Вольтер
A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 05
The maxim that the king's domain is inalienable is evidently taken from the system of French government.
The right of the king of England to call on his subjects to pay his ransom, should he become a prisoner of war; that of requiring a subsidy when he married his eldest daughter, and when he conferred the honor of knighthood on his son; all these circumstances call to recollection the ancient usages of a kingdom of which William was the chief vassal.
Scarcely had Philip le Bel summoned the commons to the states-general, before Edward, king of England, adopted the like measure, in order to balance the great power of the barons. For it was under this monarch's reign that the commons were first clearly and distinctly summoned to parliament.
We perceive, then, that up to this epoch in the fourteenth century, the English government followed regularly in the steps of France. The two churches are entirely alike; the same subjection to the court of Rome; the same exactions which are always complained of, but, in the end, always paid to that rapacious court; the same dissensions, somewhat more or less violent; the same excommunications; the same donations to monks; the same chaos; the same mixture of holy rapine, superstition, and barbarism.
As France and England, then, were for so long a period governed by the same principles, or rather without any principle at all, and merely by usages of a perfectly similar character, how is it that, at length, the two governments have become as different as those of Morocco and Venice?
It is, perhaps, in the first place to be ascribed to the circumstance of England, or rather Great Britain, being an island, in consequence of which the king has been under no necessity of constantly keeping up a considerable standing army which might more frequently be employed against the nation itself than against foreigners.
It may be further observed, that the English appear to have in the structure of their minds something more firm, more reflective, more persevering, and, perhaps, more obstinate, than some other nations.
To this latter circumstance it may be probably attributed, that, after incessantly complaining of the court of Rome, they at length completely shook off its disgraceful yoke; while a people of more light and volatile character has continued to wear it, affecting at the same time to laugh and dance in its chains.
The insular situation of the English, by inducing the necessity of urging to the particular pursuit and practice of navigation, has probably contributed to the result we are here considering, by giving to the natives a certain sternness and ruggedness of manners.
These stern and rugged manners, which have made their island the theatre of many a bloody tragedy, have also contributed, in all probability, to inspire a generous frankness.
It is in consequence of this combination of opposite qualities that so much royal blood has been shed in the field, and on the scaffold, and yet poison, in all their long and violent domestic contentions, has never been resorted to; whereas, in other countries, under priestly domination poison has been the prevailing weapon of destruction.
The love of liberty appears to have advanced, and to have characterized the English, in proportion as they have advanced in knowledge and in wealth. All the citizens of a state cannot be equally powerful, but they may be equally free. And this high point of distinction and enjoyment the English, by their firmness and intrepidity, have at length attained.
To be free is to be dependent only on the laws. The English, therefore, have ever loved the laws, as fathers love their children, because they are, or at least think themselves, the framers of them.
A government like this could be established only at a late period; because it was necessary long to struggle with powers which commanded respect, or at least, impressed awe – the power of the pope, the most terrible of all, as it was built on prejudice and ignorance; the royal power ever tending to burst its proper boundary, and which it was requisite, however difficult, to restrain within it; the power of the barons, which was, in fact, an anarchy; the power of the bishops, who, always mixing the sacred with the profane, left no means unattempted to prevail over both barons and kings.
The house of commons gradually became the impregnable mole, which successfully repelled those serious and formidable torrents.
The house of commons is, in reality, the nation; for the king, who is the head, acts only for himself, and what is called his prerogative. The peers are a parliament only for themselves; and the bishops only for themselves, in the same manner.
But the house of commons is for the people, as every member of it is deputed by the people. The people are to the king in the proportion of about eight millions to unity. To the peers and bishops they are as eight millions to, at most, two hundred. And these eight million free citizens are represented by the lower house.
With respect to this establishment or constitution – in comparison with which the republic of Plato is merely a ridiculous reverie, and which might be thought to have been invented by Locke, or Newton, or Halley, or Archimedes – it sprang, in fact, out of abuses, of a most dreadful description, and such as are calculated to make human nature shudder. The inevitable friction of this vast machine nearly proved its destruction in the days of Fairfax and Cromwell. Senseless fanaticism broke into this noble edifice, like a devouring fire that consumes a beautiful building formed only of wood.
In the time of William the Third it was rebuilt of stone. Philosophy destroyed fanaticism, which convulses to their centres states even the most firm and powerful. We cannot easily help believing that a constitution which has regulated the rights of king, lords, and people, and in which every individual finds security, will endure as long as human institutions and concerns shall have a being.
We cannot but believe, also, that all states not established upon similar principles, will experience revolutions.
The English constitution has, in fact, arrived at that point of excellence, in consequence of which all men are restored to those natural rights, which, in nearly all monarchies, they are deprived of. These rights are, entire liberty of person and property; freedom of the press; the right of being tried in all criminal cases by a jury of independent men – the right of being tried only according to the strict letter of the law; and the right of every man to profess, unmolested, what religion he chooses, while he renounces offices, which the members of the Anglican or established church alone can hold. These are denominated privileges. And, in truth, invaluable privileges they are in comparison with the usages of most other nations of the world! To be secure on lying down that you shall rise in possession of the same property with which you retired to rest; that you shall not be torn from the arms of your wife, and from your children, in the dead of night, to be thrown into a dungeon, or buried in exile in a desert; that, when rising from the bed of sleep, you will have the power of publishing all your thoughts; and that, if you are accused of having either acted, spoken, or written wrongly, you can be tried only according to law. These privileges attach to every one who sets his foot on English ground. A foreigner enjoys perfect liberty to dispose of his property and person; and, if accused of any offence, he can demand that half the jury shall be composed of foreigners.
I will venture to assert, that, were the human race solemnly assembled for the purpose of making laws, such are the laws they would make for their security. Why then are they not adopted in other countries? But would it not be equally judicious to ask, why cocoanuts, which are brought to maturity in India, do not ripen at Rome? You answer, these cocoanuts did not always, or for some time, come to maturity in England; that the trees have not been long cultivated; that Sweden, following her example, planted and nursed some of them for several years, but that they did not thrive; and that it is possible to produce such fruit in other provinces, even in Bosnia and Servia. Try and plant the tree then.
And you who bear authority over these benighted people, whether under the name of pasha, effendi, or mollah, let me advise you, although an unpromising subject for advice, not to act the stupid as well as barbarous part of riveting your nations in chains. Reflect, that the heavier you make the people's yoke, the more completely your own children, who cannot all of them be pashas, will be slaves. Surely you would not be so contemptible a wretch as to expose your whole posterity to groan in chains, for the sake of enjoying a subaltern tyranny for a few days! Oh, how great at present is the distance between an Englishman and a Bosnian!
SECTION VII
The mixture now existing in the government of England – this concert between the commons, the lords, and the king – did not exist always. England was long a slave. She was so to the Romans, the Saxons, Danes, and French. William the Conqueror, in particular, ruled her with a sceptre of iron. He disposed of the properties and lives of his new subjects like an Oriental despot; he prohibited them from having either fire or candle in their houses after eight o'clock at night, under pain of death: his object being either to prevent nocturnal assemblies among them, or merely, by so capricious and extravagant a prohibition, to show how far the power of some men can extend over others. It is true, that both before as well as after William the Conqueror, the English had parliaments; they made a boast of them; as if the assemblies then called parliaments, made up of tyrannical churchmen and baronial robbers, had been the guardians of public freedom and happiness.
The barbarians, who, from the shores of the Baltic poured over the rest of Europe, brought with them the usage of states or parliaments, about which a vast deal is said and very little known. The kings were not despotic, it is true; and it was precisely on this account that the people groaned in miserable slavery. The chiefs of these savages, who had ravaged France, Italy, Spain, and England, made themselves monarchs. Their captains divided among themselves the estates of the vanquished; hence, the margraves, lairds, barons, and the whole series of the subaltern tyrants, who often contested the spoils of the people with the monarchs, recently advanced to the throne and not firmly fixed on it. These were all birds of prey, battling with the eagle, in order to suck the blood of the doves. Every nation, instead of one good master, had a hundred tyrants. The priests soon took part in the contest. From time immemorial it had been the fate of the Gauls, the Germans, and the islanders of England, to be governed by their druids and the chiefs of their villages, an ancient species of barons, but less tyrannical than their successors. These druids called themselves mediators between God and men; they legislated, they excommunicated, they had the power of life and death. The bishops gradually succeeded to the authority of the druids, under the Goth and Vandal government. The popes put themselves at their head; and, with briefs, bulls, and monks, struck terror into the hearts of kings, whom they sometimes dethroned and occasionally caused to be assassinated, and drew to themselves, as nearly as they were able, all the money of Europe. The imbecile Ina, one of the tyrants of the English heptarchy, was the first who, on a pilgrimage to Rome, submitted to pay St. Peter's penny – which was about a crown of our money – for every house within his territory. The whole island soon followed this example; England gradually became a province of the pope; and the holy father sent over his legates, from time to time, to levy upon it his exorbitant imposts. John, called Lackland, at length made a full and formal cession of his kingdom to his holiness, by whom he had been excommunicated; the barons, who did not at all find their account in this proceeding, expelled that contemptible king, and substituted in his room Louis VIII., father of St. Louis, king of France. But they soon became disgusted with the new-comer, and obliged him to recross the sea.
While the barons, bishops, and popes were thus harassing and tearing asunder England, where each of the parties strove eagerly to be the dominant one, the people, who form the most numerous, useful, and virtuous portion of a community, consisting of those who study the laws and sciences, merchants, artisans, and even peasants, who exercise at once the most important and the most despised of occupations; the people, I say, were looked down upon equally by all these combatants, as a species of beings inferior to mankind. Far, indeed, at that time, were the commons from having the slightest participation in the government: they were villeins, or serfs of the soil; both their labor and their blood belonged to their masters, who were called "nobles." The greater number of men in Europe were what they still continue to be in many parts of the world – the serfs of a lord, a species of cattle bought and sold together with the land. It required centuries to get justice done to humanity; to produce an adequate impression of the odious and execrable nature of the system, according to which the many sow, and only the few reap; and surely it may even be considered fortunate for France that the powers of these petty robbers were extinguished there by the legitimate authority of kings, as it was in England by that of the king and nation united.
Happily, in consequence of the convulsions of empires by the contests between sovereigns and nobles, the chains of nations are more or less relaxed. The barons compelled John (Lackland) and Henry III to grant the famous charter, the great object of which, in reality, was to place the king in dependence on the lords, but in which the rest of the nation was a little favored, to induce it, when occasion might require, to range itself in the ranks of its pretended protectors. This great charter, which is regarded as the sacred origin of English liberties, itself clearly shows how very little liberty was understood. The very title proves that the king considered himself absolute by right, and that the barons and clergy compelled him to abate his claim to this absolute power only by the application of superior force. These are the words with which Magna Charta begins: "We grant, of our free will, the following privileges to the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, and barons, of our kingdom," etc. Throughout the articles of it, not a word is said of the house of commons; a proof that it did not then exist, or that it existed without power. The freemen of England are specified in it, a melancholy demonstration that there were men who were not free. We perceive, from the thirty-seventh article, that the pretended freemen owed service to their lord. Liberty of such a description had but too strong a similarity to bondage. By the twenty-first article, the king ordains that henceforward his officers shall not take away the horses and ploughs of freemen, without paying for them. This regulation was considered by the people as true liberty, because it freed them from a greater tyranny. Henry VII., a successful warrior and politician, who pretended great attachment to the barons, but who cordially hated and feared them, granted them permission to alienate their lands. In consequence of this, the villeins, who by their industry and skill accumulated property, in the course of time became purchasers of the castles of the illustrious nobles who had ruined themselves by their extravagance, and, gradually, nearly all the landed property of the kingdom changed masters.
The house of commons now advanced in power every day. The families of the old nobility became extinct in the progress of time; and, as in England, correctly speaking, peers only are nobles, there would scarcely have been any nobles in the country, if the kings had not, from time to time, created new barons, and kept up the body of peers, whom they had formerly so much dreaded, to counteract that of the commons, now become too formidable. All the new peers, who compose the upper house, receive from the king their title and nothing more, since none of them have the property of the lands of which they bear the names. One is duke of Dorset, without possessing a single foot of land in Dorsetshire; another is an earl under the name of a certain village, yet scarcely knowing where that village is situated. They have power in the parliament, and nowhere else.
You hear no mention, in this country, of the high, middle, and low courts of justice, nor of the right of chase over the lands of private citizens, who have no right to fire a gun on their own estates.
A man is not exempted from paying particular taxes because he is a noble or a clergyman. All imposts are regulated by the house of commons, which, although subordinate in rank, is superior in credit to that of the lords. The peers and bishops may reject a bill sent up to them by the commons, when the object is to raise money, but they can make no alteration in it: they must admit it or reject it, without restriction. When the bill is confirmed by the lords, and assented to by the king, then all the classes of the nation contribute. Every man pays, not according to his rank – which would be absurd – but according to his revenue. There is no arbitrary faille or capitation, but a real tax on lands. These were all valued in the reign of the celebrated King William. The tax exists still unaltered, although the rents of lands have considerably increased; thus no one is oppressed, and no one complains. The feet of the cultivator are not bruised and mutilated by wooden shoes; he eats white bread; he is well clothed. He is not afraid to increase his farming-stock, nor to roof his cottage with tiles, lest the following year should, in consequence, bring with it an increase of taxation. There are numerous farmers who have an income of about five or six hundred pounds sterling, and still disdain not to cultivate the land which has enriched them, and on which they enjoy the blessing of freedom.
SECTION VIII
The reader well knows that in Spain, near the coast of Malaga, there was discovered, in the reign of Philip II., a small community, until then unknown, concealed in the recesses of the Alpuxarras mountains. This chain of inaccessible rocks is intersected by luxuriant valleys, and these valleys are still cultivated by the descendants of the Moors, who were forced, for their own happiness, to become Christians, or at least to appear such.
Among these Moors, as I was stating, there was, in the time of Philip, a small society, inhabiting a valley to which there existed no access but through caverns. This valley is situated between Pitos and Portugos. The inhabitants of this secluded abode were almost unknown to the Moors themselves. They spoke a language that was neither Spanish nor Arabic, and which was thought to be derived from that of the ancient Carthaginians.
This society had but little increased in numbers: the reason alleged for which was that the Arabs, their neighbors, and before their time the Africans, were in the practice of coming and taking from them the young women.
These poor and humble, but nevertheless happy, people, had never heard any mention of the Christian or Jewish religions; and knew very little about that of Mahomet, not holding it in any estimation. They offered up, from time immemorial, milk and fruits to a statue of Hercules. This was the amount of their religion. As to other matters, they spent their days in indolence and innocence. They were at length discovered by a familiar of the Inquisition. The grand inquisitor had the whole of them burned. This is the sole event of their history.
The hallowed motives of their condemnation were, that they had never paid taxes, although, in fact, none had ever been demanded of them, and they were totally unacquainted with money; that they were not possessed of any Bible, although they did not understand Latin; and that no person had been at the pains of baptizing them. They were all invested with the san benito, and broiled to death with becoming ceremony.
It is evident that this is a specimen of the true system of government; nothing can so completely contribute to the content, harmony, and happiness of society.
