Chapter IX.

Doctrine of obedience.—Right of resistance.—Comparison of foreign and civil war.—Right of calling auxiliaries.—Relations of the people of England and of Holland.

The time was now come when the people of England were called upon to determine, whether they should by longer submission sanction the usurpations and encourage the further encroachments of the Crown, or take up arms against the established authority of their Sovereign for the defence of their legal rights, as well as of those safeguards which the constitution had placed around them. Though the solution of this tremendous problem requires the calmest exercise of reason, the circumstances which bring it forward commonly call forth mightier agents, which disturb and overpower the action of the understanding. In conjunctures so awful, where men feel more than they reason, their conduct is chiefly governed by the boldness or wariness of their nature, by their love of liberty or their attachment to quiet, by their proneness or slowness to fellow-feeling with their countrymen. The generous virtues and turbulent passions rouse the brave and aspiring to resistance; some gentle virtues and useful principles second the qualities of human nature in disposing many to submission. The duty of legal obedience seems to forbid that appeal to arms which the necessity of preserving law and liberty allows, or rather demands. In such a conflict there is little quiet left for moral deliberation. Yet by the immutable principles of morality, and by them alone, must the historian try the conduct of all men, before he allows himself to consider all the circumstances of time, place, opinion, example, temptation, and obstacle, which, though they never authorise a removal of the everlasting landmarks of right and wrong, ought to be well weighed, in allotting a due degree of commendation or censure to human actions.

The English law, like that of most other countries, lays down no limits of obedience. The clergy of the Established Church, the authorised teachers of public morality, carried their principles much farther than was required by a mere concurrence with this cautious silence of the law. Not content with inculcating, in common with all other moralists, religious or philosophical obedience to civil government as one of the most essential duties of human life, the English Church perhaps alone had solemnly pronounced that in the conflict of obligations no other rule of duty could, under any circumstances, become more binding than that of allegiance. Even the duty which seems paramount to every other,—that which requires every citizen to contribute to the preservation of the community,—ceased, according to their moral system, to have any binding force, whenever it could not be performed without resistance to established government. Regarding the power of a monarch as more sacred than the paternal authority from which they vainly laboured to derive it, they refused to nations oppressed by the most cruel tyrants those rights of self-defence which no moralist or lawgiver had ever denied to children against unnatural parents. To palliate the extravagance of thus representing obedience as the only duty without an exception, an appeal was made to the divine origin of government;—as if every other moral rule were not, in the opinion of all theists, equally enjoined and sanctioned by the Deity. To denote these singular doctrines, it was thought necessary to devise the terms of “passive obedience” and “non-resistance,”—uncouth and jarring forms of speech, not unfitly representing a violent departure from the general judgment of mankind. This attempt to exalt submission so high as to be always the highest duty, constituted the undistinguishing loyalty of which the Church of England boasted as her exclusive attribute, in contradistinction to the other Reformed communions, as well as to the Church of Rome. At the dawn of the Reformation it had been promulgated in the Homilies or discourses appointed by the Church to be read from the pulpit to the people; and all deviations from it had been recently condemned by the University of Oxford with the solemnity of a decree from Rome or from Trent. The Seven Bishops themselves, in the very Petition which brought the contest with the Crown to a crisis, boasted of the inviolable obedience of their Church, and of the honour conferred on them by the King’s repeated acknowledgments of it. Nay, all the ecclesiastics and the principal laymen of the Church had recorded their adherence to the same principles, in a still more solemn and authoritative mode. By the Act of Uniformity, which restored the legal establishment of the Episcopal Church, it was enacted that every clergyman, schoolmaster, and private tutor should subscribe a declaration, affirming that “it was not lawful on any pretext to take up arms against the King,” which members of corporations and officers of militia were by other statutes of the same period also compelled to swear;—to say nothing of the still more comprehensive oath which the High-Church leaders, thirteen years before the trial of the Bishops, had laboured to impose on all public officers, magistrates, ecclesiastics, and members of both Houses of Parliament.

That no man can lawfully promise what he cannot lawfully do is a self-evident proposition. That there are some duties superior to others, will be denied by no one; and that when a contest arises the superior ought to prevail, is implied in the terms by which the duties are described. It can hardly be doubted that the highest obligation of a citizen is that of contributing to preserve the community; and that every other political duty, even that of obedience to the magistrates, is derived from and must be subordinate to it. It is a necessary consequence of these simple truths, that no man who deems self-defence lawful in his own case, can, by any engagement, bind himself not to defend his country against foreign or domestic enemies. Though the opposite propositions really involve a contradiction in terms, yet declarations of their truth were imposed by law, and oaths to renounce the defence of our country were considered as binding, till the violent collision of such pretended obligations with the security of all rights and institutions awakened the national mind to a sense of their repugnance to the first principles of morality. Maxims, so artificial and over-strained, which have no more root in nature than they have warrant from reason, must always fail in a contest against the affections, sentiments, habits, and interests which are the motives of human conduct,—leaving little more than compassionate indulgence to the small number who conscientiously cling to them, and fixing the injurious imputation of inconsistency on the great body who forsake them for better guides.

The war of a people against a tyrannical government may be tried by the same tests which ascertain the morality of a war between independent nations. The employment of force in the intercourse of reasonable beings is never lawful, but for the purpose of repelling or averting wrongful force. Human life cannot lawfully be destroyed, or assailed, or endangered, for any other object than that of just defence. Such is the nature and such the boundary of legitimate self-defence in the case of individuals. Hence the right of the lawgiver to protect unoffending citizens by the adequate punishment of crimes: hence, also, the right of an independent state to take all measures necessary to her safety, if it be attacked or threatened from without: provided always that reparation cannot otherwise be obtained, that there is a reasonable prospect of obtaining it by arms, and that the evils of the contest are not probably greater than the mischiefs of acquiescence in the wrong; including, on both sides of the deliberation, the ordinary consequences of the example, as well as the immediate effects of the act. If reparation can otherwise be obtained, a nation has no necessary, and therefore no just cause of war; if there be no probability of obtaining it by arms, a government cannot, with justice to their own nation, embark it in war; and if the evils of resistance should appear, on the whole, greater than those of submission, wise rulers will consider an abstinence from a pernicious exercise of right as a sacred duty to their own subjects, and a debt which every people owes to the great commonwealth of mankind, of which they and their enemies are alike members. A war is just against the wrongdoer when reparation for wrong cannot otherwise be obtained; but it is then only conformable to all the principles of morality, when it is not likely to expose the nation by whom it is levied to greater evils than it professes to avert, and when it does not inflict on the nation which has done the wrong sufferings altogether disproportioned to the extent of the injury. When the rulers of a nation are required to determine a question of peace or war, the bare justice of their case against the wrongdoer never can be the sole, and is not always the chief matter on which they are morally bound to exercise a conscientious deliberation. Prudence in conducting the affairs of their subjects is, in them, a part of justice.

On the same principles the justice of a war made by a people against their own government must be examined. A government is entitled to obedience from the people, because without obedience it cannot perform the duty, for which alone it exists, of protecting them from each other’s injustice. But when a government is engaged in systematically oppressing a people, or in destroying their securities against future oppression, it commits the same species of wrong towards them which warrants an appeal to arms against a foreign enemy. A magistrate who degenerates into a sytematic oppressor shuts the gates of justice, and thereby restores them to the original right of defending them by force. As he withholds the protection of law from them, he forfeits his moral claim to enforce their obedience by the authority of law. Thus far civil and foreign war stand on the same moral foundation: the principles which determine the justice of both against the wrongdoer are, indeed, throughout the same.

But there are certain peculiarities, of great importance in point of fact, which in other respects permanently distinguish them from each other. The evils of failure are greater in civil than in foreign war. A state generally incurs no more than loss in war: a body of insurgents is exposed to ruin. The probabilities of success are more difficult to calculate in cases of internal contest than in a war between states, where it is easy to compare those merely material means of attack and defence which may be measured or numbered. An unsuccessful revolt strengthens the power and sharpens the cruelty of the tyrannical ruler; while an unfortunate war may produce little of the former evil and of the latter nothing. It is almost peculiar to intestine war that success may be as mischievous as defeat. The victorious leaders may be borne along by the current of events far beyond their destination; a goverment may be overthrown which ought to have been only repaired; and a new, perhaps a more formidable, tyranny may spring out of victory. A regular government may stop before its fall becomes precipitate, or check a career of conquest when it threatens destruction to itself: but the feeble authority of the chiefs of insurgents is rarely able, in the one case, to maintain the courage, in the other to repress the impetuosity, of their voluntary adherents. Finally, the cruelty and misery incident to all warfare are greater in domestic dissension than in contests with foreign enemies. Foreign wars have little effect on the feelings, habits, or condition of the majority of a great nation, to most of whom the worst particulars of them may be unknown. But civil war brings the same or worse evils into the heart of a country and into the bosom of many families: it eradicates all habits of recourse to justice and reverence for law; its hostilities are not mitigated by the usages which soften wars between nations; it is carried on with the ferocity of parties who apprehend destruction from each other; and it may leave behind it feuds still more deadly, which may render a country depraved and wretched through a long succession of ages. As it involves a wider waste of virtue and happiness than any other species of war, it can only be warranted by the sternest and most dire necessity. The chiefs of a justly disaffected party are unjust to their fellows and their followers, as well as to all the rest of their countrymen, if they take up arms in a case where the evils of submission are no more intolerable, the impossibility of reparation by pacific means more apparent, and the chances of obtaining it by arms greater than are necessary to justify the rulers of a nation in undertaking a foreign war. A wanton rebellion, when considered with the aggravation of its ordinary consequences, is one of the greatest of crimes. The chiefs of an inconsiderable and ill-concerted revolt, however provoked, incur the most formidable responsibility to their followers and their country. An insurrection rendered necessary by oppression, and warranted by a reasonable probability of a happy termination, is an act of public virtue, always environed with so much peril as to merit admiration.

In proportion to the degree in which a revolt spreads over a large body till it approaches unanimity, the fatal peculiarities of civil war are lessened. In the insurrection of provinces, either distant or separated by natural boundaries,—more especially if the inhabitants, differing in religion and language, are rather subjects of the same government than portions of the same people,—hostilities which are waged only to sever a legal tie may assume the regularity, and in some measure the mildness, of foreign war. Free men, carrying into insurrection those habits of voluntary obedience to which they have been trained, are more easily restrained from excess by the leaders in whom they have placed their confidence. Thus far it may be affirmed, happily for mankind, that insurgents are most humane where they are likely to be most successful. But it is one of the most deplorable circumstances in the lot of man, that the subjects of despotic governments, and still more those who are doomed to personal slavery, though their condition be the worst, and their revolt the most just, are disabled from conducting it to a beneficial result by the very magnitude of the evils under which they groan: for the most fatal effect of the yoke is, that it darkens the understanding and debases the soul: and that the victims of long oppression, who have never imbibed any noble principle of obedience, throw off every curb when they are released from the chain and the lash. In such wretched conditions of society, the rulers may, indeed, retain unlimited power as the moral guardians of the community, while they are conducting the arduous process of gradually transforming slaves into men; but they cannot justly retain it without that purpose, or longer than its accomplishment requires: and the extreme difficulty of such a reformation, as well as the dire effects of any other emancipation, ought to be deeply considered, as proofs of the enormous guilt of those who introduce any kind or degree of unlimited power, as well as of those who increase, by their obstinate resistance, the natural obstacles to the pacific amendment of evils so tremendous.

The frame of the human mind, and the structure of civilized society, have adapted themselves to these important differences between civil and foreign war. Such is the force of the considerations which have been above enumerated; so tender is the regard of good men for the peace of their native country,—so numerous are the links of interest and habit which bind those of a more common sort to an establishment,—so difficult and dangerous is it for the bad and bold to conspire against a tolerably vigilant administration,—the evils which exist in moderate governments appear so tolerable, and those of absolute despotism so incorrigible, that the number of unjust wars between states unspeakably surpasses those of wanton rebellions against the just exercise of authority. Though the maxim, that there are no unprovoked revolts, ascribed to the Duc de Sully, and adopted by Mr. Burke, cannot be received without exceptions, it must be owned that in civilized times mankind have suffered less from a mutinous spirit than from a patient endurance of bad government.

Neither can it be denied that the objects for which revolted subjects take up arms do, in most cases, concern their safety and well-being more deeply than the interests of states are in general affected by the legitimate causes of regular war. A nation may justly make war for the honour of her flag, or for dominion over a rock, if the one be insulted, and the other be unjustly invaded; because acquiescence in the outrage or the wrong may lower her reputation, and thereby lessen her safety. But if these sometimes faint and remote dangers justify an appeal to arms, shall it be blamed in a people who have no other chance of vindicating the right to worship God according to their consciences,—to be exempt from imprisonment and exaction at the mere will and pleasure of one or a few, and to enjoy as perfect a security for their persons, for the free exercise of their industry, and for the undisturbed enjoyment of its fruits, as can be devised by human wisdom under equal laws and a pure administration of justice? What foreign enemy could do a greater wrong to a community than the ruler who would reduce them to hold these interests by no higher tenure than the duration of his pleasure? What war can be more necessary than that which is waged in defence of ancient laws and venerable institutions, which, as far as they are suffered to act, have for ages approved themselves to be the guard of all these sacred privileges,—the shield which protects Reason in her fearless search of truth, and Conscience in the performance of her humble duty towards God,—the nursery of genius and valour,—the spur of probity, humanity, and generosity,—of every faculty of man.

As James was unquestionably an aggressor, and the people of England drew their swords only to prevent him from accomplishing a revolution which would have changed a legal and limited power into a lawless despotism, it is needless, on this occasion, to moot the question, whether arms may be as justly wielded to obtain as to defend liberty. It may, however, be observed, that the rulers who obstinately persist in withholding from their subjects securities for good government, obviously necessary for the permanence of that blessing, generally desired by competently informed men, and capable of being introduced without danger to public tranquillity, appear thereby to place themselves in a state of hostility against the nation whom they govern. Wantonly to prolong a state of insecurity seems to be as much an act of aggression as to plunge a nation into it. When a people discover their danger, they have a moral claim on their governors for security against it. As soon as a distemper is discovered to be dangerous, and a safe and effectual remedy has been found, those who withhold the remedy are as much morally answerable for the deaths which may ensue as if they had administered poison. But though a reformatory revolt may in these circumstances become perfectly just, it has not the same likelihood of a prosperous issue with those insurrections which are more strictly and directly defensive. A defensive revolution, the sole purpose of which is to preserve and secure the laws, has a fixed boundary, conspicuously marked out by the well-defined object which it pursues, and which it seldom permanently over-reaches; and it is thus exempt from that succession of changes which disturbs all habits of peaceable obedience, and weakens every authority not resting on mere force.

Whenever war is justifiable, it is lawful to call in auxiliaries. But though always legitimate against a foreign or domestic enemy, it is often in civil contentions peculiarly dangerous to the wronged people themselves. It must always hazard national independence, and will therefore be the last resource of those who love their country. Good men, more especially if they are happy enough to be the natives of a civilized, and still more of a free country, religiously cultivate their natural repugnance to a remedy of which despair alone can warrant the employment. Yet the dangers of seeking foreign aid vary extremely in different circumstances, and these variations are chiefly regulated by the power, the interest, and the probable disposition of the auxiliary to become an oppressor. The perils are the least where the inferiority of national strength in the foreign ally is such as to forbid all projects of conquest, and where the independence and greatness of the nation to be succoured are the main or sole bulwarks of his own.

These fortunate peculiarities were all to be found in the relations between the people of England and the republic of the United Provinces; and the two nations were farther united by their common apprehensions from France, by no obscure resemblance of national character, by the strong sympathies of religion and liberty, by the remembrance of the renowned reign in which the glory of England was founded on her aid to Holland, and, perhaps, also by the esteem for each other which both these maritime nations had learnt in the fiercest and most memorable combats, which had been then celebrated in the annals of naval warfare. The British people derived a new security from the dangers of foreign interposition from the situation of him who was to be the chief of the enterprise to be attempted for their deliverance, who had as deep an interest in their safety and well-being as in those of the nation whose forces he was to lead to their aid. William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, Stadtholder of the republic of the United Provinces, had been, before the birth of the Prince of Wales, first Prince of the Blood Royal of England; and his consort the Lady Mary, the eldest daughter of the King, was at that period presumptive heiress to the crown.