Mazzini and Ethic of Politicians
225no one principle in the philosophy of human rights and duties has this curator of our souls’ health ever cast, that we know, one solitary ray of light. Of his apostolical succession we can say nothing: but we are clear that he has not apostolical inspiration. To the higher intellectual and moral experiences of his profes sion he appears an absolute stranger. We frankly own ourselves unable to meet the argument from Tertullian, and cannot at all see our way through Archbishop Bramhall: but we are quite sure Providence never intended that this person should rule the beliefs and moralities of two millions of human beings. P.
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ART.VIII.-1. Report from the Secret Committee of the House of Lords, upon the Detaining and Opening of Letters at the General Post office. 2. Report from the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Com mons on the same subject. THERE are some duties which it costs a painful effort to dis charge, and we candidly confess that our Fº task is one we would willingly have avoided. We feel it incumbent upon us to denounce, in the strongest language, we can com mand, a principle of administration which, if carried out, would be found subversive of all the moral obligations of society; and yet a principle now openly advocated, not merely by political opponents, but in some instances by men with whom we have been accustomed to act, and a class of politicians standing well in the world's regard for public character and private worth. We have long considered the state of our academical and uni versity education to be the cause of half the errors committed in legislation; but of all the evils to be traced to this fruitful source, none are greater than the moral canker they occasion. The ethics of Archdeacon Paley and Professor Sewel,—political expe diency on the one hand, and blind submission to authority on the other,-the transformations of Ovid and the history of the Punic Wars, leave no place for the decalogue, or any sound inter #. of its meaning; and the result in after #. when our igh-born university graduates appear at the council board, is, as the world has seen with astonishment, a formal recognition of PETTY LARCENY as a fundamental maxim of state policy. Enough, it might be supposed, has been said of the secret detention and opening of letters to exhaust the subject; but the Vol. XLII. No. I. Q
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question has been too much treated in reference solely to party objects, and involves far higher considerations. Let us begin by acknowledging that the case attempted to be made out against the present Government, as guilty of something worse in the shape of Post-office espionage than their predeces sors, has not hitherto been sustained. We would go farther, and say that the conduct of the Whig leaders in not interposing be tween their own party and Sir James Graham, but, on the con trary, all but leading on the attack, knowing, as they did, at the time, their own share in similar transactions, was ungenerous and indefensible. The moment the Marquis of Normanby stated in the House of Lords that he had opened letters while in office in Ireland, it became evident to all impartial reasoning men that the two parties (unless as regards the use made of the in formation obtained) were upon an equal footing. It was idle to attempt a wiredrawn distinction between #. propriety of opening the letters of Irishmen and the letters of foreigners. The interests of England abroad are identical with the interests of England at home. A quarrel with Austria about her Italian possessions is, at least, as serious an evil to be deprecated and prevented, if possible, as any outrage upon property, originating in a conspiracy of Ribbonmen. We have given, in-the last number of the ‘Westminster Re view,’ a frank opinion of the character of Sir James Graham. The sketch has not been considered so flattering that we are likely to be accused of any desire to screen from public obser vation a single failing of the present Home Secretary; but we would not exaggerate his defects. He has not risen in our esti mation by the recent exposures; but honestly let us state they make him appear no worse in our eyes for bringing down the dignity of British administration to the commission of felony and acts of dirty meanness, than other politicians of the same school, and of much higher reputation. We read with surprise, amounting almost to incredulity, in the Report of the Committee of the House of Commons, the following list of Cabinet Ministers who, within the last forty years, have stooped to the tricks (to some of them at least) of a Fouché administration. 1806-7. Earl Spencer. 1807. The Right Hon. C. W. W. Wynn.
1809-12. The Right Hon. R. Ryder.
1812-21. Lord Wiscount Sidmouth.
1822-30. The Right Hon. Sir R. Peel.
1822-3. The Right Hon. G. Canning.
1823. Earl Bathurst.
1827. Lord Wiscount Goderich.
- The Right Hon. W. Sturges Bourne.
the Ethic of Politicians 229
which excited in us stronger feelings of dissatisfaction, a more irrepressible impulse of indignation, than the conclusion of this report. A great opportunity was given for vindicating the national honour against the dangerous fallacy of the maxim which all governments are too prone to adopt, that the end jus tifies the means, and the committee actually turn round upon the public, defend the maxim as a safe one, and only qualify it by observing, that when objectionable means are resorted to, it should only be in “cases of emergency” affecting “important pub lic interests.” Of course not; and where has there been a tyrant, however infamous in the annals of oppression, who has not had his “cases of emergency” affecting “important public interests” to plead for every outrage upon public liberty? Many of our readers have heard, or read, that “it is forbidden to do evil that good may come ;” that “law makers should not be law breakers;” that “justice, if it be driven from the earth, should find a refuge in the breast of kings;” but none of these old and familiar axioms seem to have had the slightest weight with the committee. On the contrary, they almost candidly avow a conviction that it is quite becoming and right that the govern ment of kings should be carried on by those dishonest arts and stratagems which, if practised between private gentlemen, or between a common clerk and his employers, would be punished with a horsepond or the treadmill. Fraud, forgery, felony, sa the committee (not indeed in direct terms, but in words º imply no other meaning) may all be practised in “cases of emer gency” for the public good. We hold the doctrine to be deserving of universal execration; and it is high time to expose it. From the reck lessness of assertion exhibited by party leaders, and sometimes flagrant breaches of faith, as in the case of the New Zealand Company, the window duties,” and other questions, an opinion is beginning to prevail, that truth with politicians is but a plaything. A fearful lesson; for there are other classes than lawyers who follow precedents. Our criminal returns show the contagious influences of example: there is a fashion even in murder and suicide : the lad who first threw himself from the Monument had at once a crowd of imitators, and it
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We allude to the clause in the 4 & 5 William IV, ch. 54, moved by Lord Althorpe, July 30, 1834, to enable the occupiers of houses to open fresh windows, free of duty, one effect of which, he stated, would be “to prevent any further increase of the revenue, in the case of houses already existing.” (See “Mirror of Parliament," page 3116.) The clause has been set aside by a quibble, and subsequent administrations have refused to carry out the spirit and intention of the act.
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would be vain now to expect that the opening of letters, and counterfeiting of seals, will be confined to Secretaries of State, and their knavish tools. The vices of the rulers of a people inevitably become national vices. The position occupied by a minister is more exposed to observation dºm that of any other human being. Every action is watched, every word is chronicled ; his opinions are seeds scattered by the Fº winds of heaven, sure at last to fall upon a fit soil for their nourishment and growth. We are told by divines (and the subject demands the strongest illustration we can find) that in the government of the world, so important is the principle that the fountain of justice should itself be pure, that even the Creator of the universe, the Omni potent and All-beneficent, could not forgive sin until the claims of justice had first been satisfied through the atoning sacra fice of Christ. It is part of the creed of the Church of England, that for God to forgive sin without an expiation of the .#. would be for God himself to sin against his own immutable law. We will not discuss a theological question, but we would con trast this doctrine with the political latitudinarianism which recognizes no fixed principles of conduct. Shall not the Judge of the whole earth do right? There is a sublime truth in the senti ment. How different from that rule of government which con founds all distinctions between virtue and vice as mere conven tionalities, and substitutes for them, at the discretion of a minister, the shifting expedients of the hour, a sliding scale of morality,
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complete contradiction to the present report, Colonel Maberly, in his examination a few months back before the Post-office committee, has described this department of Government as thoroughly demoralized. He says, “there has been enormous plunder and robbery” (1163); nay, that “the plunder is terrific * (1176), and that “a letter posted with money in it might as well be thrown down in the street as put into the Post office” (1178). These are strong expressions from a Secretary of the Post office, and it is quite clear that Colonel Maberly never thought of their possible application to the Home Secretary, when he made use of them. }. subordinates of the Post office thus harshly described have done nothing more than imitate the conduct of their chiefs. The plundering of letters by the state from mo– tives of expediency was a state secret to the public, but not to Post-office officials. When Lord Aberdeen determined to steal the contents of Mazzini's letters, he was necessarily obliged to make all the sorters and receivers of St Martin's-le Grand a party to the theft. Let this fact be well weighed by the public. Letters directed to Mazzini did not present themselves of their own accord in Downing street. They had to be searched for by human hands, and carefully selected from a pile of perhaps many thousands, and then to be sent about by different messengers from one office to another. Or, supposing the fact to have been that the Devonshire-street bag was sent to the inner office and searched by Colonel Maberly himself, the notoriety of the object for which the bag was required would still be the same. “Why,” it would of course be asked, “does Colonel Maberly always require, every day and every month for four months in succession, to count the letters contained in the Devonshire-street bag?”. The general fact of the detention and opening of letters must therefore have been known to some hundreds of persons, in cluding common letter-carriers; and what wonder is it that poor and ignorant men should convert public expediency into private expediency, and keep their own counsel when abstracting a bank note, as safely as they had been taught to do the political felonies of their employers. Twelve months ago the newspapers were filled with the case of a Government . who forged ex chequer bills to the amount of several hundred thousand pounds. It is not at all an unlikely fact that the initiative step in his career of fraud was the instruction he possibly received in the art of counterfeiting seals for state purposes. Think of forgery in this form being systematically taught in a Government depart ment, and of the probabilities of its stopping there; an apt pupil never becoming too expert for his own teacher A light now breaks in upon us to explain the animus of the
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