Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

the Whigs were willing now and then to consider the desires of the business class; otherwise both Tories and Whigs were equally conservative. Neither party legislated for the benefit of the masses.

Funds voted by Parliament for secret service were in many cases remitted to Parliament in bribes.

When we add to this royal traffic the money spent in elections or legislation by “nabobs” returning to England with wealth gleaned in India, or by businessmen seeking governmental contracts or escape from governmental interference, we get a picture of political corruption hardly rivaled west of the Oder, and unpleasantly instructive on the nature of man.

No standing army—only a militia—was allowed by Parliament; this was a minor factor in England’s superior prosperity at a time when France was supporting a permanent army of 180,000 men, Prussia 190,000, Russia 224,000.

“The development of laws was a degeneration.”22 History is a record of butchery, treachery, and war;23 and “political society is justly charged with much the greater part of this destruction.”

All governments follow the Machiavellian principles, reject all moral restraints, and give the citizens a demoralizing example of greed, deceit, robbery, and homicide.

Democracy in Athens and Rome brought no cure for the evils of government, for it soon became dictatorship through the ability of demagogues to win admiration from gullible majorities. Law is injustice codified; it protects the idle r...

Which of us would have a future if his past were known?

They accepted the aristocratic rule of Britain, though both were commoners; they scorned democracy as the enthronement of mediocrity; they defended orthodox Christianity and the Established Church as irreplaceable bastions of morality and order.

Burke was Irish, poor, conservative, religious, moral; Fox was English, rich, radical, and kept only so much religion as comported with gambling, drinking, mistresses, and the French Revolution.

The press became a third force that could sometimes hold the balance between classes in the nation or parties in Parliament. Men who could buy or control newspapers became as powerful as ministers.

The new freedom, like most liberties, was frequently abused. Sometimes it became the instrument of aims more selfish and partisan, of opposition coarser and more violent, than any that had appeared in Parliament;

In 1750 the population of the English colonies in North America was approximately 1,750,000; the population of England and Wales was some 6,140,000.93 As the rate of growth in the colonies was much higher than in the mother country, it was only a matter of time when the offspring would rebel against the parent. Montesquieu had predicted this in 1730, even to specifying that the break would be caused by British restrictions on American trade.

The Anglican Church fully supported the war against the colonies; so did the Methodists, following Wesley’s lead; but many other Dissenters regretted the conflict, for they remembered that a majority of the colonists had come from Dissenting groups.

the victories and diplomacies of the colonies persuaded the English people, and then their government, to thoughts of peace. Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga (October 17, 1777) was the turning point; for the first time England appreciated Chatham’s warning, “You cannot conquer America.”

He had no trust in the universal male suffrage that Price pleaded for; he thought the majority would be a worse tyrant than a king, and that democracy would degenerate into mob rule. Wisdom lies not in numbers but in experience. Nature knows nothing of equality. Political equality is a “monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel, in the obscure walks of laborious life, serves only to aggravate that real inequality, which it never can remove.”

In his writings on the French Revolution Burke gave a classical expression to a conservative philosophy. Its first principle is to distrust the reasoning of an individual, however brilliant, if it conflicts with the traditions of the race.

The doctrines, myths, and ceremonies of a religion may not conform to our present individual reason, but this may be of minor moment if they comport with the past, present, and presumed future needs of society. Experience dictates that the passions of men can be controlled only by the teachings and observances of religion.

Wigs were waning, and they vanished when Pitt II taxed the powder that deodorized them; they survived on doctors, judges, barristers, and Samuel Johnson; most men were now content with their own hair, gathered at the back of the neck in a ribboned queue.

About 1785 some men extended their breeches from knees to calves; in 1793, inspired by the triumphant French sans-culottes, they let them reach the ankle, and modern man was born.

infantile mortality fell from seventy-four per hundred births in 1749 to forty-one in 1809.6

Tea imports rose from a hundred pounds in 1668 to fourteen million pounds in 1786.9 The coffeehouses now served more tea than coffee.

John Wesley, who belonged to the austere class, described English morality in 1757 as a medley of smuggling, false oaths, political corruption, drunkenness, gambling, cheating in business, chicanery in the courts, servility in the clergy, worldliness among Quakers, and private embezzlement of charitable funds.

By 1776 English traders had carried three million slaves to America; add 250,000 who died in passage and were thrown into the sea.

In 1772, however, an English court ruled that a slave automatically became a free man the moment he touched English soil.

In the upper classes religion was respected as a social function, an aid to morals, and an arm of government, but it had lost private credence and all power over policy.

the furor of deism had passed, and nearly all freethinkers accepted a truce by which they would not interfere with the propagation of the faith if the Church allowed some latitude to sin.

Dissenters—Baptists, Presbyterians, and Independents (Puritans)—enjoyed religious toleration provided they adhered to Trinitarian Christianity; but no one could hold political or military office, or enter Oxford or Cambridge, without accepting the Anglican Church and its Thirty-nine Articles.

Catholics could not legally buy or inherit land except through a subterfuge and payment of a double tax on their property. They were excluded from the army and navy, from the legal profession, from voting or standing for Parliament, and from all governmental posts.

Smith defined the wealth of a nation not as the amount of gold or silver it possessed, but as the land with its improvements and products, and the people with their labor, services, skills, and goods. His thesis was that, with some exceptions, the greatest physical wealth results from the greatest economic liberty.

His achievement lay not so much in the originality of his thought as in the mastery and co-ordination of data, the wealth of illustrative material, the illuminating application of theory to current conditions, a simple, clear, and persuasive style, and a broad viewpoint that raised economics from a “dismal science” to the level of philosophy.

HORACE WALPOLE “This world,” he said, “is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”

All mankind seemed to Walpole a menagerie of “pigmy, short-lived, … comical animals.”

Walpole agreed with most of what Voltaire said, but would have gone to the stake to prevent him from saying it; for he trembled to think what would happen to Europe’s governments if Christianity collapsed.

“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.

How had Christianity made for the decline of Rome? First, by sapping the faith of the people in the official religion, and thereby undermining the state which that religion supported and sanctified.

Other sects could be tolerated because they were tolerant and did not imperil the unity of the nation; the Christians were the only new sect that denounced all others as vicious and damned, and openly predicted the fall of “Babylon”—i.e., Rome.

“that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions [since Constantine], have inflicted far greater severities on each other than they have experienced from the zeal of infidels”; and “the Church of Rome defended by violence the empire she had acquired by fraud.”

He rejected an invitation from Benjamin Franklin, with a card saying that though he respected the American envoy as a man and a philosopher, he could not reconcile it with his duty to his King to have any conversation with a revolted subject. Franklin replied that he had such high regard for the historian that if ever Gibbon should consider the decline and fall of the British Empire as a subject, Franklin would be happy to furnish him with some relevant materials.

In the final chapter he summarized his labors in a famous sentence: “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.”

in less amiable moments—and perhaps because he had taken war and politics (and theology) as the substance of history—he judged history to be “indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

Cruelty, suffering, and injustice have always afflicted mankind, and always will, for they are written in the nature of man. “Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow creatures than from the convulsions of the elements.”

Johnson wrote the epitaph. Better would have been the poet’s own lines in The Good-Natured Man: “Life at the greatest and best is but a forward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.”174

Voltaire: “All history, in short, is little else than a … collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes . .

when asked in after years how he had acquired so good a command of Latin, he answered: “My master whipt me very well. Without that, Sir, I should have done nothing.”5 In old age he deplored the obsolescence of the rod. “There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there, so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.”

He called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel,”

Contemplating the London populace, Johnson judged that democracy would be a disaster. He laughed at liberty and equality as impracticable shibboleths.

when the colonists talked of liberty, justice, and natural rights, Johnson scorned their claims as specious cant, and asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

Marie Antoinette was the most extravagant member of the court. Attached to an impotent husband, cheated of romance, indulging in no liaisons, she amused herself, till 1778, with costly dresses, gems, and palaces, with operas, plays, and balls. She lost fortunes in gambling, and gave fortunes to favorites in reckless generosity.

Hairdressers worked for hours over her head, training her hair to such heights that her chin seemed to be the mean point of her height;