkest colours; but it would be unjustly. The machinery of human conduct is complex; and it would be absurd to say that a man’s interests are not likely to have an influence on his actions. But they who see more of our nature than the surface, know that our interests are quite as frequently governed by our character as our character is by our interests. The true explanation, then, of Mackintosh’s conduct is to be found in his order of intellect. His mind was not a mind led by its own inspirations, but rather a mind reflecting the ideas of other men, and of that class of men more especially to which he, as studious and speculative, belonged. The commencement of the French Revolution, the long-prepared work of the Encyclopedists, was hailed by such persons (we speak generally) as a sort of individual success. Burke did much to check this feeling; and subsequent events favoured Burke. But by far the greater number of those addicted to literary pursuits sympathized with the popular party in the States-General. Under this impulse the “Vindiciæ Gallicæ” was written. The exclusion of the eminent men of the National Assembly from power modified, the execution of the Girondists subdued, this impulse. At the fall of those eloquent Republicans the lettered usurpation ceased; and now literature, instead of being opposed to royalty, owed, like it, a debt of vengeance to that inexorable mob which had spared neither.

It was at the time, then, when everybody was recanting that Mackintosh made his recantation. Most men of his class and nature took the same part in the same events; for such men were delighted with the theories of freedom, but shocked at its excesses; and, indeed, it is difficult to conceive anything more abhorrent to the gentle dreams of a civilised philosophy than that wild hurricane of liberty which carried ruin and desolation over France in the same blast that spread the seeds of future prosperity.

We find, it is true, this beautiful passage in the “Vindiciæ Gallicæ:” “The soil of Attica was remarked by antiquity as producing at once the most delicious fruits and the most violent poisons. It is thus with the human mind; and to the frequency of convulsions in the commonwealths we owe those examples of sanguinary tumult and virtuous heroism which distinguish their history from the monotonous tranquillity of modern states.” But though these words were used by Mackintosh, they were merely transcribed by him; they belong to a deeper and more daring genius – they are almost literally the words of Machiavel, and were furnished by the reading, and not by the genuine reflections, of the youthful pamphleteer. He had not in rejoicing over the work of the Constituante anticipated the horrors of the Convention; the regret, therefore, that he expressed for what he condemned as his early want of judgment, was undoubtedly sincere; and no one can fairly blame him for accepting, under such circumstances, a post which was not political, and which removed him from the angry arena in which he would have had to combat with former friends, whose rancour may be appreciated by Dr. Parr’s brutal reply – when Mackintosh asked him, how Quigley, an Irish priest, executed for treason, could have been worse. “I’ll tell you, Jemmy – Quigley was an Irishman, he might have been a Scotchman; he was a priest, he might have been a lawyer; he was a traitor, he might have been an apostate.”

Thus much for the Bombay Recordership. But the feverish panic which the sanguinary government of Robespierre had produced – calmed by his fall, soothed by the feeble government which succeeded him, and replaced at last by the stern domination of a warrior who had at least the merit of restoring order and tranquillity to his country – died away.

A variety of circumstances – including the publication of the “Edinburgh Review,” which, conducted in a liberal and moderate spirit, made upon the better educated class of the British population a considerable impression – favoured and aided the reaction towards a more temperate state of thought. A new era began, in which the timid lost their fears, the factious their hopes. All question of the overthrow of the constitution and of the confiscation of property was at an end; and as politics thus fell back into more quiet channels, parties adopted new watchwords and new devices. The cry was no longer, “Shall there be a Monarchy or a Republic?” but, “Shall the Catholics continue proscribed as helots, or shall they be treated as free men?”

During the seven years which Sir James had passed in India, this was the turn that had been taking place in affairs and opinions. It is hardly possible to conceive any change more calculated to carry along with it a mild and intelligent philosopher, to whom fanaticism of all kinds was hateful.

Those whom he had left, under the standard of Mr. Pitt, contending against anarchical doctrines and universal conquest, were now for disputing one of Mr. Pitt’s most sacred promises, and refusing to secure peace to an empire, at the very crisis of its fortunes, by the establishment of a system of civil equality between citizens who thought differently on the somewhat abstruse subject of transubstantiation. Mr. Perceval, at the head of this section of politicians, was separated from almost every statesman who possessed any reputation as a scholar. Mr. Canning did not belong to his administration; Lord Wellesley was on the point of quitting it. There never was a government to which what may be called the thinking class of the country stood so opposed. Thus, the very same sort of disposition which had detached Sir James Mackintosh, some years ago, from his early friends, was now disposing him to rejoin them; and he moved backwards and forwards, I must repeat, in both instances – when he went to India a Tory,88 and when he entered Parliament a Whig – with a considerable body of persons, who, though less remarked because less distinguished, honestly pursued the same conduct.

All the circumstances, indeed, which marked his conduct at this time do him honour. Almost immediately on his return to England, the premier offered him a seat in Parliament, and held out to him the hopes of the high and lucrative situation of President of the Board of Control. A poor man, and an ambitious man, equally anxious for place and distinction, he refused both; and this refusal, of which we have now the surest proof, was a worthy answer to the imputations which had attended the acceptance of his former appointment. Lord Abinger, who has since recorded the refusal of a seat from Mr. Perceval, was himself the bearer of a similar offer from Lord Cawdor;89 and under the patronage of this latter nobleman Sir James Mackintosh first entered Parliament (1813) as the Member for Nairnshire, a representation the more agreeable, since it was that of his ancestral county, wherein he had inherited the small property which some years before he had been compelled to part with.90

III

Any man entering the House of Commons for the first time late in life possesses but a small chance of attaining considerable parliamentary eminence. It requires some time to seize the spirit of that singular assembly, of which most novices are at first inclined to over-rate and then to under-rate the judgment.

A learned man is more likely to be wrong than any other. He fancies himself amidst an assembly of meditative and philosophic statesmen; he calls up all his deepest thoughts and most refined speculations; he is anxious to astonish by the profundity and extent of his views, the novelty and sublimity of his conceptions; as he commences, the listeners are convinced he is a bore, and before he concludes, he is satisfied that they are blockheads.

The orator, however, is far more out in his conjectures than the audience. The House of Commons consists of a mob of gentlemen, the greater part of whom are neither without talent nor information. But a mob of well-informed gentlemen is still a mob, requiring to be amused rather than instructed, and only touched by those reasons and expressions which, clear to the dullest as to the quickest intellect, vibrate through an assembly as if it had but one ear and one mind.

Besides, the House of Commons is a mob divided beneficially, though it requires some knowledge of the general genius and practical bearings of a representative government to see all the advantages of such a division, into parties. What such parties value is that which is done in their ranks, that which is useful to themselves, of advantage to a common cause; any mere personal exhibition is almost certain to be regarded by them with contempt or displeasure. Differing amongst themselves, indeed, in almost everything else – some being silent and fastidious, some bustling and loquacious, some indolent and looking after amusement, some incapable of being and yet desiring to appear to be men of business, some active, public-spirited, and ambitious – all agree in detecting the philosophic rhetorician. Anything in the shape of subtle refinement, – anything that borders on learned generalities, is sure to be out of place. Even supposing that the new member, already distinguished elsewhere although now at his maiden essay in this strange arena, has sufficient tact to see the errors into which he is likely to fall, he is still a suspected person, and will be narrowly watched as to any design of parading his own acquirements at the expense of other people’s patience.

How did Sir J. Mackintosh first appear amongst auditors thus disposed? Lord Castlereagh moved, on the 20th of December, 1814, for an adjournment to the 1st of March. At that moment the whole of Europe was pouring, in the full tide of victory, into France. Every heart thrilled with recent triumph and the anticipation of more complete success. The ministry had acquired popularity as the reflection of the talents of their general and the tardy good fortune of their allies. The demand for adjournment was the demand for a confidence which they had a right to expect, and which Mr. Whitbread and the leading Whigs saw it would be ungenerous and impolitic to refuse. They granted then what was asked; Mackintosh alone opposed it. His opposition was isolated, certain to be without any practical result, and could only be accounted for by the desire to make a speech!

Lord Castlereagh, who was by nature the man of action which Mackintosh was not, saw at once the error which the new Whig member had committed, and determined to add as much as possible to his difficulties. Instead, therefore, of making the statement which he knew was expected from him, and to which he presumed the orator opposite would affect to reply, he merely moved for the adjournment as a matter of course, which needed no justification. By this simple manœuvre all the formidable artillery which the profound reflector on foreign politics and the eloquent lecturer on the law of nations had brought into the field, was rendered useless. A fire against objects which were not in view, an answer to arguments which had never been employed, was necessarily a very tame exhibition, and indeed the new member was hardly able to get through the oration to which it was evident he had given no common care. In slang phrase, he “broke down.” Why was this? Sir James Mackintosh was not ignorant of the nature of the assembly he addressed; he could have explained to another all that was necessary to catch its ear; but, as I have said a few pages back, the character of a person governs his interests far more frequently than his interests govern his character; and the man I am speaking of was not the man whom a sort of instinct hurries into the heat and fervour of a real contest. To brandish his glittering arms was to him the battle. He therefore persuaded himself that what he did with satisfaction he should do with success. It was just this which made his failure serious to him.

The runner who trips in a race and loses it may win races for the rest of his life; but if he stops in the middle of his course, because he is asthmatic and cannot keep his breath, few persons would bet on him again. Now, the failure of Mackintosh was of this kind; it was not an accidental, but a constitutional one, arising from defects or peculiarities that were part of himself. He never, then, recovered from it. And yet it could not be said that he spoke ill; on the contrary, notwithstanding certain defects in manner, he spoke, after a little practice, well, and far above the ordinary speaking of learned men and lawyers. Some of his orations may be read with admiration, and were even received with applause.

IV

Where shall we find a nobler tone of statesmanlike philosophy than in the following condemnation of that policy which attached Genoa to Piedmont91– a condemnation not the less remarkable for the orator’s not unskilful attempt to connect his former opposition to the French Revolution with the war he was then waging against the Holy Alliance?

“One of the grand and patent errors of the French Revolution was the fatal opinion, that it was possible for human skill to make a government. It was an error too generally prevalent not to be excusable. The American Revolution had given it a fallacious semblance of support, though no event in history more clearly showed its falsehood. The system of laws and the frame of society in North America remained after the Revolution, and remain to this day, fundamentally the same as they ever were.92 The change in America, like the change in 1688, was made in defence of legal right, not in pursuit of political improvement; and it was limited by the necessity of defence which produced it. The whole internal order remained, which had always been Republican. The somewhat slender tie which loosely joined these Republics to a monarchy, was easily and without violence divided. But the error of the French Revolutionists was, in 1789, the error of Europe. From that error we have been long reclaimed by fatal experience.

“We now see, or rather we have seen and felt, that a government is not like a machine or a building, the work of man; that it is the work of nature, like the nobler productions of the vegetable or animal world, which man may improve and corrupt, and even destroy, but which he cannot create. We have long learned to despise the ignorance or the hypocrisy of those who speak of giving a free constitution to a people, and to exclaim, with a great living poet:

‘A gift of that which never can be givenBy all the blended powers of earth and heaven!’

“Indeed, we have gone, perhaps as usual, too near to the opposite error, and not made sufficient allowances for those dreadful cases, which I must call desperate, where, in long-enslaved countries, it is necessary either humbly and cautiously to lay foundations from which liberty may slowly rise, or acquiesce in the doom of perpetual bondage on ourselves and our children.

“But though we no longer dream of making governments, the confederacy of kings seem to feel no doubt of their own power to make a nation. A government cannot be made, because its whole spirit and principles spring from the character of the nation. There would be no difficulty in framing a government, if the habits of a people could be changed by a lawgiver; if he could obliterate their recollections, transform their attachment and reverence, extinguish their animosities and correct those sentiments which, being at variance with his opinions of public interest, he calls prejudices. Now this is precisely the power which our statesmen at Vienna have arrogated to themselves. They not only form nations, but they compose them of elements apparently the most irreconcilable. They made one nation out of Norway and Sweden; they tried to make another out of Prussia and Saxony. They have, in the present case, forced together Piedmont and Genoa to form a nation which is to guard the avenues of Italy, and to be one of the main securities of Europe against universal monarchy.

“It was not the pretension of the ancient system to form states, to divide territory according to speculations of military convenience.

“The great statesmen of former times did not speak of their measures as the noble lord (Lord Castlereagh) did about the incorporation of Belgium with Holland (about which I say nothing), as a great improvement in the system of Europe. That is the language of those who revolutionize that system by a partition like that of Poland, by the establishment of the Federation of the Rhine at Paris, or by the creation of new states at Vienna. The ancient principle was to preserve all those States which had been founded by Time and Nature, the character of which was often maintained, and the nationality of which was sometimes created by the very irregularities of frontier and inequalities of strength, of which a shallow policy complains; to preserve all such States down to the smallest, first by their own national spirit, and secondly by that mutual jealousy which makes every great power the opponent of the dangerous ambition of every other; to preserve nations, living bodies, produced by the hand of Nature – not to form artificial dead machines, called nations, by the words and parchment of a diplomatic act – was the ancient system of our wiser forefathers, &c. &c…”

V

There is also a noble strain of eloquence in the following short defence of the slave-treaty with Spain:

“I feel pride in the British flag being for this object subjected to foreign ships. I think it a great and striking proof of magnanimity that the darling point of honour of our country, the British flag itself, which for a thousand years has braved the battle and the breeze, which has defied confederacies of nations, to which we have clung closer and closer as the tempest roared around us, which has borne us through all perils and raised its head higher as the storm has assailed us more fearfully, should now bend voluntarily to the cause of justice and humanity – should now lower itself, never having been brought low by the mightiest, to the most feeble and defenceless – to those who, far from being able to return the benefits we would confer upon them, will never hear of those benefits, will never know, perhaps, even our name.”

By far the most effective of Sir James Mackintosh’s speeches in Parliament, however, was one that he delivered (June, 1819) against “The Foreign Enlistment Bill,” a measure which was intended to prevent British subjects from aiding the South American colonies in the struggle they were then making for independence. No good report of this oration remains, but even our parliamentary records are sufficient to show that it possessed many of the rarer attributes of eloquence, and moving with a rapidity and a vigour (not frequent in Sir James’s efforts), prevented his language from seeming laboured or his learning tedious.