CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS; OR CHINESE ARGUMENT—(ad verecundiam.)

CHAPTER III.

1. Fallacy of Irrevocable Laws.

2. Fallacy of Vows—(ad superstitionem.)

The two fallacies brought to view in this chapter are intimately connected, and require to be considered together: the object in view is the same in both—the difference lies only in the instrument employed; and both of them are in effect the fallacy of the wisdom of our ancestors, pushed to the highest degree of extravagance and absurdity.

The object is to tie up the hands of future legislators by obligations supposed to be indissoluble.

In the case of the fallacy derived from the alleged irrevocable nature of certain laws, or to speak briefly, the fallacy of Irrevocable laws, the instrument employed is a contract—a contract entered into by the ruling powers of the state in question, with the ruling powers of some other party. This other party may be either the sovereign of some other state, or the whole or some part of the people of the state in question.

In the case of the fallacy derived from vows, a supernatural power is called in and employed in the character of guarantee.

CHAPTER IV.

NO-PRECEDENT ARGUMENT—(ad verecundiam.)

Exposition.—“The proposition is of a novel and unprecedented complexion: the present is surely the first time that any such thing was ever heard of in this house.”

Whatsoever may happen to be the subject introduced, above is a specimen of the infinite variety of forms in which the opposing predicate may be clothed.

To such an observation there could be no objection, if the object with which it were made was only to fix attention to a new or difficult subject: “Deliberate well before you act, as you have no precedent to direct your course.”

Exposure.—But in the character of an argument, as a ground for the rejection of the proposed measure, it is obviously a fallacy.

Whether or no the alleged novelty actually exists, is an inquiry which it can never be worth while to make.

That it is impossible that it should in any case afford the smallest ground for the rejection of the measure,—that the observation is completely irrelevant in relation to the question, whether or no it is expedient that such a measure should be adopted,—is a proposition to which it seems difficult to conceive how an immediate assent can be refused. If no specific good is indicated as likely to be produced by the proposed measure, this deficiency is itself sufficient to warrant the rejection of it. If any such specific good is indicated, it must be minute indeed, if an observation of this nature can afford a sufficient ground for the rejection of the measure.

If the observation presents a conclusive objection against the particular measure proposed, so it would against any other that ever was proposed, including every measure that ever was adopted, and therein every institution that exists at present. If it proves that this ought not to be done, it proves that nothing else ought ever to have been done.

It may be urged, that if the measure had been a fit one, it would have been brought upon the carpet before. But there are several obstacles, besides the inexpediency of a measure, which, for any length of time, may prevent its being brought forward:—

1. If, though beyond dispute promotive of the interest of the many, there be anything in it that is adverse to the interests, the prejudices, or the humours of the ruling few, the wonder is, not that it should not have been brought forward before, but that it should be brought forward even now.

2. If in the complexion of it there be anything which it required a particular degree of ingenuity to contrive and adapt to the purpose, this would of itself be sufficient to account for the tardiness of its appearance.

In legislation, the birth of ingenuity is obstructed and retarded by difficulties beyond any which exist in other matters. Besides the more general sinister interest of the powerful few in whose hands the functions of government are lodged, the more particular sinister interest affecting the body of lawyers, is one to which any given measure, in proportion to the ingenuity displayed in it, is likely to be adverse.

Measures which come under the head of indirect legislation, and in particular those which have the quality of executing themselves, are the measures which, as they possess most efficiency when established, so they require greater ingenuity in the contrivance. Now, in proportion as laws execute themselves—in other words, are attended with voluntary obedience—in that proportion are they efficient; but it is only in proportion as they fail of being efficient, that to the man of law they are beneficial and productive; because it is only in proportion as they stand in need of enforcement, that business makes its way into the hands of the man of law.

CHAPTER V.

1. Self-assumed Authority—(ad ignorantiam; ad verecundiam.)

2. The Self-trumpeter’s fallacy.

This fallacy presents itself in two shapes:—1. An avowal made with a sort of mock modesty and caution by a person in exalted station, that he is incapable of forming a judgment on the question in debate, such incapacity being sometimes real, sometimes pretended; 2. Open assertion, by a person so situated, of the purity of his motives and integrity of his life, and the entire reliance which may consequently be reposed on all he says or does.

I. The first is commonly played off as follows:—An evil or defect in our institutions is pointed out clearly, and a remedy proposed, to which no objection can be made; up starts a man high in office, and, instead of stating any specific objection, says, “I am not prepared” to do so and so, “I am not prepared to say,” &c. The meaning evidently intended to be conveyed is, “If I, who am so dignified, and supposed to be so capable of forming a judgment, avow myself incompetent to do so, what presumption, what folly, must there be in the conclusion formed by any one else!” In truth, this is nothing else but an indirect way of browbeating—arrogance under a thin veil of modesty.

If you are not prepared to pass a judgment, you are not prepared to condemn, and ought not, therefore, to oppose: the utmost you are warranted in doing, if sincere, is to ask for a little time for consideration.

Supposing the unpreparedness real, the reasonable and practical inference is—say nothing, take no part in the business.

A proposition for the reforming of this or that abuse in the administration of justice, is the common occasion for the employment of this fallacy.

In virtue of his office, every judge, every law-officer, is supposed and pronounced to be profoundly versed in the science of the law.

Yes; of the science of the law as it is, probably as much as any other man: but law as it ought to be, is a very different thing; and the proposal in question has for its avowed, and commonly for its real object, the bringing law as it is, somewhat nearer to law as it ought to be. But this is one of those things for which the great dignitary is sure to be at all times unprepared,—unprepared to join in any such design, everything of this sort, having been at all times contrary to his interest,—unprepared so much as to form any judgment concerning the conduciveness of the proposed measure to such its declared object: in any such point of view it has never been his interest to consider it.

A mind that, from its first entrance upon this subject, has been applying its whole force to the inquiry as to what are the most effectual means of making its profit of the imperfections of the system,—a mind to which, of consequence, the profit from these sources of affliction has been all along an object of complacency, and the affliction itself, at best, but an object of indifference,—a mind which has, throughout the whole course of its career, been receiving a correspondent bias, and has in consequence contracted a correspondent distortion,—cannot with reason be expected to exert itself with much alacrity or facility in a track so opposite and so new.

For the quiet of his conscience, if, at the outset of his career, it were his fortune to have one, he will naturally have been feeding himself with the notion, that if there be anything that is amiss, in practice it cannot be otherwise; which being granted, and, accordingly, that suffering to a certain amount cannot but take place, whatsoever profit can be extracted from it, is fair game, and as such belongs of right to the first occupant among persons duly qualified.

The wonder would not be great if an officer of the military profession should exhibit, for a time at least, some awkwardness if forced to act in the character of a surgeon’s mate: to inflict wounds requires one sort of skill—to dress and heal them requires another. Telephus is the only man upon record who possessed an instrument by which wounds were with equal dispatch and efficiency made and healed. The race of Telephus is extinct; and as to his spears, if ever any of them found their way into Pompeii or Herculaneum, they remain still among the ruins.

Unfortunately, in this case, were the ability to form a judgment ever so complete, the likelihood of co-operation would not be increased. None are so completely deaf as those who will not hear—none are so completely unintelligent as those who will not understand.

Call upon a chief-justice to concur in a measure for giving possibility to the recovery of a debt,—the recovery of which is in his own court rendered impossible by costs which partly go into his own pocket,—as well might you call upon the Pope to abjure the errors of the church of Rome. If not hard pressed, he will maintain a prudent and easy silence; if hard pressed, he will let fly a volley of fallacies—he will play off the argument drawn from the imputation of bad motives, and tell you of the profit expected by the party by whom the bill was framed, and petition procured, to form a ground for it. If that be not sufficient, he will transform himself in the first place into a witness giving evidence upon a committee; in the next place, after multiplying himself into the number of members necessary to hear and report upon that evidence, he will make a report accordingly.

He will report in that character, that when in any town a set of tradesmen have, on their petition, obtained a judicatory in which the recovery of a debt under 40s. or £5 is not attended with that obstruction of accumulated expense by which the relief which his judicatory professes to afford is always accompanied, it has been with no other effect than that of giving in the character of judges effect to claims which in the character of witnesses it was originally their design, and afterwards their practice, to give support to by perjury.

II. The second of these two devices may be called the self-trumpeter’s fallacy.

By this name it is not intended to designate those occasional impulses of vanity which lead a man to display or overrate his pretensions to superior intelligence. Against the self-love of the man whose altar to himself is raised on this ground, rival altars, from every one of which he is sure of discouragement, raise themselves all around.

But there are certain men in office, who in discharge of their functions arrogate to themselves a degree of probity which is to exclude all imputations and all inquiry; their assertions are to be deemed equivalent to proof; their virtues are guarantees for the faithful discharge of their duties; and the most implicit confidence is to be reposed in them on all occasions. If you expose any abuse, propose any reform, call for securities, inquiry, or measures to promote publicity, they set up a cry of surprise, amounting almost to indignation, as if their integrity were questioned, or their honour wounded. With all this, they dexterously mix up intimations that the most exalted patriotism, honour, and perhaps religion, are the only sources of all their actions.

Such assertions must be classed among fallacies, because—1. They are irrelevant to the subject in discussion; 2. The degree in which the predominance of motives of the social or disinterested cast is commonly asserted or insinuated, is, by the very nature of man, rendered impossible; 3. The sort of testimony thus given affords no legitimate reason for regarding the assertion in question to be true, for it is no less completely in the power of the most profligate than in that of the most virtuous of mankind; nor is it in a less degree the interest of the profligate man to make such assertions. Be they ever so completely false, not any the least danger of punishment does he see himself exposed to, at the hands either of the law or of public opinion.

For ascribing to any one of these self-trumpeters the smallest possible particle of that virtue which they are so loud in the profession of, there is no more rational cause, than for looking upon this or that actor as a good man, because he acts well the part of Othello, or bad, because he acts well the part of Iago.

4. On the contrary, the interest he has in trying what may be done by these means, is more decided and exclusive than in the case of the man of real probity and social feeling. The virtuous man, being what he is, has that chance for being looked upon as such; whereas the self-trumpeter in question, having no such ground of reliance, beholds his only chance in the conjunct effect of his own effrontery, and the imbecility of his hearers.

These assertions of authority, therefore, by men in office, who would have us estimate their conduct by their character, and not their character by their conduct, must be classed among political fallacies. If there be any one maxim in politics more certain than another, it is, that no possible degree of virtue in the governor can render it expedient for the governed to dispense with good laws and good institutions.*

CHAPTER VI.

LAUDATORY PERSONALITIES—(ad amicitiam.)

Personalities of this class are the opposites, and in some respects the counterparts, of vituperative personalities, which will be treated of next in order, at the commencement of the ensuing Book.

Laudatory personalities are susceptible of the same number of modifications as will be shown to exist in the case of vituperative personalities: but in this case the argument is so much weaker than in the other, that the shades and modifications of it are seldom resorted to, and are therefore not worth a detailed exposition. The object of vituperative personalities is to effect the rejection of a measure, on account of the alleged bad character of those who promote it; and the argument advanced is—“The persons who propose or promote the measure, are bad; therefore the measure is bad, or ought to be rejected.” The object of laudatory personalities is to effect the rejection of a measure on account of the alleged good character of those who oppose it; and the argument advanced is—“The measure is rendered unnecessary by the virtues of those who are in power; their opposition is a sufficient authority for the rejection of the measure.”

The argument indeed is generally confined to persons of this description, and is little else than an extension of the self-trumpeter’s fallacy. In both of them, authority derived from the virtues or talents of the persons lauded, is brought forward as superseding the necessity of all investigation.

“The measure proposed implies a distrust of the members of his Majesty’s government; but so great is their integrity, so complete their disinterestedness, so uniformly do they prefer the public advantage to their own, that such a measure is altogether unnecessary:—their disapproval is sufficient to warrant an opposition: precautions can only be requisite where danger is apprehended; here, the high character of the individuals in question is a sufficient guarantee against any ground of alarm.”

The panegyric goes on increasing in proportion to the dignity of the functionary thus panegyrized.

Subordinates in office are the very models of assiduity, attention, and fidelity to their trust; ministers, the perfection of probity and intelligence: and as for the highest magistrate in the state, no adulation is equal to describe the extent of his various merits.

There can be no difficulty in exposing the fallacy of the argument attempted to be deduced from these panegyrics:—

1. They have the common character of being irrelevant to the question under discussion. The measure must have something extraordinary in it, if a right judgment cannot be founded on its merits, without first estimating the character of the members of the government.

2. If the goodness of the measure be sufficiently established by direct arguments, the reception given to it by those who oppose it will form a better criterion for judging of their character, than their character (as inferred from the places which they occupy) for judging of the goodness or badness of the measure.

3. If this argument be good in any one case, it is equally good in every other; and the effect of it, if admitted, would be to give to the persons occupying for the time being the situation in question, an absolute and universal negative upon every measure not agreeable to their inclinations.

4. In every public trust, the legislator should, for the purpose of prevention, suppose the trustee disposed to break the trust in every imaginable way in which it would be possible for him to reap, from the breach of it, any personal advantage. This is the principle on which public institutions ought to be formed; and when it is applied to all men indiscriminately, it is injurious to none. The practical inference is, to oppose to such possible (and what will always be probable) breaches of trust every bar that can be opposed, consistently with the power requisite for the efficient and due discharge of the trust. Indeed, these arguments, drawn from the supposed virtues of men in power, are opposed to the first principles on which all laws proceed.

5. Such allegations of individual virtue are never supported by specific proof—are scarce ever susceptible of specific disproof; and specific disproof, if offered, could not be admitted, viz. in either House of Parliament. If attempted elsewhere, the punishment would fall, not on the unworthy trustee, but on him by whom the unworthiness had been proved.

CHAPTER I.

VITUPERATIVE PERSONALITIES—(ad odium.)

To this class belongs a cluster of fallacies so intimately connected with each other, that they may first be enumerated, and some observations be made upon them in the lump. By seeing their mutual relations to each other—by observing in what circumstances they agree, and in what they differ—a much more correct as well as complete view will be obtained of them, than if they were considered each of them by itself.

The fallacies that belong to this cluster may be denominated—

1. Imputation of bad design.

2. Imputation of bad character.

3. Imputation of bad motive.

4. Imputation of inconsistency.

5. Imputation of suspicious connexions—Noscitur ex sociis.

6. Imputation founded on identity of denomination—Noscitur ex cognominibus.

Of the fallacies belonging to this class, the common character is the endeavour to draw aside attention from the measure to the man;* and this in such sort as, from the supposed imperfection on the part of the man by whom a measure is supported or opposed, to cause a correspondent imperfection to be imputed to the measure so supported, or excellence to the measure so opposed. The argument in its various shapes amounts to this:—In bringing forward or supporting the measure in question, the person in question entertains a bad design; therefore the measure is bad:—he is a person of a bad character; therefore the measure is bad:—he is actuated by a bad motive; therefore the measure is bad:—he has fallen into inconsistencies; on a former occasion, he either opposed it, or made some observation not reconcilable with some observation which he has advanced on the present occasion; therefore the measure is bad:—he is on a footing of intimacy with this or that person, who is a man of dangerous principles and designs, or has been seen more or less frequently in his company, or has professed, or is suspected of entertaining some opinion which the other has professed, or been suspected of entertaining; therefore the measure is bad:—he bears a name that at a former period was borne by a set of men now no more, by whom bad principles were entertained, or bad things done; therefore the measure is bad.

In these arguments, thus arranged, a sort of anti-climax may be observed; the fact intimated by each succeeding argument being suggested in the character of evidence of the one immediately preceding it, or at least of some one or more of those which precede it, and the conclusion being accordingly weaker and weaker at each step. The second is a sort of circumstantial evidence of the first, the third of the second, and so on. If the first is inconclusive, the rest fall at once to the ground.

Exposure.—Various are the considerations which concur in demonstrating the futility of the fallacies comprehended in this class, and (not to speak of the improbity of the utterers) the weakness of those with whom they obtain currency—the weakness of the acceptors:—

1. In the first place comes that general character of irrelevancy which belongs to these, in common with the several other articles that stand upon the list of fallacies.

2. In the next place comes the complete inconclusiveness. Whatsoever be their force as applied to a bad measure—to the worst measure that can be imagined, they would be found to apply with little less force to all good measures—to the best measures that can be imagined.

Among 658, or any such large number of persons taken at random, there will be persons of all characters: if the measure is a good one, will it become bad because it is supported by a bad man? If it is bad, will it become good because supported by a good man? If the measure be really inexpedient, why not at once show that it is so? Your producing these irrelevant and inconclusive arguments in lieu of direct ones, though not sufficient to prove that the measure you thus oppose is a good one, contributes to prove that you yourselves regard it as a good one.

After these general observations, let us examine, more in detail, the various shapes the fallacy assumes.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

FALLACY OF DISTRUST, OR, WHAT’S AT THE BOTTOM?—(ad metum.)

Exposition.—This argument may be considered as a particular modification of the No-Innovation argument. An arrangement or set of arrangements has been proposed, so plainly beneficial, and at the same time so manifestly innoxious, that no prospect presents itself of bringing to bear upon them with any effect the cry of No innovation. Is the anti-innovationist mute? No; he has this resource:—In what you see as yet (says he) there may perhaps be no great mischief; but depend upon it, in the quarter from whence these proposed innoxious arrangements come, there are more behind that are of a very different complexion; if these innoxious ones are suffered to be carried, others of a noxious character will succeed without end, and will be carried likewise.

Exposure.—The absurdity of this argument is too glaring to be susceptible of any considerable illustration from anything that can be said of it:—

1. In the first place, it begins with a virtual admission of the propriety of the measure considered in itself; and thus containing within itself a demonstration of its own futility, it cuts up from under it the very ground which it is endeavouring to make: yet, from its very weakness, it is apt to derive for the moment a certain degree of force. By the monstrosity of its weakness, a feeling of surprise, and thereupon of perplexity, is apt to be produced: and so long as this feeling continues, a difficulty of finding an appropriate answer continues with it. For that which is itself nothing, what answer (says a man) can I find?

If two measures—G and B—were both brought forward at the same time, G being good and B bad;—rejecting G, because B is bad, would be quite absurd enough; and at first view a man might be apt to suppose that the force of absurdity could go no further.

But the present fallacy does in effect go much further:—two measures, both of them brought upon the carpet together, both of them unobjectionable, are to be rejected, not for anything that is amiss in either of them, but for something that by possibility may be found amiss in some other or others that nobody knows of, and the future existence of which, without the slightest ground, is to be assumed and taken for granted.

In the field of policy as applied to measures, this vicarious reprobation forms a counterpart to vicarious punishment in the field of justice as applied to persons.

The measure G, which is good, is to be thrown out, because, for aught we can be sure of, some day or other it may happen to be followed by some other measure B, which may be a bad one. A man A, against whom there is neither evidence nor charge, is to be punished, because, for aught we can be sure of, some time or other there may be some other man who will have been guilty.

If on this ground it be right that the measure in question be rejected, so ought every other measure that ever has been or can be proposed: for of no measure can anybody be sure but that it may be followed by some other measure or measures, of which, when they make their appearance, it may be said that they are bad.

If, then, the argument proves anything, it proves that no measure ought ever to be carried, or ever to have been carried; and that, therefore, all things that can be done by law or government, and therefore law and government themselves, are nuisances.

This policy is exactly that which was attributed to Herod in the extermination of the innocents; and the sort of man by whom an argument of this sort can be employed, is the sort of man who would have acted as Herod did, had he been in Herod’s place.

But think, not only what sort of man he must be who can bring himself to employ such an argument; but moreover, what sort of men they must be to whom he can venture to propose it—on whom he can expect it to make any impression, but such a one as will be disgraceful to himself. “Such drivellers,” says he to them in effect, “such drivellers are you, so sure of being imposed upon by any one that will attempt it, that you know not the distinction between good and bad; and when, at the suggestion of this or that man, you have adopted any one measure, good or bad, let but that same man propose any number of other measures, whatever be their character, ye are such idiots and fools, that without looking at them yourselves, or vouchsafing to learn their character from others, you will adopt them in a lump.” Such is the compliment wrapt up in this sort of argument.

CHAPTER IV.

OFFICIAL MALEFACTOR’S SCREEN—(ad metum.)

“Attack us, you attack Government.”

Exposition.—The fallacy here in question is employed almost as often as, in speaking of the persons by whom, or of the system on which, the business of the government is conducted, any expressions importing condemnation or censure are uttered. The fallacy consists in affecting to consider such condemnation or censure as being, if not in design, at least in tendency, pregnant with mischief to government itself:—“Oppose us, you oppose government;” “Disgrace us, you disgrace government;” “Bring us into contempt, you bring government into contempt; and anarchy and civil war are the immediate consequences.” Such are the forms it assumes.

Exposure.—Not ill-grounded, most assuredly, is the alleged importance of this maxim: to the class of persons by or for whom it is employed, it must be admitted to be well worth whatsoever pains can be employed in decking it out to the best advantage.

Let but this notion be acceded to, all persons now partaking, or who may at any time be likely to partake, in the business and profit of misrule, must, in every one of its shapes, be allowed to continue so to do without disturbance: all abuses, as well future as present, must continue without remedy. The most industrious labourers in the service of mankind will experience the treatment due to those to whose dis-social or selfish nature the happiness of man is an object of aversion or indifference. Punishment, or at least disgrace, will be the reward of the most exalted virtue; perpetual honour, as well as power, the reward of the most pernicious vices. Punishment will be, and so by English libel-law it is at this day—let but the criminal be of a certain rank in the state, and the mischief of the crime upon a scale to a certain degree extensive—punishment will be, not for him who commits a crime, but for him who complains of it.

So long as the conduct of the business of the government contains anything amiss in it—so long as it contains in it anything that could be made better—so long, in a word, as it continues short of a state of absolute perfection,—there will be no other mode of bringing it nearer to perfection—no other means of clearing it of the most mischievous abuses with which government can be defiled, than the indication of such points of imperfection as at the time being exist, or are supposed to exist in it; which points of imperfection will always be referable to one or other of two heads: the conduct of this or that one of the individuals by whom in such or such a department the business of government is conducted; or the state of the system of administration under which they act. But neither in the system in question, nor in the conduct of the persons in question, can any imperfection be pointed out, but that, as towards such persons or such system, in proportion to the apparent importance and extent of that imperfection, aversion or contempt must in a greater or less degree be produced.

In effect, this fallacy is but a mode of intimating in other words, that no abuse ought to be reformed—that nothing ought to be uttered in relation to the misconduct of any person in office, which may produce any sentiment of disapprobation.

In this country at least, few if any persons aim at any such object as the bringing into contempt any of those offices on the execution of which the maintenance of the general security depends;—any such office, for example, as that of king, member of parliament, or judge. As to the person of the king, if the maxim, “The king can do no wrong,” be admitted in both its senses, there can be no need of imputing blame to him, unless in the way of defence against the imprudence or the improbity of those who, by groundless or exaggerated eulogiums on the personal character of the individual monarch on the throne, seek to extend his power, and to screen from censure or scrutiny the misconduct of his agents.

But in the instance of any other office, to reprobate everything the tendency of which is to expose the officer to hatred or contempt, is to reprobate everything that can be said or done, either in the way of complaint against past, or for the purpose of preventing future transgressions;—to reprobate everything the tendency of which is to expose the office to hatred or contempt, is to reprobate everything that can be said or done towards pointing out the demand for reform, how needful soever, in the constitution of the office.

If in the constitution of the office, in respect of mode of appointment, mode of remuneration, &c., there be anything that tends to give all persons placed in it an interest acting in opposition to official duty, or to give an increased facility to the effective pursuit of any such sinister interest, everything that tends to bring to view such sinister interest, or such facility, contributes, it may be said, to bring the office itself into contempt.

That under the existing system of judicature, so far as concerns its higher seats, the interest of the judge is, throughout the whole field of his jurisdiction, in a state of constant and diametrical opposition to the line of his duty;—that it is his interest to maintain undiminished, and as far as possible to increase, every evil opposite to the ends of justice, viz. uncertainty, delay, vexation and expense;—that the giving birth to these evils has at all times been more or less an object with every judge (the present ones excepted, of whom we say nothing) that ever sat on a Westminster-Hall bench;—and that, under the present constitution of the office, it were weakness to expect at the hands of a judge anything better;—whilst, that of the above-mentioned evils, the load which is actually endured by the people of this country, is, as to a very small part only, the natural and unavoidable lot of human nature;—are propositions which have already in this work been made plain to demonstration, and in the belief of which the writer has been confirmed by the observations of nearly sixty years—propositions, of the truth of which he is no more able to entertain a doubt, than he is of his own existence.

But in these sentiments, has he any such wish as to see enfeebled and exposed to effectual resistance the authority of judges?—of any established judicatory?—of any one occupier of any such judicial seat? No: the most strenuous defender of abuse in every shape would not go further than he in wishes, and upon occasion in exertion, for its support.

For preventing, remedying, or checking transgression on the part of the members of government, or preventing their management of the business of government from becoming completely arbitrary, the nature of things affords no other means than such, the tendency of which, as far as they go, is to lower either these managing hands, or the system, or both, in the affection and estimation of the people: which effect, when produced in a high degree, may be termed bringing them into hatred and contempt.

But so far is it from being true that a man’s aversion or contempt for the hands by which the powers of government, or even for the system under which they are exercised, is a proof of his aversion or contempt towards government itself, that, even in proportion to the strength of that aversion or contempt, it is a proof of the opposite affection. What, in consequence of such contempt or aversion, he wishes for, is, not that there be no hands at all to exercise these powers, but that the hands may be better regulated;—not that those powers should not be exercised at all, but that they should be better exercised;—not that, in the exercise of them, no rules at all should be pursued, but that the rules by which they are exercised should be a better set of rules.

All government is a trust—every branch of government is a trust, and immemorially acknowledged so to be: it is only by the magnitude of the scale, that public differ from private trusts.

I complain of the conduct of a person in the character of guardian—as domestic guardian, having the care of a minor or insane person. In so doing, do I say that guardianship is a bad institution? Does it enter into the head of any one to suspect me of so doing?

I complain of an individual in the character of a commercial agent, or assignee of the effects of an insolvent. In so doing, do I say that commercial agency is a bad thing?—that the practice of vesting in the hands of trustees or assignees the effects of an insolvent, for the purpose of their being divided among his creditors, is a bad practice? Does any such conceit ever enter into the head of man, as that of suspecting me of so doing?

I complain of an imperfection in the state of the law relative to guardianship. In stating this supposed imperfection in the state of the law itself, do I say that there ought to be no law on the subject?—that no human being ought to have any such power as that of guardian over the person of any other? Does it ever enter into the head of any human being to suspect me so much as of entertaining any such persuasion, not to speak of endeavouring to cause others to entertain it?

Nothing can be more groundless than to suppose that the disposition to pay obedience to the laws by which security in respect of person, property, reputation, and condition in life, is afforded, is influenced by any such consideration as that of the fitness of the several functionaries for their respective trusts, or even so much as by the fitness of the system of regulations and customs under which they act.

The chief occasions in which obedience on the part of a member of the community, in his character of subject, is called upon to manifest itself, are the habitual payment of taxes, and submission to the orders of courts of justice: the one an habitual practice, the other an occasional and eventual one. But in neither instance in the disposition to obedience, is any variation produced by any increase or diminution in the good or ill opinion entertained in relation to the official persons by whom the business of those departments is respectively carried on, or even in relation to the goodness of the systems under which they act.

Were the business of government carried on ever so much worse than it is, still it is from the power of government in its several branches, that each man receives whatsoever protection he enjoys, either against foreign or domestic adversaries. It is therefore by his regard for his own security, and not by his respect either for the persons by whom, or the system according to which, those powers are exercised, that his wish to see obedience paid to them by others, and his disposition to pay obedience to them himself, are produced.

Were it even his wish to withhold from them his own obedience, that wish cannot but be altogether ineffectual, unless and until he shall see others in sufficient number disposed and prepared to withhold each of them his own obedience—a state of things which can only arise from a common sense of overwhelming misery, and not from the mere utterance of complaint. There is no freedom of the press, no power to complain, in Turkey; yet of all countries it is that in which revolts and revolutions are the most frequent and the most violent.

Here and there a man of strong appetites, weak understanding and stout heart excepted, it might be affirmed with confidence that the most indigent and most ignorant would not be foolish enough to wish to see a complete dissolution of the bonds of government. In such a state of things, whatsoever he might expect to grasp for the moment, he would have no assured hope of keeping. Were he ever so strong, his strength, he could not but see, would avail him nothing against a momentarily confederated multitude; nor in one part of his field, against a swifter individual ravaging the opposite part; nor during sleep, against the weakest and most sluggish: and for the purpose of securing himself against such continually-impending disasters, let him suppose himself entered into an association with others-for mutual security,—he would then suppose himself living again under a sort of government.

Even the comparatively few who, for a source of subsistence, prefer depredation to honest industry, are not less dependent for their wretched and ever palpitating existence than the honest and industrious are for theirs, on that general security to which their practice creates exceptions. Be the momentary object of his rapacity what it may, what no one of them could avoid having a more or less distinct conception of, is, that it could not exist for him further than it is secured against others.

So far is it from being true, that no government can exist consistently with such exposure, no good government can exist without it.

Unless by open and lawless violence, by no other means than lowering in the estimation of the people the hands by which the powers of government are exercised, if the cause of the mischief consist in the unfitness of the hands—or the system of management under which they act, if the cause of the mischief lie in the system—be the hands ever so unfit, or the system ever so ill-constructed,—can there be any hope or chance of beneficial change.

There being no sufficient reason for ascribing even to the worst-disposed any wish so foolish as that of seeing the bonds of government dissolved, nor on the part of the best-disposed any possibility of contributing to produce change, either in any ruling hands deemed by them unfit for their trust, or of the system deemed by them ill adapted to those which are or ought to be its ends, otherwise than by respectively bringing into general disesteem these objects of their disapprobation,—there cannot be a more unfounded imputation, or viler artifice if it be artifice, or grosser error if it be error, than that which infers from the disposition, or even the endeavour to lessen in the estimation of the people the existing rulers, or the existing system, any such wish as that of seeing the bands of government dissolved.

In producing a local or temporary debility in the action of the powers of the natural body, in many cases, the honest and skilful physician beholds the only means of cure: and from the act of the physician who prescribes an evacuant or a sedative, it would be as reasonable to infer a wish to see the patient perish, as from the act of a statesman, whose endeavours are employed in lowering the reputation of the official hands in whom, or the system of management in which, he beholds the cause of what appears to him amiss,—to infer a wish to see the whole frame of government either destroyed or rendered worse.

In so far as a man’s feeling and conduct are influenced and determined by what is called public opinion, by the force of the popular or moral sanction, and that opinion runs in conformity with the dictates of the principles of general utility,—in proportion to the value set upon reputation, and the degree of respect entertained for the community at large, his conduct will be the better, the more completely the quantity of respect he enjoys is dependent upon the goodness of his behaviour: it will be the worse, the more completely the quantity of respect he is sure of enjoying is independent of it.

Thus, whatsoever portion of respect the people at large are in the habit of bestowing upon the individual by whom, on any given occasion, the office in question is filled, this portion of respect may, so long as the habit continues, be said to be attached to the office, just as any portion of the emolument is, which happens to be attached to the office.

But as it is with emolument, so is it with respect. The greater the quantity of it a man is likely to receive independently of his good behaviour, the less good, in so far as depends upon the degree of influence with which the love of reputation acts upon his mind, is his behaviour likely to be.

If this be true, it is in so far the interest of the public, that that portion of respect, which along with the salary is habitually attached to the office, should be as small as possible.

If, indeed, the notion which it is the object of the fallacy in question to inculcate were true, viz. that the stability of the government, or its existence at each given point of time, depends upon the degree of respect bestowed upon the several individuals by whom at that point of time its powers are exercised,—if this were true, it would not be the interest of the public that the portion of respect habitually attached to the office, and received by the official person independently of his good behaviour in it, should be as small as possible. But in how great a degree this notion is erroneous, has been shown already.

But while it is the interest of the public, that in the instance of each trustee of the public, the remuneration received by him in the shape of respect should be as completely dependent as possible upon the goodness of his behaviour in the execution of his trust, it is the interest of the trustee himself that, as in every other shape, so in the shape of respect, whatsoever portion of the good things of this world he receives, on whatever score, whether on the score of remuneration or any other, should be as great as possible; since by good behaviour, neither respect nor anything else can be always earned by him but by sacrifices in some shape or other, and in particular in the shape of ease.

Whatsoever, therefore, be the official situation which the official person in question occupies, it is his interest that the quantity of respect habitually attached to it be as great, and at the same time as securely attached to it, as possible.

And in the point of view from which he is by his personal and sinister interest led to consider the subject, the point of perfection in this line will not be attained until the quantity of respect he receives, in consequence of the possession he has of the office, be at all times as great as the nature of the office admits—at all times as completely independent of the goodness of his behaviour in his office as possible—as great, in the event of his making the worst and least good use, as in that of his making the best and the least bad use, of the powers belonging to it.

Such being his interest, whatsoever be his official situation, if, as is the case of most, if not all official situations, it be of such a nature as to have power in any shape attached to it, his endeavour and study will be so to order matters as to cause to be attached to it as above, and by all means possible, the greatest portion of respect possible.

To this purpose, amongst others, will be directed whatsoever influence his will can be made to act with on other wills, and whatsoever influence his understanding can be made to exert over other understandings.

If, for example, his situation be that of a judge,—by the influence of will on will, it will seldom in any considerable degree be in his power to compel men by force to bestow upon him the sentiment of respect, either by itself, or in any considerable degree by means of any external mark or token of it: but he may restrain men from saying or doing any of those things, the effect of which would be to cause others to bestow upon him less respect than they would otherwise.

If, being a judge of the King’s Bench, any man has the presumption to question his fitness for such his high situation, he may for so doing punish him by fine and imprisonment with et cæteras. If a Lord Chancellor, he may prosecute him before a judge, by whom a disposition to attach such punishments to such offences has been demonstrated by practice.

Thus much as to what can, and what cannot be done, towards attaching respect to office, by the influence of will on will.

What may be done by the influence of understanding on understanding, remains to be noticed. Laying out of the question that influence which, in the official situation in question, is exercised over the understandings of the people at large, independently of any exertions on the part of him by whom it is filled,—that which on his part requires exertion, and is capable of being exercised by exertion, consists in the giving utterance and circulation in the most impressive manner to the fallacy in question, together with a few such others as are more particularly connected with it.

Upon the boldness and readiness with which the hands and system are spoken ill of, depends the difference between arbitrary and limited government—between a government in which the great body of the people have, and one in which they have not, a share.

In respect of the members of the governing body, undoubtedly the state of things most to be desired is, that the only occasion on which any endeavours should be employed to lower them in the estimation of the public should be those in which inaptitude in some shape or other, want of probity, or weakness of judgment, or want of appropriate talent, have justly been imputable to them: that on those occasions in which inaptitude has not in any of those shapes been justly imputable, no such endeavour should ever be employed.

Unfortunately, the state of things hereby supposed is plainly (need it be said?) an impossible one. Admit no accusation, you may, and you will exclude all unjust ones: admit just ones, you must admit unjust ones along with them; there is no help for it. One of two evils being necessary to be chosen, the question is, which is the least?—to admit all such imputations, and thereby to admit of unjust ones? or to exclude all such imputations, and thereby to exclude all just ones? I answer without difficulty,—the admission of unjust imputations is, beyond comparison, the least of the two evils. Exclude all unjust imputations, and with them all just ones,—the only check by which the career of deterioration can be stopped being thus removed, both hands and system will, until they arrive at the extreme of despotism and misrule, be continually growing worse and worse: the hands themselves will grow worse and worse, having nothing to counteract the force of that separate and sinister interest to the action of which they remain constantly exposed; and the system itself will grow worse and worse, it being all along, the interest, and, by the supposition, within the power, of the hands themselves to make it so.

Admit just imputations, though along with them you admit unjust ones,—so slight is the evil as scarcely to bear that name. Along with unjust imputations, are not defences admitted? In respect of motives and of means, have not the defendants in this case, beyond all comparison, the advantage of the complainants?

As far as concerns motives, in the instance of every person included in the attack (and in an attack made upon any one member of the government as such, who does not know how apt all are to feel themselves included?) the principle of self-preservation is stronger than the exciting cause productive of the disposition to attack can be in any instance.

As far as concerns means of defence, if the person against whom the attack is principally levelled wants time or talent to defend himself, scarce a particle of the immense mass of the matter of reward,—which, in all manner of shapes, for the purpose of carrying on the ordinary business of government, lies constantly at the disposal of the members of the government,—but is applicable, even without any separate expense, to the extraordinary purpose of engaging defending advocates.

Let it not be said—“This is a persecution to which an honourable man ought not to be exposed—a persecution which, though to some honourable men it may be tolerable, will to others be intolerable—intolerable to such a degree as to deprive the public of the benefit of their services.”

A notion to any such effect will scarcely be advanced with a grave face. That censure is the tax imposed by nature upon eminence, is the A B C of common place. Who is there to whom it can be a doubt that exposure to such imputations is among the inevitable appendages of office? If it were an office which in no shape whatever had any adequate allowance of the matter of reward annexed to it—if it were a situation into which men were pressed—the observation would have some better ground; but in the class of office here in question, exists there any such?

A self-contradiction is involved in the observation itself. The subject, of which sensibility thus morbid is predicated, is an honourable man: but to an honourable man, to any man to whom the attribute honourable can with truth and justice be applied, such sensibility cannot be attributed. The man who will not accept an office but upon condition that his conduct in it shall remain exempt from all imputation, intends not that his conduct shall be what it ought to be;—the man to whom the idea of being subject to those imputations, to which he sees the best are exposed, is intolerable,—is in his heart a tyrant—and, to become so in practice, wants nothing but to be seated on one of those thrones, or on one of those benches, in which, by the appearance of chains made for show and not for use, a man is enabled, with the greater dignity as well as safety, to act the part of the tyrant, and glut himself with vengeance.

To a man who, in the civil line of office, accepts a commission, it is not less evident that by so doing he exposes himself to imputations, some of which may happen to be unjust, than to a man in the military line it is evident, that by acceptance of a commission in that line he exposes himself to be shot at: and of a military office, with about equal truth might it be said, that an honourable man will not accept it on such condition, as of a civil office, that an honourable man will not accept it if his conduct is to stand exposed to such imputations.

In such circumstances, it is not easy to see how it should happen to a public man to labour at the long-run under an imputation that is not just. In so far as any such incident does take place, evil does in truth take place: but even in this case, the evil will not be unaccompanied with concomitant good, operating in compensation for it. On the part of men in office, it contributes to keep up the habit of considering their conduct as exposed to scrutiny—to keep up in their minds that sense of responsibility on which goodness of conduct depends, in which good behaviour finds its chief security.

On the part of the people at large, it serves to keep alive the expectation of witnessing such attacks,—the habit of looking out for them; and, when any such attack does come, it prevents the idea of hardship which is apt to attach upon any infliction, how necessary soever, of which it can be said that it is unprecedented or even rare; and hinders the public mind from being set against the attack, and him who finds exertion and courage enough to make it.

When, in support of such imputations, false facts are alleged, the act of him by whom such false allegations are made, not only ought to be regarded as pernicious, but ought to be, and is, consistently with justice and utility, punishable—punishable even when advanced through temerity, without consciousness of the falsity, and more so when accompanied with such dishonest consciousness.

But by a sort of law, of which the protection of high-seated official delinquency is at least the effect, not to say the object, a distinction thus obvious as well as important has been carefully overlooked: and whenever, to the prejudice of the reputation of a man, especially if he be a man in office, a fact which has with more or less confidence been asserted or insinuated, turns out to be false, the existence of dishonest consciousness, whether really existing or not, is assumed.

In so far as public men, trustees and agents for the people in possession or expectancy, are the objects, a general propensity to scrutinize into their conduct, and thereby to cast imputations on it at the hazard of their being more or less unmerited, is a useful propensity—it is conducive to good behaviour on their part: and for the opposite and corresponding reason, the habit of general laudation—laudation without specific grounds—is a mischievous propensity, being conducive to ill behaviour on their part.

Render all such endeavours hopeless, you take from a bad state of things all chance of being better: allow to all such endeavours the freest range, you do no injury to the best state of things imaginable.

Whatsoever facilities the adversaries of the existing state of things have for lowering it in the estimation of the people, equal facilities at least, if not greater, have its friends and supporters for keeping and raising it up.

Under the English constitution, at any rate, the most strenuous defenders of the existing set of managing hands, as well as of the existing system of management, are not backward in representing an opposition as being no less necessary a power among the springs of government than the regulator in a watch.* But in what way is it that opposition, be it what it may, ever acts, or ever can act, but by endeavouring to lower either the managing hands, or, in this or that part of it, the system of management, in the estimation of the people? And from a watchmaker’s putting a regulating spring into the watch he is making, it would be just as reasonable and fair to infer that his meaning is to destroy the watch, as from the circumstance of a man seeking, in this or that instance, to lower in the estimation of the people the managing hands, or this or that part of the system of management, to infer a desire on his part to destroy the government.

Under the English constitution at least, not only in point of fact, is the disposition to pay that obedience by which the power of government is constituted, and on which the existence of it depends, independent of all esteem for the hands by which this power is exercised, unaffected by any dis-esteem for this or that part of the system of management according to which it is executed; but, under such a constitution at least, the more complete this independence, the better for the stability and prosperity of the state. Being as it is, it suffices for carrying on at all times the business of government; viz. upon that footing in point of skill and prosperity which is consistent with the aptitude, probity, and intelligence of the managing hands, and the goodness of the system of management under which they act: but if on each occasion it depended on the degree of estimation in which the conduct and character of the managing hands, and the structure of the system of management under which they act, happened at that time to be held by the majority of the people, this power would be seen strong, and perhaps too strong, at one time; weak to any degree of weakness—insufficient to any degree of insufficiency—at another.

Among the peculiar excellencies of the English constitution, one is, that the existence of the government, and even the good conduct of it, depends in a less degree than under any other monarchy upon the personal qualifications of the chief ruler, and upon the place he occupies in the estimation of the people. Conceive the character of the chief ruler perfect to a certain degree of perfection, all checks upon his power would be a nuisance. On the other hand, under a constitution of government into which checks upon that power are admitted, the stronger and more efficient those checks, the worse the personal character of the chief ruler may be, and the business of government still go on without any fatal disturbance.

On recent occasions, as if the endeavour had been new and altogether anomalous to the constitution, great were the outcries against the audacity of those parliamentary electors and other members of the community, who, in the character of petitioners, were using their endeavours to lower the House of Commons in the estimation of the people, or, in stronger terms, to bring it and its authority into contempt. That by the individuals in question, an endeavour of this nature should be regarded as a cause of personal inconvenience, and, as such, be resisted, is natural enough; but as to its being, on the part of the authors of those exertions, blameable—or, on the part of the constitution, dangerous—surely no further observation need here be added.

But what was complained of as an abuse, was the existence of that state of things—of that system of management, under which, in a number sufficient on ordinary occasions to constitute or secure a majority, the members of that governing body have a sinister interest separate from and opposite to that of the people for whom they profess to serve: that being independent as towards those to whom they ought to be dependent, as to those whom it is their duty to controul, and towards whom they ought to be independent they are dependent; and that by means by which, though altogether out of the reach of punishment, the dependence is rendered beyond comparison more constant and effectual than it would be by acts of punishable bribery.

In this state of things, if any alteration in it be desirable, it is impossible that such alteration should be brought about by other means than lowering in the estimation of the people, not only the system itself, but all those who act willingly under it, and use their endeavours to uphold it.

Without this means, and by any other means, how is it that by possibility any such change should be produced? Supposing them assured of possessing, in the event of a refusal of all such change, as high a place in the estimation of the people as they hold at present, anything done by them in furtherance of such a change would be an effect without a cause. In their personal capacities, they have all, or most of them, little to gain, while they have much to lose, by any proposed change.

True, it may be said,—to be remedied, an imperfection, be it what it may, must be pointed out. But what we complain of as dangerous to government is, not the indication of such imperfections, with their supposed remedies, but the mode in which they are apt to be pointed out—the heat, the violence, with which such indication is accompanied. This we object to, not merely as dishonest, but as unwise,—as tending to irritate the very persons at whose hands the remedy thus pleaded for is sought.

To this, the answer is as follows:—

1. Whatsoever may be the terms most decorous, and, upon the supposition, the best adapted to the obtaining of the relief desired, it is not possible to comprise them in any such scheme of description as will enable a man to satisfy himself beforehand what terms will be considered exposed to, what exempt from, censure.

2. The cause of irritation is not so properly in the terms of the application, as in the substance and nature of the application itself; so that the greatest irritation would be produced by that mode of application, whichever it were, that appeared most likely to produce the effect in question—the effect the production of which is on the one part an object of desire, on the other of aversion; the least irritation by that which, in whatever terms couched, afforded the fairest pretence for non-compliance.

3. The imperfection in question being, by the supposition, one of a public nature, the advantages of which are enjoyed by a few, while the interest which the many, each taken individually, have in the removal of the imperfection is commonly comparatively small and remote, no little difficulty is commonly experienced by any one whose endeavour it should be to persuade the many to collect amongst them a degree of impressive force sufficient to operate upon the ruling powers with effect. On the part of the many, the natural interest being in each case commonly but weak, it requires to bring it into effective action whatsoever aids can be afforded it. Strong arguments, how strong soever, will of themselves be scarcely sufficient; for at the utmost they can amount to no more than the indication of that interest, which, in the case of the greater part of the many whose force it is necessary to bring to bear upon the point in question, is by the supposition but weak. In aid of the utmost strength of which the argument is susceptible, strength of expression will therefore be necessary, or at least naturally and generally regarded as necessary, and as such employed. But in proportion as this strength of expression is employed, the mode of application stands exposed to the imputation of that heat, and violence, and acrimony, the use of which it is the object of the alleged fallacy to prevent.

4. It is only on the supposition of its being in effect, and being felt to be, conducive, or at least not repugnant, to the interest of the ruling powers addressed, that the simple statement of the considerations which, in the character of reasons, prove the existence of the supposed imperfection, and, if a remedy be proposed, the aptitude of the proposed remedy, can with reason be expected to operate on them with effect. But the fact is, that on the part of those ruling powers, this sort of repugnance, in a degree more or less considerable, is no other than what on every such occasion ought in reason to be expected. If the imperfection in question be of the nature of those to which the term abuse is wont to be applied, these ruling powers have some or all of them, by the supposition, a special profit arising out of that abuse—a special interest, consequently, in the preservation and defence of it. Even if there be no such special interest, there exists in that quarter at all times, and in more shapes than one, a general and constant interest by which they are rendered mutually averse to applications of that nature. In the first place, in addition to their ordinary labours, they find themselves called upon to undertake a course of extraordinary labour, which it was not their design to undertake, and for which it may happen to some or all of them to feel themselves but indifferently prepared and qualified; and thus the application itself finds it self opposed by the interest of their case. In the next place, to the extent of the task thus imposed upon them, they find the business of government taken out of their hands. To that same extent, their conduct is determined by a will which originated not among themselves; and if, the measure being carried into effect, the promoters of it would obtain reputation, respect, and affection,—of those rewards, a share more or less considerable falls into other hands; and thus the application in question finds an opponent in the interest of their pride.

CHAPTER V.

ACCUSATION-SCARER’S DEVICE—(ad metum.)

“Infamy must attach somewhere.”

Exposition.—This fallacy consists in representing the imputation of purposed calumny as necessarily and justly attaching upon him who, having made a charge of misconduct against any person or persons possessed of political power or influence, fails of producing evidence sufficient for conviction.

Its manifest object, accordingly, is, as far as possible, to secure impunity to crimes and transgressions in every shape, on the part of persons so situated; viz. by throwing impediments in the way of accusation, and in particular, by holding out to the eyes of those persons who have in view the undertaking the functions of accusers, in case of failure, in addition to disappointment, the prospect of disgrace.

Exposure.—“Infamy must attach somewhere.” To this effect was a dictum ascribed in the debates to the Right Honourable George Canning, on the occasion of the inquiry into the conduct of the Duke of York in his office of Commander-in-Chief.

In principle, insinuation to this effect has an unlimited application: it applies not only to all charges against persons possessed of political power, but, with more or less force to all criminal charges in form of law against any persons whatsoever; and not only to all charges in a prosecution of the criminal cast, but to the litigants on both sides of the cause in a case of a purely non-penal, or, as it is called, a civil nature.

If taken as a general proposition applying to all public accusations, nothing can be more mischievous as well as fallacious. Supposing the charge unfounded, the delivery of it may have been accompanied with mâla fides (consciousness of its injustice,) temerity only, or it may have been perfectly blameless. It is in the first case alone that infamy can with propriety attach upon him who brings it forward. A charge really groundless may have been honestly believed to be well founded; i. e. believed with a sort of provisional credence, sufficient for the purpose of engaging a man to do his part towards the bringing about an investigation, but without sufficient reasons. But a charge may be perfectly groundless, without attaching the smallest particle of blame upon him who brings it forward. Suppose him to have heard from one or more, presenting themselves to him in the character of percipient witnesses, a story, which either in toto, or perhaps only in circumstances, though in circumstances of the most material importance, should prove false and mendacious,—how is the person who hears this, and acts accordingly, to blame? What sagacity can enable a man, previously to legal investigation—a man who has no power that can enable him to insure correctness or completeness on the part of this extra-judicial testimony—to guard against deception in such a case? Mrs. C. states to the accuser, that the Duke of York knew of the business; stating a conversation as having passed between him and herself on the occasion. All this (suppose) is perfectly false: but the falsity of it, how was it possible for one in the accuser’s situation to be apprised of?

The tendency of this fallacy is, by intimidation to prevent all true charges whatever from being made,—to secure impunity to delinquency in every shape.

But the conclusion, that because the discourse of a witness is false in one particular, or on one occasion, it must therefore be false in toto,—in particular, that because it is false in respect of some fact or circumstance spoken to on some extra-judicial occasion, it is therefore not credible on the occasion of a judicial examination,—is a conclusion quite unwarranted.

If this argument were consistently and uniformly applied, no evidence at all ought ever to be received, or at least to be credited: for where was ever the human being, of full age, by whom the exact line of truth had never been in any instance departed from in the whole course of his life?

The fallacy consists, not in the bringing to view, as lessening the credit due to the testimony of the witness, this or that instance of falsehood, as indicated by inconsistency or counter-evidence, but in speaking of them as conclusive, and as warranting the turning a deaf ear to everything else the witness has said, or, if suffered, might have said. Under the pressure of some strong and manifest falsehood-exciting interest, suppose falsehood has been uttered by the witness: be it so; does it follow that falsehood will on every occasion—will on the particular occasion in question—be uttered by him without any such excitement?

Under the pressure of terror, the Apostle Peter, when questioned whether he were one of the adherents of Jesus, who at that time was in the situation of a prisoner just arrested on a capital charge,—denied his being so; and in so doing, uttered a wilful falsehood: and this falsehood he thrice repeated within a short time:—does it follow that the testimony of the Apostle ought not on any occasion to have been considered as capable of being true?

If any such rule were consistently pursued, what judge, who had ever acted in the profession of an advocate, could with propriety be received in the character of a witness?

Again, with respect to the object of the charge, so far from receiving less countenance where the object is a public than where he is a private man, accusation, whether it be at the bar of an official judicatory or at the bar of the public at large, ought to receive beyond comparison more countenance. In case of the truth of the accusation, the mischief is greater—the demand for appropriate censure as a check to it, correspondently greater. On the other hand, in case of non-delinquency, the mischief to the groundlessly-accused individual is less. Power, in whatever hands lodged, is almost sure to be more or less abused; the check, in all its shapes, so as it does not defeat the good purposes for which the power has been given or suffered to be exercised, can never be too strong. That against a man who, by the supposition, has done nothing wrong, it is not desirable, whether his situation be public or private, that accusation should have been preferred—that he should have been subjected to the danger, and alarm, and evil in other shapes attached to it, is almost too plainly true to be worth saying. But in the case of a public accusation, though by the supposition it turns out to be groundless, it is not altogether without its use—the evil produced is not altogether without compensation; for by the alarm it keeps up in the breasts in which a disposition to delinquency has place, such accusation acts as a check upon it, and contributes to the prevention or repression of it. On the other hand, in the situation of the public man, the mischief, in the case of his having been the object of an unfounded accusation, is less, as we have shown in the preceding chapter, than in the case of a private man. In the advantages that are attached to his situation, he possesses a fund of compensation, which, by the supposition, has no place in the other case: and apprised as he ought to be, and but for his own fault is, of the enmity and envy to which, according to the nature of it, his situation exposes him, and not the private man, he ought to be, and, but for his own fault, will be, proportionably prepared to expect it, and less sensibly affected by it when it comes.

CHAPTER I.

THE QUIETIST, OR “NO COMPLAINT”—(ad quietem)

Exposition.—A new law or measure being proposed in the character of a remedy for some incontestable abuse or evil, an objection is frequently started, to the following effect:—“The measure is unnecessary; nobody complains of disorder in that shape in which it is the aim of your measure to propose a remedy to it: even when no cause of complaint has been found to exist, especially under governments which admit of complaints, men have in general not been slow to complain; much less where any just cause of complaint has existed.” The argument amounts to this:—Nobody complains, therefore nobody suffers. It amounts to a veto on all measures of precaution or prevention, and goes to establish a maxim in legislation, directly opposed to the most ordinary prudence of common life;—it enjoins us to build no parapets to a bridge till the number of accidents has raised an universal clamour.

Exposure.—The argument would have more plausibility than it has, if there were any chance of complaints being attended to—if the silence of those who suffer did not arise from despair, occasioned by seeing the fruitlessness of former complaints. The expense and vexation of collecting and addressing complaints to parliament being great and certain, complaint will not commonly be made without adequate expectation of relief. But how can any such expectation be entertained by any one who is in the slightest degree acquainted with the present constitution of parliament? Members who are independent of and irresponsible to the people, can have very few and very slight motives for attending to complaints, the redress of which would affect their own sinister interests. Again, how many complaints are repressed by the fear of attacking powerful individuals, and incurring resentments which may prove fatal to the complainant!

The most galling and the most oppressive of all grievances is that complicated mass of evil which is composed of the uncertainty, delay, expense, and vexation in the administration of justice: of this, all but a comparatively minute proportion is clearly factitious*—factitious, as being the work, originally and in its foundation, of the man of law; latterly, and in respect of a part of its superstructure, of the man of finance. In extent, it is such, that of the whole population there exists not an individual who is not every moment of his life exposed to suffer under it: and few advanced in life, who, in some shape or other, have not actually been sufferers from it. By the price that has been put upon justice, or what goes by the name of justice, a vast majority of the people, to some such amount as 9-10^ths or 19-20^ths, are bereft altogether of the ability of putting in for a chance for it; and to those to whom, instead of being utterly denied this sort of chance, is sold, it is sold at such a price, as, to the poorest of such as have it still in their power to pay, the price is utter ruin—and even to the richest, matter of serious and sensible inconvenience.

In comparison of this one scourge, all other political scourges put together are feathers: and in so far as it has the operations of the man of finance for its cause, if, instead of onetenth upon income, a property tax amounted to nine-tenths, still an addition to the property tax would, in comparison of the affliction produced by the sum assessed on law-proceedings, be a relief: for the income-tax falls upon none but the comparatively prosperous, and increases in proportion to the prosperity—in proportion to the ability to sustain it; whereas the tax upon law-proceedings falls exclusively upon those whom it finds labouring under affliction—under that sort of affliction which, so long as it lasts, operates as a perpetual blister on the mind.

Here, then, is matter of complaint for every British subject that breathes—here, injustice, oppression, and distress are all extreme: complaint there is none. Why? Because, by unity of sinister interest, and consequent confederacy between lawyer and financier, relief is rendered hopeless.

CHAPTER II.

FALLACY OF FALSE CONSOLATION—(ad quietem.)

Exposition.—A measure having for its object the removal of some abuse, i. e. of some practice, the result of which is, on the part of the many, a mass of suffering more than equivalent to the harvest of enjoyment reaped from it by the few, being proposed,—this argument consists in pointing to the general condition of the people in this or that other country, under the notion, that in that other country, either in the particular respect in question, or upon the whole, the condition of the people is not so felicitous as, notwithstanding the abuse, it is in the country in and for which the measure of reform is proposed.

“What is the matter with you?” “What would you have?” Look at the people there, and there: think how much better off you are than they are. Your prosperity and liberty are objects of envy to them;—your institutions are the models which they endeavour to imitate.

Assuredly, it is not to the disposition to keep an eye of preference turned to the bright side of things, where no prospect of special good suggests the opposite course,—it is not to such a disposition or such a habit, that by the word fallacy it is proposed to affix a mark of disapprobation.

When a particular suffering, produced as it appears by an assignable and assigned cause, has been pointed out as existing, a man, instead of attending to it himself, or inviting to it the attention of others, employs his exertions in the endeavour to engage other eyes to turn themselves to any other quarter in preference (he being of the number of those whose acknowledged duty it is to contribute their best endeavours to the affording to every affliction within their view, whatsoever relief may be capable of being afforded to it without preponderant inconvenience)—then, and then only, is it, that the endeavour becomes a just ground for censure, and the means thus employed present a title to be received upon the list of fallacies.

Exposure.—The pravity as well as fallaciousness of this argument can scarcely be exhibited in a stronger or truer light than by the appellation here employed to characterize it.

1. Like all other fallacies upon this list, it is nothing to the purpose.

2. In his own case, no individual in his senses would accept it. Take any one of the orators by whom this argument is tendered, or of the sages on whom it passes for sterling: with an observation of the general wealth and prosperity of the country in his mouth, instead of a half-year’s rent in his hand, let any one of his tenants propose to pay him thus in his own coin,—will he accept it?

3. In a court of justice, in an action for damages,—to learned ingenuity did ever any such device occur as that of pleading assets in the hand of a third person, or in the hands of the whole country, in bar to the demand? What the largest wholesale trade is to the smallest retail, such, and more in point of magnitude, is the relief commonly sought for at the hands of the legislator, to the relief commonly sought for at the hands of the judge:—what the largest wholesale trade is to the smallest retail trade, such in point of magnitude, yea and more, is the injustice endeavoured at by this argument when employed in the seat of legislative power, in comparison of the injustice that would be committed by deciding in conformity to it in a court of justice.

No country so wretched, so poor in every element of prosperity, in which matter for this argument might not be found.

Were the prosperity of the country ever so much greater than at present—take for the country any country whatsoever, and for present time any time whatsoever—neither the injustice of the argument, nor the absurdity of it, would in any the smallest degree be diminished.

Seriously and pointedly, in the character of a bar to any measure of relief—no, nor to the most trivial improvement, can it ever be employed. Suppose a bill brought in for converting an impassable road anywhere into a passable one, would any man stand up to oppose it who could find nothing better to urge against it than the multitude and goodness of the roads we have already? No: when in the character of a serious bar to the measure in hand, be that measure what it may, an argument so palpably inapplicable is employed, it can only be for the purpose of creating a diversion—of turning aside the minds of men from the subject really in hand, to a picture which by its beauty it is hoped, may engross the attention of the assembly, and make them forget for the moment for what purpose they came there.

CHAPTER III.

PROCRASTINATOR’S ARGUMENT (ad socordiam.)

“Wait a little, this is not the time.”

Exposition.—To the instrument of deception here brought to view, the expressions that may be given are various to an indefinite degree; but in its nature and conception nothing can be more simple.

To this head belongs every form of words by which, speaking of a proposed measure of relief, an intimation is given, that the time, whatever it be, at which the proposal is made, is too early for the purpose; and given without any proof being offered of the truth of such intimation,—such as, for instance, the want of requisite information, or the convenience of some preparatory measure.

Exposure.—This is the sort of argument or observation which we so often see employed by those who, being in wish and endeavour hostile to a measure, are afraid or ashamed of being seen to be so. They pretend, perhaps, to approve of the measure—they only differ as to the proper time of bringing it forward; but it may be matter of question whether, in any one instance, this observation has been applied to a measure by a man whose wish it was not, that it should remain excluded for ever.

It is in legislation the same sort of quirk, which in judicial procedure is called a plea in abatement. It has the same object, being never employed but on the side of a dishonest defendant, whose hope it is to obtain ultimate impunity and triumph by overwhelming his injured adversary with despair, impoverishment, and lassitude.

A serious refutation would be ill bestowed upon so frivolous a pretence. The objection exists in the will, not in the judgment, of the objector. “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath day?” was the question put by Jesus to the official hypocrites. Which is the properest day to do good?—which is the properest day to remove a nuisance? Answer: The very first day that a man can be found to propose the removal of it; and whosoever opposes the removal of it on that day, will, if he dare, oppose the removal on every other.

The doubts and fears of the parliamentary procrastinator are the conscientious scruples of his prototype the Pharisece; and neither the answer nor the example of Jesus has succeeded in removing these scruples. To him, whatsoever is too soon to-day, be assured that to-morrow, if not too soon, it will be too late.

True it is, that, the measure being a measure of reform or improvement, an observation to this effect may be brought forward by a friend to the measure: and in this case, it is not an instrument of deception, but an expedient of unhappily necessary prudence.

Whatsoever it may be some centuries hence, hitherto the fault of the people has been, not groundless clamour against imaginary grievances, but insensibility to real ones,—insensibility, not to the effect—the evil itself, for that, if it were possible, far from being a fault, would be a happiness,—but to the cause—to the system or course of misrule which is the cause of it.

What, therefore, may but too easily be—what hitherto ever has been—the fact, and that throughout a vast proportion of the field of legislation, is, that in regard to the grievances complained of, the time for bringing forward a measure of effectual relief is not yet come. Why? Because, though groaning under the effect, the people, by the artifice and hypocrisy of their oppressors having been prevented from entertaining any tolerably adequate conception of the cause, would at that time regard either with indifference or with suspicion the healing hand that should come forward with the only true and effectual remedy. Thus it is, for example, with that Pandora’s box of grievances and misery, the contents of which are composed of the evils opposite to the ends of justice.

CHAPTER IV.

SNAIL’S-PACE ARGUMENT.—(ad socordiam.)

“One thing at a time! Not too fast! Slow and sure!”

Exposition.—The proposed measure being a measure of reform, requiring, that for the completion of the beneficial work in question a number of operations be performed, capable, all or some of them, of being carried on at the same time, or successively without intervals, or at short intervals, the instrument of deception here in question consists in holding up to view the idea of graduality or slowness, as characteristic of the course which wisdom would dictate on the occasion in question. For more effectual recommendation of this course, to the epithet gradual are commonly added some such eulogistic epithets as moderate and temperate; whereby it is implied, that in proportion as the pace recommended by the word gradual is quickened, such increased pace will justly incur the censure expressed by the opposite epithets, immoderate, violent, precipitate, extravagant, intemperate.

Exposure.—This is neither more nor less than a contrivance for making out of a mere word an excuse for leaving undone an indefinite multitude of things, which the arguer is convinced, and cannot forbear acknowledging, ought to be done.

Suppose half a dozen abuses, which equally and with equal promptitude stand in need of reform—this fallacy requires, that without any reason that can be assigned, other than what is contained in the pronouncing or writing of the word gradual, all but one or two of them shall remain untouched.

Or, what is better, suppose that, to the effectual correction of some one of these abuses, six operations require to be performed—six operations, all of which must be done ere the correction can be effected,—to save the reform from the reproach of being violent and intemperate, to secure to it the praise of graduality, moderation, and temperance, you insist, that of these half-a-dozen necessary operations, some one or some two only shall be talked of, and proposed to be done;—one, by one bill to be introduced this session, if it be not too late (which you contrive it shall be;) another, the next session; which time being come, nothing more is to be said about the matter—and there it ends.

For this abandonment, no one reason that will bear looking at can be numbered up, in the instance of any one of the five measures endeavoured to be laid upon the shelf; for if it could, that would be the reason assigned for the relinquishment, and not this unmeaning assemblage of three syllables.

A suit which, to do full justice to it, requires but six weeks, or six days, or six minutes in one day—has it been made to last six years? That your caution and your wisdom may not be questioned, by a first experiment reduce the time to five years; then if that succeeds, in another parliament, should another parliament be in a humour (which it is hoped it will not,) reduce it to four years; then again to three years; and if it should be the lot of your grandchildren to see it reduced to two years, they may think themselves well off, and admire your prudence.

Justice—to which in every eye but that of the plunderer and oppressor, rich and poor have an equal right—do nine-tenths of the people stand excluded from all hope of, by the load of expense that has been heaped up. You propose to reduce this expense. The extent of the evil is admitted, and the nature of the remedy cannot admit of doubt; but by the magic of the three syllables gra-du-al, you will limit the remedy to the reduction of about one-tenth of the expense. Some time afterwards you may reduce another tenth, and go on so, that in about two centuries, justice may, perhaps, become generally accessible.

Importance of the business—extreme difficulty of the business—danger of innovation—need of caution and circumspection—impossibility of foreseeing all consequences—danger of precipitation—everything should be gradual—one thing at a time—this is not the time—great occupation at present—wait for more leisure—people well satisfied—no petitions presented—no complaints heard—no such mischief has yet taken place—stay till it has taken place:—such is the prattle which the magpie in office, who, understanding nothing, understands that he must have something to say on every subject shouts out among his auditors as a succedaneum to thought.

Transfer the scene to domestic life, and suppose a man who, his fortune not enabling him without running into debt to keep one race-horse, has been for some time in the habit of keeping six: to transfer to this private theatre the wisdom and the benefit of the gradual system, what you would have to recommend to your friend would be something of this sort:—Spend the first year in considering which of your six horses to give up; the next year, if you can satisfy yourself which it shall be, give up some one of them: by this sacrifice, the sincerity of your intention and your reputation for economy will be established; which done, you need think no more about the matter.

As all psychological ideas have their necessary root in physical ones, one source of delusion in psychological arguments consists in giving an improper extension to some me taphor which has been made choice of.

It would be a service done to the cause of truth, if some advocate for the gradual system would let us into the secret of the metaphor or physical image, if any, which he has in view, and in the same language give us the idea of some physical disaster as the result of precipitation. A patient killed by rapid bleeding—a chariot dashed in pieces by runaway steeds—a vessel overset by carrying too much sail in a squall,—all these images suppose a degree of precipitation which, if pursued by the proposers of a political measure, would be at once apparent, and the obvious and assignable consequence of their course would afford unanswerable arguments against them.

All this while, though by a friend to the measure no such word as above will be employed in the character of argument, yet cases are not wanting in which the dilatory course recommended may be consented to, or even proposed by him.

Suppose a dozen distinct abuses in the seat of legislative power, each abuse having a set of members interested in the support of it,—attack the whole body at once, all these parties join together to a certainty, and oppose you with their united force. Attack the abuses one by one, and it is possible that you may have but one of these parties, or at least less than all of them, to cope with at a time. Possible? Yes: but of probability, little can be said. To each branch of the public service belongs a class of public servants, each of which has its sinister interest, the source of the mass of abuses on which it feeds; and in the person and power of the universal patron, the fountain of all honour and of all abuse, all those sinister interests are joined and embodied into one.

This is a branch of science in which no man is ever deficient; this is what is understood—understood to perfection, by him to whom nothing else ever was or can be clear,—Hoc discunt omnes, unto alpha et beta puelli.

If there be a case in which such graduality as is here described can have been consented to, and with a reasonable prospect of advantage, it must have been a case in which, without such consent, the whole business would be hopeless.

Under the existing system, by which the door of the theatre of legislation is opened by opulence to members in whose instance application of the faculty of thought to the business about which they are supposed to occupy themselves would have been an effect without a cause, so gross is the ignorance, and in consequence, even where good intention is not altogether wanting, so extreme the timidity and apprehension, that on their part, without assurance of extreme slowness, no concurrence to a proposal for setting one foot before another, at even the slowest pace, would be obtained at all; their pace, the only pace at which they can be persuaded to move, is that which the traveller would take, whose lot it should be to be travelling in a pitch-dark night over a road broken and slippery, edged with precipices on each side. Time is requisite for quieting timidity: why? Because time is requisite for instructing ignorance.

CHAPTER V.

FALLACY OF ARTFUL DIVERSION—(ad verecundiam.)

Exposition and Exposure.—The device here in question may be explained by the following direction or receipt for the manufacture and application of it:—

When any measure is proposed, which on any account whatsoever it suits your interest or your humour to oppose, at the same time that, in consideration of its undeniable utility, or on any other account, you regard it unadvisable to pass direct condemnation on it,—hold up to view some other measure, such as, whether it bear any relation or none to the measure on the carpet, will, in the conception of your hearers, present itself as superior in the order of importance. Your language then is,—Why that? (meaning the measure already proposed)—why not this? or this? mentioning some other, which it is your hope to render more acceptable, and by means of it to create a diversion, and turn aside from the obnoxious measure the affections and attention of those whom you have to deal with.

One case there is, in which the appellation of fallacy cannot with justice be applied to this argument; and that is, where the effectuation or pursuit of the measure first proposed would operate as a bar or an obstacle to some other measure of a more beneficial character held up to view by the argument as competitor with it: and what, in the way of Exposure, will be said of the sort of expedient just described, will not apply to this case.

However, where the measure first proposed is of unquestionable utility, and you oppose it merely because it is adverse to your own sinister interest, you must not suggest any relevant measure of reform in lieu of it, except in a case in which, in the shape of argument, every mode of opposition is considered as hopeless; for unless for the purpose of forestalling the time and attention that would be necessary to the effectuation of the proposed beneficial measure, a measure altogether irrelevant and foreign to it is set up, a risk is incurred, that something, however inferior in degree, may be effected towards the diminution of the abuse or imperfection in question.

In the character of an irrelevant counter-measure, any measure or accidental business whatever may be made to serve, so long as it can be made to pre-occupy a sufficient portion of the disposable time and attention of the public men on whose suffrages the effectuation or frustration of the measure depends.

But supposing the necessity for a relevant counter-measure to exist, and that you have accordingly given introduction to it, the first thing then to be done is, to stave off the undesirable moment of its effectuation as long as possible.

According to established usage, you have given notice of your intention to propose a measure on the subject and to the effect in question. The intention is of too great importance to be framed and carried into act in the compass of the same year or session: you accordingly announce your intention for next session. When the next session comes, the measure is of too great importance to be brought on the carpet at the commencement of the session; at that period it is not yet mature enough. If it be not advisable to delay it any longer, you oring it forward just as the session closes. Time is thus gained, and without any decided loss in the shape of reputation; for what you undertook, has to the letter been performed. When the measure has been once brought in, you have to take your choice, in the first place, between operations for delay and operations for rejection. Operations for delay exhibit a manifest title to preference: so long as their effect can be made to last, they accomplish their object, and no sacrifice either of design or of reputation has been made. The extreme importance and extreme difficulty are themes on which you blow the trumpet, and which you need not fear the not hearing sufficiently echoed. When the treasury of delay has been exhausted, you have your choice to take between trusting to the chapter of accidents for the defeat of the measure, or endeavouring to engage some friend to oppose it, and propose the rejection of it. But you must be unfortunate indeed, if you can find no opponents, no tolerably plausible opponents, unless among friends, and friends specially commissioned for the purpose: a sort of confidence more or less dangerous must in that case be reposed.

Upon the whole, you must however be singularly unfortunate or unskilful, if by the counter-measure of diversion any considerable reduction of the abuse or imperfection be, spite of your utmost endeavours, effected, or any share of reputation that you need care about, sacrificed.

CHAPTER I.

QUESTION-BEGGING APPELLATIVES—(ad judicium.)

Petitio principii, or begging the question, is a fallacy very well known even to those who are not conversant with the principles of logic. In answer to a given question, the party who employs the fallacy contents himself by simply affirming the point in debate. Why does opium occasion sleep? Because it is soporiferous.

Begging the question is one of the fallacies enumerated by Aristotle; but Aristotle has not pointed out (what it will be the object of this chapter to expose) the mode of using the fallacy with the greatest effect, and least risk of detection,—namely, by the employment of a single appellative.

Exposition and Exposure.—Among the appellatives employed for the designation of objects belonging to the field of moral science, there are some by which the object is presented singly, unaccompanied by any sentiment of approbation or disapprobation attached to it—as, desire, labour, disposition, character, habit, &c. With reference to the two sorts of appellatives which will come immediately to be mentioned, appellatives of this sort may be termed neutral.

There are others, by means of which, in addition to the principal object, the idea of general approbation as habitually attached to that object is presented—as, industry, honour, piety, generosity, gratitude, &c. These are termed eulogistic or laudatory.

Others there are, again, by means of which, in addition to the principal object, the idea of general disapprobation, as habitually attached to that object, is presented—as, lust, avarice, luxury, covetousness, prodigality, &c. These may be termed dyslogistic or vituperative.*

Among pains, pleasures, desires, emotions, motives, affections, propensities, dispositions, and other moral entities, some, but very far from all, are furnished with appellatives of all three sorts:—some, with none but eulogistic; others, and in a greater number, with none but those of the dyslogistic cast. By appellatives, I mean here, of course, single-worded appellatives; for by words, take but enough of them, anything may be expressed.

Originally, all terms expressive of any of these objects were (it seems reasonable to think) neutral. By degrees they acquired, some of them an eulogistic, some a dyslogistic, cast. This change extended itself, as the moral sense (if so loose and delusive a term may on this occasion be employed) advanced in growth.

But to return. As to the mode of employing this fallacy, it neither requires nor so much as admits of being taught: a man falls into it but too naturally of himself; and the more naturally and freely, the less he finds himself under the restraint of any such sense as that of shame. The great difficulty is to unlearn it: in the case of this, as of so many other fallacies, by teaching it, the humble endeavour here is, to unteach it.

In speaking of the conduct, the behaviour, the intention, the motive, the disposition of this or that man,—if he be one who is indifferent to you, of whom you care not whether he be well or ill thought of, you employ the neutral term:—if a man whom, on the occasion and for the purpose in question, it is your object to recommend to favour, especially a man of your own party, you employ the eulogistic term:—if he be a man whom it is your object to consign to aversion or contempt, you employ the dyslogistic term.

To the proposition of which it is the leading term, every such eulogistic or dyslogistic appellative, secretly, as it were, and in general insensibly, slips in another proposition of which that same leading term is the subject, and an assertion of approbation or disapprobation the predicate. The person, act, or thing in question, is or deserves to be, or is and deserves to be, an object of general approbation; or the person, act, or thing in question, is or deserves to be, or is and deserves to be, an object of general disapprobation.

The proposition thus asserted is commonly a proposition that requires to be proved. But in the case where the use of the term thus employed is fallacious, the proposition is one that is not true, and cannot be proved: and where the person by whom the fallacy is employed is conscious of its deceptive tendency, the object in the employment thus given to the appellative is, by means of the artifice, to cause that to be taken for true, which is not so.

By appropriate eulogistic and dyslogistic terms, so many arguments are made, by which, taking them altogether, misrule, in all its several departments, finds its justifying arguments, and these in but too many eyes, conclusive. Take, for instance, the following eulogistic terms:—

1. In the war department,—honour and glory.

2. In international affairs,—honour, glory, and dignity.

3. In the financial department, liberality. It being always at the expense of unwilling contributors that this virtue (for among the virtues it has its place in Aristotle) is exercised—for liberality, depredation may, in perhaps every case, and without any impropriety, be substituted.

4. In the higher parts of all official departments, dignity—dignity, though not in itself depredation, operates as often as the word is used, as a pretence for, and thence as a cause of depredation. Wherever you see dignity, be sure that money is requisite for the support of it: and that, in so far as the dignitary’s own money is regarded as insufficient, public money, raised by taxes imposed on all other individuals, on the principle of liberality, must be found for the supply of it.*

Exercised at a man’s own expense, liberality may be, or may not be, according to circumstances, a virtue:—exercised at the expense of the public, it never can be anything better than vice. Exercised at a man’s own expense, whether it be accompanied with prudence or no—whether it be accompanied or not with beneficence, it is at any rate disinterestedness:—exercised at the expense of the public, it is pure selfishness: it is, in a word, depredation: money or money’s worth is taken from the public to purchase, for the use of the liberal man, respect, affection, gratitude, with its eventual fruits in the shape of services of all sorts—in a word, reputation, power.

When you have a practice or measure to condemn, find out some more general appellative, within the import of which the obnoxious practice or measure in question cannot be denied to be included, and to which you, or those whose interests and prejudices you have espoused, have contrived to annex a certain degree of unpopularity, in so much that the name of it has contracted a dyslogistic quality—has become a bad name.

Take, for example, improvement and innovation: under its own name to pass censure on any improvement might be too bold: applied to such an object, any expressions of censure you could employ might lose their force; employing them, you would seem to be running on in the track of self-contradiction and nonsense.

But improvement means something new, and so does innovation. Happily for your purpose, innovation has contracted a bad sense; it means something which is new and bad at the same time. Improvement, it is true, in indicating something new, indicates something good at the same time; and therefore, if the thing in question be good as well as new, innovation is not a proper term for it. However, as the idea of novelty was the only idea originally attached to the term innovation, and the only one which is directly expressed in the etymology of it, you may still venture to employ the word innovation, since no man can readily and immediately convict your appellation of being an improper one upon the face of it.

With the appellation thus chosen for the purpose of passing condemnation on the measure, he by whom it has been brought to view in the character of an improvement, is not (it is true) very likely to be well satisfied: but of this you could not have had any expectation. What you want is a pretence which your own partisans can lay hold of, for the purpose of deducing from it a colourable warrant for passing upon the improvement that censure which you are determined, and they, if not determined, are disposed and intend to pass on it.

Of this instrument of deception, the potency is most deplorable. It is but of late years that so much as the nature of it has in any way been laid before the public: and now that it has been laid before the public, the need there is of its being opposed with effect, and the extreme difficulty of opposing it with effect, are at the same time and in equal degree manifest. In every part of the field of thought and discourse, the effect of language depends upon the principle of association—upon the association formed between words, and those ideas of which, in that way, they have become the signs. But in no small part of the field of discourse, one or other of the two censorial and reciprocally correspondent and opposite affections—the amicable and the hostile—that by which approbation, and that by which disapprobation, is expressed—are associated with the word in question by a tie little less strong than that by which the object in question, be it person or thing—be the thing a real or fictitious entity—be it operation or quality, is associated with that same articulate audible sign and its visible representations.

To diminish the effect of this instrument of deception (for to do it away completely, to render all minds, without exception, at all times insensible to it, seems scarcely possible) must, at any rate, be a work of time. But in proportion as its effect on the understanding, and through that channel on the temper and conduct of mankind, is diminished, the good effect of the exposure will become manifest.

By such of these passion-kindling appellatives as are of the eulogistic cast, comparatively speaking, no bad effect is produced: but by those which are of the dyslogistic, prodigious is the mischievous effect produced, considered in a moral point of view. By a single word or two of this complexion, what hostility has been produced! how intense the feeling of it! how wide the range of it! how full of mischief, in all imaginable shapes, the effects!*

CHAPTER II.

IMPOSTOR TERMS—(ad judicium.)

Exposition.—The fallacy which consists in the employment of impostor terms, in some respects resembles that which has been exposed in the preceding chapter; but it is applied chiefly to the defence of things, which under their proper name are manifestly indefensible. Instead, therefore, of speaking of such things under their proper name, the sophist has recourse to some appellative, which, along with the indefensible object, includes some other—generally an object of favour; or at once substitutes an object of approbation for an object of censure. For instance, persecutors in matters of religion have no such word as persecution in their vocabulary: zeal is the word by which they characterize all their actions.

In the employment of this fallacy, two things are requisite:—

1. A fact or circumstance, which, under its proper name, and seen in its true colours, would be an object of censure, and which, therefore, it is necessary to disguise:—(res tegenda.)

2. The appellative which the sophist employs to conceal what would be deemed offensive, or even to bespeak a degree of favour for it by the aid of some happier accessary:—(tegumen.)†

Exposure.—Example: Influence of the Crown.—The sinister influence of the crown is an object which, if expressed by any peculiar and distinctive appellation, would, comparatively speaking, find perhaps but few defenders; but which, so long as no other denomination is employed for the designation of it than the generic term influence, will rarety meet with indiscriminating reprobation.

Corruption,—the term which, in the eyes of those to whom this species of influence is an object of disapprobation, is the appropriate and only single-worded term capable of being employed for the expression of it—is a term of the dyslogistic cast. This, then, by any person whose meaning it is not to join in the condemnation passed on the practice or state of things which is designated, is one that cannot possibly be employed. In speaking of this practice and state of things, he is therefore obliged to go upon the look-out, and find some term, which, at the same time that its claim to the capacity of presenting to view the object in question cannot be contested, shall be of the eulogistic or at least of the neutral cast; and to one or other of these classes belongs the term influence.

Under the term influence, when the crown is considered as the possessor of it, are included two species of influence: the one of them such, that the removal of it could not, without an utter reprobation of the monarchical form of government, be by any person considered as desirable, nor, without the utter destruction of monarchical government, be considered as possible;—the other such—that in the opinion of many persons, the complete destruction or removal of it would, if possible, be desirable,—and that, though consistently with the continuance of the monarchical government, the complete removal of it would not be practicable, yet the diminution of it to such a degree as that the remainder should not be productive of any practically pernicious effects would not be impracticable.

Influence of will on will—influence of understanding on understanding: in this may be seen the distinction on which the utility or noxiousness of the sort of influence in question depends.

In the influence of understanding on understanding, may be seen that influence to which, by whomsoever exercised, on whomsoever exercised, and on what occasion soever exercised, the freest range ought to be left—left, although, as for instance, exercised by the crown, and on the representatives of the people. Not that to this influence it may not happen to be productive of mischief to any amount; but that because without this influence scarce any good could be accomplished, and because, when it is left free, disorder cannot present itself without leaving the door open at least for the entrance of the remedy.

The influence of understanding on understanding is, in a word, no other than the influence of human reason—a guide which, like other guides, is liable to miss its way, or dishonestly to recommend a wrong course, but which is the only guide of which the nature of the case is susceptible.

Under the British constitution, to the crown belongs either the sole management, or a principal and leading part of the management of the public business: and it is only by the influence of understanding on understanding, or by the influence of will on will, that by any person or persons, except by physical force immediately applied, anything can be done.

To the execution of the ordinary mass of duties belonging to the crown, the influence of will on will, so long as the persons on whom it is exercised are the proper persons, is necessary. On all persons to whom it belongs to the crown to give orders, this species of influence is necessary; for it is only in virtue of this species of influence that orders, considered as delivered from a superordinate to a subordinate—considered in a word as orders, in contradistinction to mere suggestions, or arguments operating by the influence of understanding on understanding,—can be productive of any effect.

Thus far, then, in the case of influence of will on will, as well as in the case of influence of understanding on understanding, no rational and consistent objection can be made to the use of influence. In either case, its title to the epithet legitimate influence is above dispute.

The case, among others, in which the title of the influence of the crown is open to dispute—the case in which the epithet sinister, or any other mark of disapprobation, may be bestowed upon it (bestowed upon the bare possession, and without need of reference to the particular use and application which on any particular occasion may happen to be made of it,)—is that where, being of that sort which is exercised by will on will, the person on whom on the occasion in question it is exercised, is either a member of parliament, or a person possessed of an electoral vote with reference to a seat in parliament.

The ground on which this species of influence thus exercised is, by those by whom it is spoken of with disapprobation, represented as sinister, and deserving of that disapprobation, is simply this:—viz. that in so far as this influence is efficient, the will professed to be pronounced is not in truth the will of him whose will it professes to be, but the will of him in whom the influence originates, and from whom it proceeds: in so much, that if, for example, every member of parliament without exception were in each house under the dominion of the influence of the crown, and in every individual instance that influence were effectual,—the monarchy, instead of being the limited sort of monarchy it professes to be, would be in effect an absolute one—in form alone a limited one; nor so much as in form a limited one any longer than it happened to be the pleasure of the monarch that it should continue to be so.

The functions attached to the situation of a member of parliament may be included, most or all of them, under three denominations—the legislative, the judicial, and the inquisitorial: the legislative, in virtue of which, in each House, each member that pleases takes a part in the making of laws; the judicial, which, whether penal cases or cases non-penal be considered, is not exercised to any considerable extent but by the House of Lords; and the inquisitorial, the exercise of which is performed by an inquiry into facts, with a view to the exercise either of legislative authority, or of judicial authority, or both, whichever the case may be found to require. To the exercise of either branch may be referred what is done, when, on the ground of some defect either in point of moral or intellectual fitness, or both, application is made by either house for the removal of any member or members of the executive branch of the official establishment—any servant or servants of the crown.

But, for argument’s sake, suppose the abovementioned extreme case to be realized, all these functions are equally nugatory. Whatever law is acceptable to the crown, will be not only introduced but carried; no law that is not acceptable to the crown, will be so much as introduced: every judgment that is acceptable to the crown will be pronounced; no judgment that is not acceptable to the crown will be pronounced: every inquiry that is acceptable to the crown will be made; no inquiry that is not acceptable to the crown will be made: and in particular, let, on the part of the servants of the crown, any or all of them, misconduct in every imaginable shape be ever so enormous, no application that is not acceptable to the crown will ever be made for their removal; that is, no such application will ever be made at all: for in this state of things, supposing it, in the instance of any servant of the crown, to be the pleasure of the crown to remove him, he will be removed of course; nor can any such application be productive of anything better than needless loss of time.

Raised to the pitch supposed in this extreme case, there are not, it is supposed, many men in the country, by whom the influence of the crown, of that sort which is exercised by the will of the crown on the wills of members of parliament, would not be really regarded as coming under the denomination of sinister influence; not so much as a single one by whom its title to that denomination would be openly denied.

But among members of parliament, many there are on whom, beyond possibility of denial, this sort of influence—influence of will on will—is exerted: since no man can be in possession of any desirable situation from which he is removable, without its being exerted on him; say rather, without its exerting itself on him: for to the production of the full effect of influence, no act, no express intimation of will on the part of any person, is in any such situation necessary.

Here, then, comes the grand question in dispute. In some opinions, of that sort of influence of will on will, exercising itself from the crown on a member of parliament, or at any rate on a member of the House of Commons, composed of the elected representatives of the people, not any the least particle is necessary—not any the least particle is in any way beneficial—not any the least particle, in so far as it is operative, can be other than pernicious.

In the language of those by whom this opinion is held, every particle of such influence is sinister influence, corrupt or corruptive influence, or, in one word, corruption.

Others there are, in whose opinion, or at any rate, if not in their opinion, in whose language, of that influence thus actually exercising itself, the whole, or some part at any rate, is not only innoxious but beneficial, and not only beneficial but—to the maintenance of the constitution in a good and healthful state—absolutely necessary: and to this number must naturally be supposed to belong all those on whom this obnoxious species of influence is actually exercising itself.

CHAPTER III.

VAGUE GENERALITIES—(ad judicium.)

Exposition.—Vague generalities comprehend a numerous class of fallacies, resorted to by those who, in preference to the most particular and determinate terms and expressions which the nature of the case in question admits of, employ others more general and indeterminate.

As expression is vague and ambiguous when it designates, by one and the same appellative, an object which may be good or bad, according to circumstances; and if, in the course of an inquiry touching the qualities of such an object, such an expression is employed without a recognition of this distinction, the expression operates as a fallacy.

Take, for instance, the terms, government, laws, morals, religion. The genus comprehended in each of these terms may be divided into two species—the good and bad; for no one can deny that there have been and still are in the world, bad governments, bad laws, bad systems of morals, and bad religions. The bare circumstance, therefore, of a man’s attacking government or law, morals or religion, does not of itself afford the slightest presumption that he is engaged in anything blameable: if his attack is only directed against that which is bad in each, his efforts may be productive of good to any extent.

This essential distinction the defender of abuse takes care to keep out of sight, and boldly imputes to his antagonist an intention to subvert all governments, laws, morals or religion.

But it is in the way of insinuation, rather than in the form of direct assertion, that the argument is in this case most commonly brought to bear. Propose anything with a view to the improvement of the existing practice in relation to government at large, to the law, or to religion, he will treat you with an oration on the utility and necessity of government, of law, or of religion. To what end? To the end that of your own accord you may draw the inference which it is his desire you should draw, even that what is proposed has in its tendency something which is prejudicial to one or other or all of these objects of general regard. Of the truth of the intimation thus conveyed, had it been made in the form of a direct assertion or averment, some proof might naturally have been looked for: by a direct assertion, a sort of notice is given to the hearer or reader to prepare himself for something in the shape of proof; but when nothing is asserted, nothing is on the one hand offered, nothing on the other expected, to be proved.

CHAPTER IV.

ALLEGORICAL IDOLS—(ad imaginationem.)

Exposition.—The use of this fallacy is the securing to persons in office, respect independent of good behaviour. This is in truth only a modification of the fallacy of vague generalities, exposed in the preceding chapter. It consists in substituting for men’s proper official denomination, the name of some fictitious entity, to whom, by customary language, and thence opinion, the attribute of excellence has been attached.

Examples:—1. Government; for members of the governing body. 2. The law; for lawyers. 3. The church; for churchmen. The advantage is, the obtaining for them more respect than might be bestowed on the class under its proper name.

Exposure.—I. Government. In its proper sense, in which it designates the set of operations, it is true, and universally acknowledged, that everything valuable to man depends upon it: security against evil in all shapes, from external adversaries as well as domestic.

II. Law: execution of the law.—By this it is that men receive whatsoever protection they receive against domestic adversaries and disturbers of their peace. By government—law—the law—are therefore brought to view the naturalest and worthiest objects of respect and attachment within the sphere of a man’s observance: and for conciseness and ornament (not to speak of deception) the corresponding fictitious entities are feigned, and represented as constantly occupied in the performance of the above-mentioned all-preserving operations. As to the real persons so occupied, if they were presented in their proper character, whether collectively or individually, they would appear clothed in their real qualities, good and bad together. But, as presented by means of this contrivance, they are decked out in all their good and acceptable qualities, divested of all their bad and unacceptable ones. Under the name of the god Æsculapius, Alexander the impostor, his self-constituted high priest, received to his own use the homage and offerings addressed to his god. Acquired, as it is believed, comparatively within late years, this word government has obtained a latitude of import in a peculiar degree adapted to the sinister purpose here in question. From abstract, the signification has become, as the phrase is, concrete. From the system, in all its parts taken together, it has been employed to denote the whole assemblage of the individuals employed in the carrying on of the system—of the individuals who, for the time being, happen to be members of the official establishment, and of these more particularly, and even exclusively, such of them as are members of the administrative branch of that establishment. For the designation either of the branch of the system, or of the members that belong to it, the language had already furnished the word administration. But the word administration would not have suited the purpose of this fallacy: accordingly, by those who feel themselves to have an interest in the turning it to account, to the proper word administration, the too ample, and thence improper word government, has been, probably by a mixture of design and accident, commonly substituted.

This impropriety of speech being thus happily and successfully established, the fruits of it are gathered in every day. Point out an abuse—point to this or that individual deriving a profit from the abuse: up comes the cry, “You are an enemy to government!” then, with a little news in advance, “Your endeavour is to destroy government!” Thus you are a Jacobin, an anarchist, and so forth: and the greater the pains you take for causing government to fulfil, to the greatest perfection, the professed ends of its institution the greater the pains taken to persuade those who wish, or are content to be deceived, that you wish and endeavour to destroy it.

III. Church.—This is a word particularly well adapted to the purpose of this fallacy. To the elements of confusion shared by it with government and law, it adds divers proper to itself. The significations indifferently attachable to the word Church are—1. Place of worship; 2. Inferior officers engaged by government to take a leading part in the ceremonies of worship;* 3. All the people considered as worshippers; 4. The superior officers of government by whom the inferior, as above, are engaged and managed; 5. The rules and customs respecting those ceremonies.

The use of this fallacy to churchmen, is the giving and securing to them a share of coercive power; their sole public use, and even original destination, being the serving the people in the capacity of instructors—instructing them in a branch of learning, now more thoroughly learnt without than from them.† In the phrase “church and state,” churchmen are represented as superior to all non-churchmen. By “church and king,” churchmen are represented as superior to the king. Fox and Norfolk were struck off the the list of privy councillors for drinking “The sovereignty of the people:” the reduction would be greater, were all struck off who have ever drank “Church and king.” According to Bishop Warburton’s Alliance, the people in the character of the church, meeting with all themselves in the character of the state, agreed to invest the expounders of the sacred volume with a large share of the sovereignty. Against this system, the lawyers, their only rivals, were estopped from pleading its seditiousness in bar. In Catholic countries, the churchmen who compose Holy Mother Church possess one beautiful female, by whom the people are governed in the field of spiritual law, within which has been inclosed as much as possible of profane law. By Protestants, on Holy Mother Church the title of Whore of Babylon has been conferred: they recognise no Holy Mother Church. But in England, churchmen, a large portion of them, compose two Almæ Matres Academiæ—kind Mother Academies or Universities. By ingenuity such as this, out of “lubberly post-masters’ boys” in any number, one “sweet Mrs. Anne Page” is composed, fit to be decked out in elements of amiability to any extent. The object and fruit of this ingenuity is the affording protection to all abuses and imperfections attached to this part of the official establishment. Church being so excellent a being, none but a monster can be an enemy, a foe to her. Monster, i. e. anarchist, Jacobin, leveller, &c. To every question having reform or improvement in view as to this part of the official establishment, the answer is one and the same: “You are an enemy to the church.” For instance, among others, to such questions as follow:—1. What does this part of the official establishment do, but read or give further explanation to one book, of which more explanation has been given already than the longest life would suffice to hear? 2. Does not this suppose a people incapable of being taught to read? 3. Would it not be more read if each of them, being able to read, had it constantly by him to read all through, than by their being at liberty some of them to go miles to hear small parts of it? Suppose it admitted, that by the addition of other services conducive to good morals and good government, business for offices not much inferior to the existing ecclesiastical offices might be found, then go on and ask—1. As to the connexion between reward and service, do not the same rules apply to these as to profane offices? 2. Pay unconditioned-for service,—is it more effectual in producing service here than there? 3. Here more than there,—can a man serve in a place without being there? 4. Here, as there, is not a man’s relish for the business proved the greater, the smaller the factitious reward he is content to receive for doing it? 5. The stronger such his relish, is not his service likely to be the better? 6. Over and above what, if anything, is necessary to engage him to render the service, does not every penny contribute to turn him aside to other and expensive occupations, by furnishing him with the means? 7. In Scotland, where there is less pay, is not residence more general, and clerical service more abundant and efficient?

Answer: Enemy!—and, if English-bred, Apostate!

1. In Scotland, does any evil arise from the non-existence of bishops? 2. In the House of Lords, any good? 3. Is not non-attendance there more general than even non-residence elsewhere? 4. In judiciali, does any bishop ever attend, who is not laid hold of after reading prayers? 5. In legislatura, ever, except where personal interest wears the mask of gratitude? 6. Such non-attendance, is it not felt rather as a relief than as a grievance?

Answer: “Enemy to the church!”

1. In Ireland, what is the use of Protestant priests to Catholics, who will neither hear nor see them? to whom they are known but as plunderers? 2. By such exemption from service, is not value of preferment increased? 3. By patrons, as by incumbents, are not bishopricks thus estimated? 4. Is it not there a maxim, that service and pay should be kept in separate hands? 5. In eyes not less religious than gracious, is not the value of religion inversely as the labour, as well as directly as the profit? 6. Is not this estimate the root of those scruples, by which oaths imposed to protect Protestantism from being oppressed, are employed in securing to it the pleasure of oppressing?

Answer: “Enemy to the church!”

CHAPTER V.

SWEEPING CLASSIFICATIONS—(ad judicium.)

Exposition.—The device of those who employ in the way of fallacy, sweeping classifications, is that of ascribing to an individual object (person or thing) any properties of another, only because the object in question is ranked in the class with that other, by being designated by the same name.

In its nature, this fallacy is equally applicable to undeserved eulogy as to undeserved censure; but it is more frequently applied to the purpose of censure, its efficiency being greater in that direction.

Exposure.—Example 1: Kings—Crimes of Kings.—In the heat of the French revolution, when the lot of Louis XVI. was standing between life and death, among the means employed for bringing about the catastrophe that ensued, was the publication of a multitude of inflammatory pamphlets, one of which had for its title “The Crimes of Kings.”

Kings being men, and all men standing exposed to those temptations by which some of them are led into crimes, matter could not be wanting for a book so entitled: and if there are some crimes to the temptation of which men thus elevated stand less exposed than the inferior orders, there are other crimes, to which, perhaps, that elevation renders them but the more prone.

But of the man by whom on that occasion a book with such a title was published, the object, it is but too probable, was to compose out of it this argument: Criminals ought to be punished—kings are criminals—and Louis is a king; therefore Louis ought to be punished.

Example 2: Catholics—Cruelties of Catholics.—Not long ago, in the course, and for the purpose of the controversy on the question, whether that part of the community which is composed of persons of the Catholic persuasion, ought or ought not to be kept any longer in a state of degradation under the predominant sect, a book made its appearance, under the title of “Cruelties of the Catholics.”

Of any such complete success, as the consigning in a body to the fate in which that Catholic king was, with so many of his nearest connexions, involved, all such British subjects as participate with him in that odious name, there could not be much hope: but whatsoever could, by the species of fallacy here in question, be done towards the promoting of it, was done by that publication. The object of it was to keep them still debarred from whatsoever relief remains yet to be administered to the oppressions under which they labour: either it had this object, or it had none.

To the complexion of this argument, and of the mind that could bring it forward, justice will not be done, unless an adequate conception be formed of the practical consequences to which, if to anything, it leads.

Of the Catholics of the present and of all future time, whatsoever be the character, the cruelties, and other enormities committed by persons who in former times were called by the same indefinitely comprehensive name, will still remain what they were. Whatsoever harsh treatment, therefore, this argument warrants the bestowing on these their namesakes at the present time, the same harsh treatment will, from the same argument, continue to receive the same justification, so long as there remains one individual who, consistently with truth, is capable of being characterized by the same name.

Be they what they may, the barbarities of the Catholics of those times had their limits: but of this abhorrer of Catholic barbarities, the barbarity has, in respect of the number of intended victims, no limits other than those of time.

Of the man who, to put an end to the cruelties of kings, did what depended upon him towards extirpating the class of kings, the barbarity, so far as regarded this object, was, comparatively speaking, confined within a very narrow range. All Europe would not have sufficed to supply his scaffold with a dozen victims. But after crushing as many millions of the vermin, whom his piety and his charity marked out for sacrifice, the zeal of the abhorrer of Catholic cruelties would have been in the condition of the tiger whom, in the plains of Southern Africa, a traveller depicted to us as lying breathless with fatigue amidst a flock of antelopes.

In the same injurious device the painter of the crimes of kings might, by a no less conclusive argument, have proved the necessity of crushing the English form of the Protestant religion, and consigning to the fate of Louis XVI. the present head of it.

By order of King James I. two men, whose misfortune it was not to be able to form, in relation to some inexplicable points of technical theology, the same conception that was entertained, or professed to be entertained, by the royal ruler and instructor of his people, were burnt alive.* George IV. not only bears in common with James I. the two different denominations—viz. Protestant of the Church of England, and King of Great Britain—but, as far as marriage can be depended on for proof of filiation, is actually of the same blood and lineage with that royal and triumphant champion of local orthodoxy.

If, indeed, in the authentic and generally received doctrines of the religion in question, there were anything that compelled its professors to burn or otherwise to destroy or ill-treat all or any of those that differed from them, and if by any recent overt-act an adherence to those dissocial doctrines had appeared in practice, in such case the adherence to such dissocial doctrines would afford a just ground for whatsoever measures of security were deemed necessary to guard other men from the effect of such doctrines and such practice.

But by no doctrines of their religion are Catholics compelled to burn or otherwise ill-treat those who differ from them, any more than by the doctrines of the Church of England James I. was compelled to burn those poor Anabaptists.

If from analogy any sincere and instructive use had on this occasion been intended to be derived from different countries professing the same persuasion,—in these our times a much more instructive lesson would be afforded than any that could be derived from even the same country at such different times.

If in Ireland, where three-fourths or more of the population is composed of Catholics, no ill-treatment has, within the memory of man, been bestowed by Catholics, as such, upon Protestants, as such; while in the same country so much ill-treatment has on other accounts been bestowed by each of these persuasions upon the other; it is, it may be said, because the power of doing so with impunity is not in their hands.

But in countries where the Catholic religion is the predominant religion, and in which at the same time, as in our islands, barbarity on the score of heresy was by Catholics exercised according to law, and in the countries in which the exercise of those barbarities was at those times most conspicuous,—of no such barbarities has any instance occurred for a long course of years.*

CHAPTER VI.

SHAM DISTINCTIONS—(ad judicium.)

Exposition.—Of the device here in view, the nature may be explained by the following direction for the use of it:—

When any existing state of things has too much evil in it to be defensible in toto, or proposals for amendment are too plainly necessary to be rejectible in toto, the evil and the good being nominally distinguished from each other by two corresponding and opposite terms, eulogistic and dyslogistic, but in such sort that, to the nominal line of distinction thus drawn, there corresponds not any determinate real difference,—declare your approbation of the good by its eulogistic name, and thus reserve to yourself the advantage of opposing it without reproach by its dyslogistic name, and so vice versa declare your disapprobation of the evil, &c.

Exposure.—Example 1: Liberty and Licentiousness of the Press.—Take for example the case of the Press.

The press (including under this denomination every instrument employed or employable for the purpose of giving diffusion to the matter of human discourse by visible signs)—the press has two distinguishable uses,—viz. moral and political: moral, consisting in whatsoever check it may be capable of opposing to misconduct in private life—political, in whatsoever check it may be capable of opposing to misconduct in public life, that is, on the part of public men—men actually employed, or aspiring to be employed, in any situation in the public service: opposing viz. by pointing on the persons to whom such misconduct is respectively imputable, a portion more or less considerable of disapprobation and consequent ill-will on the part of the public at large—a portion more or less considerable according to the nature of the case.

If to such misconduct there be no such check at all opposed, as that which it is the nature of the press to apply, the consequence is, that of such misconduct, whatsoever is not included in the prohibitions and eventual punishment provided by law, will range uncontrouled: in which case, so far as concerns the political effect of such exemption from controul, the result is power uncontroulable, arbitrary despotism, in the hands whatsoever they are, in which the powers and functions of government happen to be reposed: and, moreover, in the instance of such misconduct as is included in that system of prohibition and eventual punishment, the controul will be without effect, in so far as by delay, vexation, and expense, natural or factitious, the individual who would be led to call for the application, is prevented from making such demand.

At the same time, on the other hand, the use of the press cannot be altogether free, but that on pretence of giving indication of misconduct that has actually taken place, supposed misconduct that never did actually take place, will to this or that individual be imputed.

In so far as the imputation thus conveyed happens to be false, the effects of the liberty in question will, so far as concerns any individual person thus unjustly accused, be of the evil cast, and by whomsoever they are understood so to be, the dyslogistic appellation licentiousness will naturally be applied.

Here then comes the dilemma—the two evils between which a choice must absolutely be made. Leave to the press its perfect liberty; along with the just imputations, which alone are the useful ones, will come, and in an unlimited proportion, unjust imputations, from which, in so far as they are unjust, evil is liable to arise.

But to him whose wish it really is that good morals and good government should prevail, the choice need not be so difficult as at first sight it may seem to be.

Let all just imputations be buried in utter silence,—what you are sure of is, that misconduct in every part of the field of action, moral and political, private and public, will range without controul—free from all that sort of controul which can be applied by the press, and not by anything else.

On the other hand, let all unjust imputations find, through this channel, an unobstructed course,—still, of the evil—the personal suffering threatened by such infliction—there is neither certainty, nor in general any near approach to it. Open to accusation, that same channel is not less open to defence.* He, therefore, who has truth on his side, will have on his side all that advantage which it is in the nature of truth to give.

That advantage,—is it an inconsiderable one? On the contrary supposition is founded, whatsoever is done in the reception and collection of judicial evidence—whatsoever is intended by the exercise of judicial authority, by the administration of whatsoever goes by the name of justice.

Meantime, if any arrangements there be, by which the door may be shut against unjust imputations, without incurring to an equal amount that sort of evil which is liable to result from the exclusion of just ones, so much the better.

But unless and until such arrangements shall have been devised and carried into effect, the tendency and effect of all restrictions having for their object the abridging of the liberty of the press, cannot but be evil on the whole.

To shut the door against such imputations as are either unjust or useless, leaving it at the same time open to such as are at the same time just and useful, would require a precise, a determinate, a correct and complete definition of the appellative, whatsoever it be, by which the abuse—the improper use—the supposed preponderantly pernicious use—of the press, is endeavoured to be brought to view.

To establish this definition, belongs to those, and to those alone, in whose hands the supreme power of the state is vested.

Of this appellative, no such definition has ever yet been given—of this appellative no such definition can reasonably be expected at the hands of any person so situated, since, by the establishing of such definition, their power would be curtailed, their interest prejudiced.

While this necessary definition remains unestablished, there remains with them the faculty of giving continuance and increase to the several points of abuse and misgovernment by which their interest in its several shapes is advanced.

Till that definition is given, the licentiousness of the press is every disclosure by which any abuse, from the practice of which they draw any advantage, is brought to light, and exposed to shame:—whatsoever disclosure it is, or is supposed to be, their interest to prevent.

The liberty of the press is such disclosure, and such only, from which no such inconvenience is apprehended.

No such definition can be given but at their expense:—at the expense of their arbitrary power—of their power of misconduct in the exercise of the functions of government,—at the expense of their power of misgovernment—of their power of sacrificing the public interest to their own private interest.

Should that line have ever been drawn, then it is that licentiousness may be opposed without opposing liberty: while that line remains undrawn, opposing licentiousness is opposing liberty.

Thus much being understood, in what consists the device here in question? It consists in employing the sham approbation given to the species of liberty here in question under the name of liberty, as a mask or cloak to the real opposition given to it under the name of licentiousness.

It is in the licentiousness of the press that the judge pretends to see the downfall of that government, the corruption of which he is upholding by inflicting on all within his reach those punishments which by his predecessors have been provided for the suppression of all disclosures by means of which the abuses which he profits by might be checked.

Example 2:—Reform, temperate and intemperate.—For the designation of the species or degree of political reform, which, by him who speaks of it, is meant to be represented as excessive or pernicious, the language affords no such single-worded appellative as in the case of liberty:—the liberty of the press. For making the nominal and pretended real distinction, and marking out on the object of avowed reprobation the pernicious or excessive species or degree, recourse must therefore be had to epithets or adjuncts: such, for instance, as violent, intemperate, outrageous, theoretical, speculative, and so forth.

If, with the benefit of the subterfuge afforded by any of these dyslogistic epithets, a man indulges himself in the practice of reprobating reform in terms thus vague and comprehensive, and without designating by any more particular and determinate word, the species or degree of reform to which he means to confine his reprobation, or the specific objections he may have to urge, you may in general venture to conclude it is not to any determinate species or degree that his real disapprobation and intended opposition confines itself, but that it extends itself to every species or degree of reform which, according to his expectation, would be efficient; that is, by which any of the existing abuses would find a corrective.

For, between all abuses whatsoever, there exists that connexion—between all persons who see each of them any one abuse in which an advantage results to himself, there exists in point of interest that close and sufficiently understood connexion, of which intimation has been given already. To no one abuse can correction be administered, without endangering the existence of every other.

If, then, with this inward determination not to suffer, so far as depends upon himself, the adoption of any reform which he is able to prevent, it should seem to him necessary or advisable to put on for a cover, the profession or appearance of a desire to contribute to such reform,—in pursuance of the device or fallacy here in question, he will represent that which goes by the name of reform as distinguishable into two species; one of them a fit subject for approbation, the other for disapprobation. That which he thus professes to have marked for approbation, he will accordingly, for the expression of such approbation, characterize by some adjunct of the eulogistic cast—such as moderate, for example, or temperate, or practical, or practicable.

To the other of these nominally distinct species, he will at the same time attach some adjunct of the dyslogistic cast—such as violent, intemperate, extravagant, outrageous, theoretical, speculative, and so forth.

Thus, then, in profession and to appearance, there are, in his conception of the matter, two distinct and opposite species of reform—to one of which his approbation, to the other his disapprobation, is attached. But the species to which his approbation is attached is an empty species,—a species in which no individual is, or is intended to be, contained.

The species to which his disapprobation is attached, is, on the contrary, a crowded species, a receptacle in which the whole contents of the genus—of the genus reform—are intended to be included.

CHAPTER VII.

POPULAR CORRUPTION—(ad superbiam.)

Exposition.—The instrument of deception, of which the argument here in question is composed, may be thus expressed:—The source of corruption is in the minds of the people; so rank and extensively seated is that corruption, that no political reform can ever have any effect in removing it.*

Exposure.—This fallacy consists in giving to the word corruption, when applied to the people, a sense altogether indeterminate—a sense in and by which all that is distinctly expressed is the disaffection of the speaker as towards the persons spoken of, imputing to them a bad moral character or cast of mind, but without any intimation given of the particular nature of it.

It is the result of a thick confusion of ideas, whether sincere, or affected for the purpose.

In the case of a parliamentary election, each elector acts as a trustee for himself and for all the other members of the community, in the exercise of the branch of political power here in question. If, by the manner in which his vote is received from him, he is precluded (as by ballot) from the possibility of promoting his own particular interest, to the prejudice of the remainder of the universal interest,—the only interest of his which he can entertain a prospect of promoting by such his vote, is his share of the universal interest: and for doing this, he sees before him no other possible means than the contributing to place the share of power attached to the seat in question in the hands of that candidate who is likely to render most service to the universal interest.

Now, how inconsiderable soever may be in his eyes this his share in the universal interest, still it will be sufficient to turn the scale where there is nothing in the opposite scale: and, by the supposition, the emptiness of the opposite scale has been secured in the mode of election by ballot, where the secresy thereby endeavoured at is accomplished, as to so complete a certainty it may be. If, then, to continue the allusion, the value of his share in the universal interest, in his eyes, is such as to overcome the love of ease—the aversion to labour—he will repair to the place, and give his vote to that candidate who, in his eyes, is likely to do most service to the universal interest: if it be not sufficient to overcome that resisting force, he will then forbear to give his vote; and though he will do no good to the universal interest, he will do no harm to it.

Thus it is that, under an apposite system of election procedure, supposing them in the account of self-regarding prudence equal, the least benevolent set of men will, on this occasion, render as much service to the universal interest as the most benevolent: the least benevolent, if that be what is meant by the most corrupt; and if that is not meant, nothing which is to the purpose, nor in short anything which is determinate, is meant.

On the other hand, in so far as the system of election is so ordered, that by the manner in which he gives his vote a man is enabled to promote his own separate interest, what is sufficiently notorious is, that no ordinary portion of benevolence in the shape of public spirit will suffice to prevent the breach of trust in question from being committed.

In the case, therefore, of the subject-many, to whom exclusively it was applied, the word corruption has no determinate and intelligible application. But to the class of the ruling few, it has a perfectly intelligible application—application in a sense in which the truth of it is as notorious as the existence of the sun at noonday. Pretending to be all of them chosen by the subject-many,—chosen, in fact, a very small proportion of them in that manner—the rest by one another,—they act in the character of trustees for the subject-many, bound to support the interest of the subject-many: instead of so doing, being with money exacted from the subject-many bribed by one another acting under the ruling one, they act in constant breach of such their trust, serving in all things their own particular and sinister interests, at the expense and to the sacrifice of that interest of the subject-many, which, together with that of the ruling few, composes and constitutes the universal interest. Corrupt, corruption, corruptors, corruptionist, applied to conduct such as hath been just described,—the meaning given to these terms wants assuredly nothing of being sufficiently intelligible.

A circumstance that renders this fallacy in a peculiar degree insidious and dangerous, is a sort of obscure reference made by it to certain religious notions—to the doctrine of original sin as delivered in the compendium of Church of England faith, termed the 39 articles.

Into that doctrine, considered in a religious point of view, it is not necessary on this occasion to make any inquiry. The field here in question is the field of politics; and, applied to this field, the fallacy in question seeks to lay the axe to the root of all government. It applies not only to this, but to all other remedies against that preponderance of self-regarding over social interest and affection, which is essential to man’s existence, but which, for the creation and preservation of political society, and thence for his well-being in it, requires to be checked—checked by a force formed within itself. It goes to the exclusion of all laws, and in particular of all penal laws; for if, for remedy to what is amiss, nothing is to be attempted by arrangements which, such as those relative to the principle and mode of election as applied to rulers, bring with them no punishment—no infliction,—how much less should the accomplishment of any such object be attempted by means so expensive and afflictive as those applied by penal laws!

By the employment given to this fallacy, the employer of it afforded himself a double gratification: he afforded an immediate gratification to his own anti-social pride and insolence, while he afforded to his argument a promise of efficiency, by the food it supplied to the same appetite in the breasts of his auditors, bound to him, as he saw them to be, by a community of sinister interest.

Out of the very sink of immorality was this fallacy drawn: a sentiment of hatred and contempt, of which not only all the man’s fellow-countrymen were the declared, but all mankind in at least equal degree were the naturally supposable object:—“So bad are they in themselves, no matter how badly they are treated: they cannot be treated worse than they deserve: Of a bad bargain (says the proverb) make the best; of so bad a crew, let us make the best for ourselves: no matter what they suffer, be it what it may, they deserve it.” If Nero had thought it worth his while to look out for a justification, he could not have found a more apt one than this: an argument which, while it harmonized so entirely with the worst passions of the worst men, screened its true nature in some measure from the observation of better men, by the cloud of confusion in which it wrapped itself.

In regard to corruption and uncorruption,—or to speak less ambiguously, in regard to vice and virtue,—how then stands the plain and real truth? That in the ruling few there is most vice and corruption, because in their hands has been the power of serving their own private and sinister interest, at the expense of the universal interest: and in so doing, they have, in the design and with the effect of making instruments of one another for the accomplishment of that perpetual object, been the disseminators of vice and corruption:—That in the subject-many, there has been least of vice and corruption, because they have not been in so large a degree partakers in that sinister interest, and have thus been left free to pursue the track pointed out to them, partly by men who have found a personal interest in giving to their conduct a universally beneficial direction—partly by discerning and uncorrupted men, who, lovers of their country and mankind, have not been in the way of having that generous affection overpowered in their breasts by any particular self-regarding interest.

Nearly akin to the cry of popular corruption is language commonly used to the following effect:—“Instead of reforming others—instead of reforming your betters, instead of reforming the state, the constitution, the church, everything that is most excellent,—let each man reform himself—let him look at home, he will find there enough to do, and what is in his power, without looking abroad and aiming at what is out of his power,” &c. &c.

Language to this effect may at all times be heard from anti-reformists—always, as the tone of it manifests, accompanied with an air of triumph—the triumph of superior wisdom over shallow and presumptuous arrogance.

One feature which helps to distinguish it from the cry of popular corruption, is the tacit assumption that, between the operation condemned and the operation recommended, incompatibility has place: than which, when once brought clearly to view, nothing, it will be seen, can be more groundless.

Certain it is, that if every man’s time and labour is exclusively employed in the correcting of his own personal imperfections, no part of it will be employed in the endeavour to correct the imperfections and abuses which have place in the government; and thus the mass of those imperfections and abuses will go on, never diminishing, but perpetually increasing with the torments of those who suffer by them, and the comforts of those who profit by them: which is exactly what is wanted.

CHAPTER VIII.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE SEVEN PRECEDING FALLACIES.

In the seven preceding fallacies, and in others of a similar nature, the device resorted to is uniformly the same, and consists in entirely avoiding the question in debate, by substituting general and ambiguous terms in the place of clear and particular appellatives.

In other fallacies, the argument advanced is generally irrelevant, but argument of some kind they do contain. In these, argument there is none; Sunt verba et voces prætereàque nihil.

To find the only word that will suit his purpose, the defender of corruption is obliged to make an ascent in the scale of generalization—to soar into the region of vague generalities, till he comes to a word by the extensiveness of whose import he is enabled, so by confounding language to confound conceptions, as without general and immediate fear of detection to defend, with a chance of success, an object, of the defence of which there would, under its proper and peculiar name, be no hope.

When of two terms—viz. a generic term, and a special term included under it—the specific term alone is proper, i. e. the proposition into the composition of which it enters, true; the generic term, if substituted to it, is ambiguous; and of the ambiguity, if the effect of it is not perceived, the consequence is error and deception.

Opposite to this aërial mode of contestation, is the mode already known and designated by the appellation of close reasoning.

In proportion as a man’s mode of reasoning is close (always supposing his intention honest,) for the designation of every object which he has occasion to bring to view, he employs in preference the most particular expression that he can find—that which is best adapted to the purpose of bringing to view everything which it is its object to bring to view, as clear as possible from everything which the purpose does not require to be brought, and which in consequence it is his endeavour to avoid bringing to view.

In proportion as a man is desirous of contributing on every occasion to the welfare of the community, and at the same time skilled in the means that most directly and certainly lead to the attainment of that end, he will, on the occasion of the language employed by him in the designation of each measure, look out for that plan of nomenclature and classification by which the degree and mode of its conduciveness or repugnancy to that end may be the more easily and correctly judged of.

Thus, in regard to offences,—acts which on account of their adverseness to the general welfare are objects meet for discouragement—for prohibition—and in case of necessity, for punishment,—not content with the employing for the designation of each such act in particular, that mode of expression by which every individual act partaking of the common nature indicated by the generic term may be brought to view, to the exclusion of every act not partaking of that common nature, he will, for the designation of the relation it bears to other offences, and of the place which it occupies in the aggregate assemblage of these obnoxious acts, find for it and assign to it some such more general and extensive appellation as shall give intimation of the mode in which the wound given by it to the general welfare is perceptible.

1. Offences against individuals other than a man’s self, and those assignable individuals; 2. Against a man’s self; 3. Against this or that particular class of the community; 4. Against the whole community without distinction.

In the case of individuals,—offences against person, against reputation, against property, against condition in life—and so on through the other classes above designated.*

For the opposite reason,—in proportion as, without regard to, and to the sacrifice of, the general welfare, a man is desirous of promoting his own personal or any other private interest, he will, on the occasion of the language employed in the designation of each measure, look out for that plan of nomenclature and classification, by which the real tendency of the measure to which he proposes to give birth or support, shall be as effectually masked as possible—rendered as difficult as possible to be comprehended and judged of.

In the English law, under the principle of arrangement—which till comparatively of late years was the only one, and which is still the predominant one—such were the groupes into which, by the classical denominations employed, they were huddled together, that by those denominations not any the slightest intimation was given of the nature and mischief of the offences respectively contained under them. Treasons, felonies unclergyable, felonies clergyable, premunires, misdemeanors.

By the four first of these five denominations, what is designated is, not the offence itself, but the treatment given to the offender in respect of it in the way of punishment: by the other denomination, not so much as even that—only that the act is treated on the footing of an offence, and on that score made punishable: it is the miscellaneous class, the contents of which are composed of all such offences as are not comprised under any of the others.

To what cause can a scheme of arrangement so incompatible with clear conception and useful instruction be ascribed?

Its creation may be traced to one source: its continuance to another. For its creation (such is its antiquity,) the weakness of the public intellect presents an adequate cause. Of treason and felony—terms imported at the Norman conquest with the rest of the nomenclature of the feudal system—the origin is lost in the darkness of primæval barbarism: religion—a perversion of the Christian religion, gave birth, after a hard and long labour, to the distinction between clergyable and unclergyable: religion, by a further perversion, gave birth to premunires in the reign of Edward III.

To the designs of those whose interest it is that misrule in all its shapes should be perpetuated, and thence, that useful information, by which it might be put to shame, and in time to flight, should as long as possible be excluded, nothing could be more serviceable than this primæval imbecility. Under these denominations in general, and in particular under felony, acts of any description are capable of being ranked with equal propriety, or rather with equal absence of impropriety: acts of any description whatsoever, and consequently acts altogether pure from any of those mischievous consequences from which alone any sufficient warrant for subjecting the agents to punishment can be found; and offences thus clear of every really mischievous quality have accordingly been created, and still continue in existence, in convenient abundance.

By this contrivance, the open tyranny of the lawyer-led legislator, and the covert tyranny of the law-making judge, are placed at the most perfect ease. The keenest eye cannot descry the felonies destined to be created by the touch of the sceptre upon the pattern of the old: the liveliest imagination cannot pourtray to itself the innoxious acts destined to be fashioned or swollen into felonies.

Analogous to this ancient English system—correspondent and analogous both as to the effect itself and as to its cause, is the system lately brought out by the legislators of France and their forced imitators in Germany. Faute, contravention, dêlit, crime—classes rising one above another in a climax of severity,—all of them, designative how indeterminately soever, rather of the treatment to which at the hands of the judge, the agent is subjected, than of the sort of act for which he is subjected to that treatment—much less of the ground, or reason, on which (regard being had to the quality and quantity of mischief) it is thought fit he shall be so dealt with.

Lawyer-craft, in alliance with political tyranny, may be marked out as the source of this confusion in the English case; lawyer-craft in subjection to political tyranny, in the French case.

In England, it is the interest of the man of law that the rule of action should be, and continue, in a state of as general uncertainty and incognoscibility as possible: that on condition of pronouncing on each occasion a portion of the flash language adapted to that purpose, he may, in his state of law-adviser and advocate, be master of men’s purses; in his state of judge,—of purse, reputation, condition in life, and life itself, to as complete a degree, and with as little odium and suspicion as possible. This is the state of things which it always has been, and will be his interest to perpetuate: and this is the state of things which hitherto it has been in his power to continue, and which accordingly does to this day continue in existence.

In France, where the man of law is not the ally of the politician, but his slave, that which it is not the interest of the politician to keep out of the view of the subject, is—what the law is;—that which it is his interest to keep (nor even that in all parts) out of the view of the subject, is—what it is for the interest of the subject that the law should be;—what, in a word, the law ought to be.

Having brought the rule of action within a compass, the narrowness of which, in respect of the quantity of words, has never, regard being had to the amplitude of the matter, yet been equalled, the tyrant of France has by this one act of charity displayed a quantity of merit, ample enough of itself to form a covering to no inconsiderable a portion of his sins.

But the exemplifications of vague generalities afforded by these systems of classification are sufficiently striking. To save the authors of the systems from ranking any one of the offences in question under a denomination which would be manifestly inapplicable to it, and from the discredit which would attach to them from such a source,—ascending to a superior height in the logical scale—in the scale of genera and species,—they provide a set of denominations so boundless in their extent, as to be capable without impropriety of including any objects whatsoever on which it might be found convenient to stamp the factitious quality desired. Noxiousness to other individuals in this or that way—noxiousness to a person himself in this or that way—noxiousness to a particular class of the community in this or that way—noxiousness to the whole community in this or that way,—these are qualities which it is not in the power of despotism to communicate to any act of any sort: but to cause such persons as it is performed by to be punished with such or such a punishment,—these are effects which, be the sort of act what it may, it is but too easy for supreme power, in whatsoever hands reposed, to annex to it.

Here, then, are so many instances where the turn of the man in power not being capable of being served, or at least so well served, by giving to an object that which is at once its most particular and most proper name, a name of more general and extensive import is employed for the purpose of favouring that deception, which by the designating of it by such its proper name, would have been dissipated, and thus giving to an exercise of power, which, if rightly denominated, would have been seen to be improper and mischievous, the chance of not appearing in such its true light.

CHAPTER IX.

ANTI-RATIONAL FALLACIES—(ad verecundiam.)

Exposition.—When reason is found or supposed to be in opposition to a man’s interests, his study will naturally be to render the faculty itself, and whatsoever issues from it, an object of hatred and contempt.

So long as the government contains in it any sort of abuse from which the members of the government, or any of them, derive in any shape a profit, and in the continuance of which they possess a proportionable interest, reason being against them, persons so circumstanced will be in so far against reason.

Instead of reason, we might here say thought. Reason is a word that implies not merely the use of the faculty of thinking, but the right use of it: but sooner than fail of its object, the sarcasm and other figures of speech employed upon the occasion are directed not merely against reason, but against thought itself; as if there were something in the faculty of thought that rendered the exercise of it incompatible with useful and successful practice.

1. Sometimes a plan, the adoption of which would not suit the official person’s interest, is without more ado pronounced a speculative one: and by this observation all need of rational and deliberate discussion,—such as objection to the end proposed, as not a fit one—objection to the means employed, as not being fit means,—is considered as being superseded.

To the word speculative, for further enforcement, are added or substituted, in a number more or less considerable, other terms, as nearly synonymous to it and to one another, as it is usual for words called synonymous to be; viz. theoretical, visionary, chimerical, romantic, utopian.

2. Sometimes a distinction is taken, and thereupon a concession made. The plan is good in theory, but it would be bad in practice; i. e. its being good in theory does not hinder its being bad in practice.

3. Sometimes, as if in consequence of a further progress made in the art of irrationality, the plan is pronounced to be too good to be practicable: and its being so good as it is, is thus represented as the very cause of its being bad in practice.

4. In short, such is the perfection at which this art is at length arrived, that the very circumstanee of a plan’s being susceptible of the appellation of a plan, has been gravely stated as a circumstance sufficient to warrant its being rejected: rejected, if not with hatred, at any rate with a sort of accompaniment, which to the million is commonly felt still more galling—with contempt.

“Looking at the House of Commons with these views,” says a writer on the subject of parliamentary reform, “my object would be to find out its chief defects, and to attempt the remedy of these one by one. To propose no system, no great project, nothing which pretended even to the name of a plan, but to introduce in a temperate and conciliatory manner . . . . one or two separate bills.”*

In this strain were these men proposed to be addressed, anno 1810, by Mr. Brougham: in this strain were they addressed, anno 1819, by Sir James Mackintosh, in moving for a committee on the penal laws. To give a man any chance of doing anything with them, in this same way they have ever been addressed, and must ever be addressed, till by radical reform (for it cannot be by anything less) the house shall have been purged of a class of men, of whom the most complete inaptitude in respect of every element of appropriate aptitude, is an essential characteristic. In the scale of appropriate probity—in the scale of appropriate intellectual aptitude, to find their level, a man must descend below that of the very dregs of the people. Oh what a picture is here drawn of them, and by so experienced a hand! How cutting, yet how unquestionably just, the perhaps unintended, perhaps intended satire! To avoid awakening the real terrors of some, the sham terrors of others, all consistency, all comprehensive acquaintance with the field of action, must be abjured. When idolatry in all its shapes shall have become extinct, and the words wise ancestors no longer an instrument of deception but a by-word, with what scorn will not ancestors such as these be looked back upon by their posterity!

Intimate as is the connexion between all these contrivances, there is however enough of distinction to render them, in this or that point of view, susceptible of a separate exposure.

CHAPTER X.

PARADOXICAL ASSERTION—(ad judicium.)

1. Dangerousness of the principle of utility. 2. Uselessness of classification. 3. Mischievousness of simplification. 4. Disinterestedness a mark of profligacy.

Exposition.—When of any measure, practice, or principle, the utility is too far above dispute to be capable of being impeached by reasoning, a rhetorician to whose interests or views it has appeared adverse, has in some instances, in a sort of fit of desperation, made this attack upon it; taking up the word or set of words commonly employed for the designation of it, without any such attempt as that of opposing it by any specific objection, he has assailed it with some vehement note of reprobation or strain of invective, in which the mischievousness or folly of it has been taken for granted, as if it were undeniable.

Exposure is a sort of process of which the device in question is scarce susceptible: but for the purpose of exposition, an example or two may have its use.

Utility, method, simplification, reason, sincerity. By a person unexperienced in the arts of political and verbal warfare, it would not readily be imagined that entities like these should, by any man laying claim to the distinguishing attribute of man, be pointed out as fit objects of hatred and contempt: yet so it is.

1. As to Utility.—Already has been named “a great character in a high situation,” by whom the principle of utility was pronounced a dangerous one.* A book might be mentioned, and one of no small celebrity,† in which the same principle—the principle of utility—has been pronounced useless:—the principle itself, and consequently every investigation in which, to the purposes of legislation or common life, application is endeavoured to be made of it.

What must be acknowledged is, that to make a right and effectual use of it, requires the concurrence of those requisites which are not always found in company:—invention, discernment, patience, sincerity—each in no inconsiderable degree; while, for the pronouncing of decisions without consulting it, decisions in the ipse dixit style, nothing is required but boldness.

Not that, on any occasion on which it promises to suit his purpose, and he feels in himself a capacity to apply it to that purpose, the most decided scorner of it ever fails to make use of it. It is only when, if consulted, its decisions would be against him, or he feels himself awkward at consulting it, that he ever takes upon him to do without it: and to prove anything to be right or wrong, thinks it sufficient for himself to say so.

CHAPTER XI.

NON-CAUSA PRO CAUSA: OR, CAUSE AND OBSTACLE CONFOUNDED—(ad judicium.)

Exposition.—When in a system which has good points in it, you have a set of abuses, or any of them, to defend,—after a general eulogium bestowed on the system, or an indication more or less explicit of the good effects the existence of which is out of dispute, take the abuses you have to defend, either separately or collectively (collectively is the safest course,) and to them ascribe the credit of having given birth to the good effects.

Cùm hoc, ergò propter hoc.

In every political system which is of long standing, and which, not having been produced, any considerable part of it, in prosecution of any comprehensive design, good or bad, but piecemeal at different and distant times, according to the casual and temporary predominance of conflicting interests—whatsoever may be the good or the bad points in the state of things which at any given time constitutes the result of it, among the incidents which may be observed as having place in it, some, upon proper scrutiny and proper distinction made, may be seen to have operated in the character of effective or promotive causes—others, in the character of obstacles or preventives—others, to have been in relation to them, in the character of immaterial incidents, or inoperative circumstances.

In such a system, whatsoever are the abuses or other imperfections in it, and whatsoever are the prosperous results observable in it, these prosperous results will have found, in the abuses and imperfections, not so many efficient or promotive causes, but so many obstacles or preventives.

Meantime, if so you can order matters, that instead of being recognised as having operated in the character of obstacles, the abuses in question shall be believed to have operated in the character of efficient or promotive causes, nothing can contribute more powerfully to the effect which it is your endeavour to produce.

If you cannot so far succeed as to cause the prosperous results in question to be referred to the abuses by which they have been obstructed and retarded, the next thing you are to endeavour at is, to cause them to be ascribed to some inoperative circumstance or circumstances, having in appearance some connexion or other—the nearer the better—with the abuses.

At any rate, you will, as far as depends upon you, cause the prosperous circumstances in question to be referred to any causes rather than the real ones: for in proportion as it becomes manifest of what causes they are the results, it will become manifest of what other circumstances they have not been the results: whereupon, no sooner is any one of the abuses you have to defend, considered in this point of view, than a question will be apt to occur.—Well, and this?—what has been the use of this? To which no answer being found, the consequence is such as need not be mentioned.

Real knowledge being among the number of your most formidable adversaries, your endeavour must of course be to obstruct its advancement and propagation as effectually as possible.

Real knowledge depends in a great degree on the being able, on each occasion, to distinguish from each other, causes, obstacles, and uninfluencing circumstances;—these, therefore, it must on every occasion be your study to confound as effectually as possible.

CHAPTER XII.

PARTIALITY-PREACHER’S ARGUMENT—(ad judicium.)

“From the abuse, argue not against the use.”

Exposition.—From abuse it is an erorr (it has been said) to argue against use.

The proposition is an absurd one, make the best of it: but the degree of absurdity will depend upon the turn that may be given to the sentence.

Whichsoever he the turn given to it, the plain and undeniable truth of the case, as between use and abuse, will alike serve for the exposure of it.

Be the institution what it may, whatsoever good effects there are that have resulted from it, these constitute, as far as experience goes, the use of it: whatsoever ill effects have resulted from it, these, in so far at least as they have been the object of foresight and the result of intention, constitute the abuse of it.

Thus as to past results: and the same observation applies to expected future ones.

Exposure.—Now then come the fallacies to the propagation of which it may and must have been directed:—

1. In taking an account of the effects of an institution, you ought to set down all the good effects, and omit all the bad ones.

This is one of the purposes to which it is capable of being applied: this needs not much to be said of it.

2. In taking an account of the effects of an institution good and bad, you ought not to argue against it on the supposition that the sum of the bad ones is greater than the sum of the good ones, merely from the circumstance, that among all its effects taken together, there are some that belong to the bad side of the account.

In this latter sense, such is the character of the maxim, that nothing can be said against the truth of it. As an instruction, it is too obvious to be of any use: in the way of warning, it cannot by possibility do any harm; nor is it altogether out of the sphere of possibility, that in this or that instance it may have its use.

Applied to a man’s pecuniary affairs, it amounts to this; viz. Conclude not that a man has no property because he has some debts.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS—(ad judicium.)

In this case, surely, if in any, exposition is of itself exposure.

The insertion of this article in the list of fallacies, was suggested by the use made of it in the Courier newspaper of the 27th of August 1819, as reported and commented upon in the Morning Chronicle of the 28th.*

The end justifies the means. Yes: but on three conditions, any of which failing, no such justification has place:—

1. One is, that the end be good.

2. That the means chosen be either purely good—or if evil, having less evil in them than on a balance there is of real good in the end.

3. That they have more of good in them, or less of evil, as the case may be, than any others, by the employment of which the end might have been attained.

Laying out of the case these restrictions, note the absurdities that would follow.

Acquisition of a penny loaf is the end I aim at. The goodness of it is indisputable. If, by the goodness of the end, any means employed in the attainment of it are justified, instead of a penny, I may give a pound for it: thus stands the justification on the ground of prudence. Or, instead of giving a penny for it, I may cut the baker’s throat, and thus get it for nothing: and thus stands the justification on the ground of benevolence and beneficence.

In politics, what is the use of this fallacy? In the mouth of one whose station is among the ins, it will serve for whatsoever cruelties those by whom power is exercised may at any time find a pleasure in committing on those over whom power is exercised, for the purpose of confirming themselves in the power of committing more such cruelties.

The ins, as such, have the power to commit atrocities; and that power having sinister interest for its spur, is never suffered to be idle. For the use of this fallacy, in so far as it can be worth their while to employ a cloak, they have therefore a continual demand.

The outs, acting under the impulse of the same spur, sharpened by continual privation and continually repeated disappointment, have on their part a still more urgent demand for the same fallacy, though the opportunities of making application of it but rarely present themselves to their hands.

The oracular party adage, invented by the Whigs—Not men but measures—or, Not measures but men—(for according as you complete the sentence, you may word it either way,)—this bold but slippery instrument of fallacy has manifest alliance with the present. Seating in office fit men, being the end, every thing depending upon that end, and the men in question being the only ones by which it can be attained, no means can be imagined, which by such an end may not be justified.

CHAPTER XIV.

OPPOSER-GENERAL’S JUSTIFICATION:—NOT MEASURES BUT MEN; OR, NOT MEN BUT MEASURES—(ad invidiam.)

According to the notions commonly entertained of moral duty under the head of probity, and in particular under the head of that branch of probity which consists in sincerity, whatsoever be the nature and extent of the business in question, private or public, it is not right for a man to argue against his own opinion;—when his opinion is so and so, to profess it to be the reverse, and in so doing, to bend the force of his mind to the purpose of causing others to embrace the opinion thus opposite to his real one.

That, in particular, if, being a member of the House of Commons, and in opposition, a measure, which to him seems a proper one, is brought on the carpet on the ministerial side, it is not right that he should declare it to be in his opinion pernicious, and use his endeavours to have it thought so, and treated as such by the House; and so again, if, being on that same side, a measure such as to him appears pernicious, is brought on the carpet on the side of opposition, it is not right that he should declare it to be in his opinion beneficial and fit to be adopted, and accordingly use his endeavours to make it generally thought so, and as such adopted by the House.

An aphorism, said to have been a favourite one with the late Mr. Charles Fox, is the proposition at the head of this chapter.

Not men but measures! or, Not measures but men!—are the two forms, in either of which, according as the ellipsis is filled up, the aphorism may be couched.

Not measures but men! is the more simple expression of the two, it being in that form that the aphorism is marked out for approbation: reprobation being the sentiment attached to its opposite, Not men but measures!

If you look to speeches, then comes the constant, and constantly interminable question—what were the words in the speeches? The words are in that case on each occasion genuine or spurious, the interpretation correct or incorrect, according as it suits the purpose of him who is speaking of it, and more particularly of him who spoke it, that it should be.

But on one occasion we have the aphorism from the pen of Charles Fox himself: and then, if applied to the question of sincerity or insincerity, as above, it is found to have no direct bearing on it.

“Are to be attended to,” are the words employed on this occasion to complete the proposition. “How vain, how idle, how presumptuous,” says the declaimer in his attempt to put on the historian, “is the opinion that laws can do everything! and how weak and pernicious the maxim founded upon it, that measures not men, are to be attended to!”

Weak enough, as thus expressed, it must be confessed; and abundantly too weak to be by a statesman considered as worth noticing, even by so vague and ungrounded a note of reprobation. As if any one ever thought of denying that both ought to be “attended to!” and as if, even in a debating club, words so vague and unmeaning as “attended to” were a fit subject of debate.

What must be confessed is, that to a man who wishes well to his country, and sees a set of men who in his opinion are a bad set, conducting the affairs of it, few things are more provoking than by this or that comparatively unimportant, but so far as it goes beneficial measure, to see them obtain a degree of reputation, of which one effect may be to confirm them in their seat.

But what seems not to have been sufficiently “attended to” is, that it is by the badness of their measures, that the only warrant for giving to the men the appellation of bad men, can be grounded: that if they are really the bad men they are supposed to be, have a little patience, and they will come out with some bad measure, against which, it being by the supposition bad, and by yourself looked upon as such, you may, without prejudice to your sincerity, point your attacks: and if no such bad measure ever came from them, the imputation of their being bad men is rather premature.

Distressing indeed to a man of real probity must be the alternative: to see a set of men fixed in this their all-commanding seat, and making a proportionally extensive and pernicious use of it; or, for the purpose of taking what chance is to be had of precluding them from this advantage, to keep on straining every endeavour to make the House and the public look upon as pernicious, a measure, of the utility of which he is himself satisfied.

In the abomination of long and regularly corrupt parliaments lies the cause of this distress.

Under this system, when the whole system of abuses has a determined patron on the throne, and that patron has got a set of ministers that suit this ruling purpose, misrule may swell to such a pitch, that without any one measure in such sort bad that you can fix upon it, and say, this is a sufficient ground for punishment, or even for dismission, the State may be at the brink of ruin:—meantime some measure may be introduced, against which, though good, or at least innoxious of itself, the people, by means of some misrepresentation of matter of fact, or some erroneous opinion or other which prevails among them, may, to the disgrace and expulsion of the ministry, be turned against it; and then comes the distressing alternative.

But were the duration of the assembly short, and the great and surely effective mass of the matter of corruption expelled and kept out of it, no such alternative would ever present itself: the chance of ridding the country of a bad set of ministers would be renewed continually. The question supposed to be tried on each occasion might be the question really tried; whereas at present, on each occasion, the question tried is but one and the same, viz. Shall the ministry, or shall it not, continue?

The question brought on the carpet is like the wager in a feigned issue, a mere farce, which, but for its connexion with the principal question above mentioned, would not be deemed worth trying, and would not be tried.

CHAPTER XV.

REJECTION INSTEAD OF AMENDMENT—(ad judicium.)

Exposition.—This fallacy consists in urging, in the character of a bar, or conclusive objection against the proposed measure, some consideration which, if presented in the character of a proposed amendment, might have more or less claim to notice.

It generally consists of some real or imaginary inconvenience, alleged commonly, but not necessarily, as eventually to result from the adoption of the measure.

This inconvenience, supposing it real, will either be preponderant over the promised benefit, or not preponderant.

In either case, it will be either remediable or irremediable.

If at the same time irremediable and preponderant, then it is, and then only, that in the character of an objection it is of itself conclusive.

By him in whose mind discernment and candour are combined, this distinction will be not only felt, but brought to view. If in respect of adequate discernment there be a failure, it will not be felt: if in respect of candour only, it will have been felt, but it will not be brought to view.

The occasion by which opportunity is afforded for the working of this fallacy, is the creation of any new office, including the mass of emolument which, without inquiry into the necessity, or any means taken for keeping down the quantum of it within the narrowed limits which the good of the service admits of, is, by the union of habit with the sinister interest that gave birth to it, annexed as of course, upon their creation, to all new offices.

The fallacy,—what there is of fallacy in the case, consists in the practice of setting up the two universally applicable objections, viz. need of economy, and mischief or danger from the increase of the influence of the crown, in the character of peremptory bars to the proposed measure.

Exposure.—The ground on which an objection of this stamp may with propriety be considered and spoken of under the denomination of a fallacy, is where the utility of the proposed new establishment is left unimpeached, and the sole reason for the rejection proposed to be put upon the proposed measure, consists in the above topics, or one of them.

In such case, on the part of him by whom any objections so inconclusive in their nature are relied on, the reliance placed on them amounts to a virtual acknowledgment of the utility of the proposed new establishment: inasmuch as in an address from one rational being to another, nothing seems, upon the face of the statement at least, more unnatural, than that if a man could find any objection that would apply to the particular establishment in question, in contradistinction to all others, he should confine himself to an objection which applies alike to almost all existing establishments; that is, to almost the whole frame of the existing government.

Such is the case where the two commonplace objections in question, or either of them, are brought out in the character of objections by themselves, and without being accompanied by any specific ones.

But even when added to specific ones, an objection thus inconclusive in its nature, if urged in a direct way, and dwelt upon with any emphasis, can scarcely—at least while there remain any useless places unabolished, or any overpaid places, from which the overplus of emolument remains undefalcated—be exempted from the imputation of irrelevancy.

At any rate, wherever it happens that a minister at present in office sees opposite to him in the House another person who has at any time been in office, it seems an observation not very easy to answer in the character of an argument ad hominem, should it be said, “When you were in office, there were such and such offices which were of no manner of use; these you never used your endeavours to abolish, notwithstanding the use that would have resulted from the abolition, in the shape of diminution of needless expenditure and sinister influence: yet now, when a set of offices is proposed, for which you cannot deny but that there is some use, your exertions for the benefit of economy are reserved to be directed against these useful ones.”

No doubt but that, on the supposition that the two opposite masses of advantage and disadvantage being completely in equilibrio,—advantage in the shape of service expected to be rendered in the proposed new offices on the one hand, disadvantage in the shape of expense—of the emolument proposed to be attached to them on the other,—a weight much less than that of the mischief from the increase of sinister influence, would suffice to turn the scale.

Take also another supposition. Suppose (what is not in every case possible) that the value of the service expected to be obtained by means of the proposed new offices is capable of being obtained, and has accordingly been obtained in figures. Suppose, on the other hand (what will very frequently be feasible,) that the expense of the establishment may with sufficient precision be obtained in figures—and being so obtained, on striking the balance, found to be less than the advantage so expected from the service. Suppose, lastly (what is impossible,) that the value of the mischief which, in the shape of introduction of additional influence, were with sufficient precision capable of standing expressed in figures, had been so expressed—and being so expressed, the quantity of mischief in this shape were found sufficient to turn the scale on the side of disadvantage.

Here would be a sufficient reason for the rejection of the proposed establishment, and thence a sufficient warrant for bringing into the field the argument in question, commonplace as it is. But in regard to this last supposition, at any rate, how far it is from being capable of being realized, is but too evident.

Upon the whole, therefore, so far at least as concerns the objection drawn from the increase that would result to the sinister influence of the crown, it may be said, that whatsoever time is spent in descanting upon this topic, may be set down to the account of lost time.

It is a topic, the importance of which is surely sufficient to entitle it to be considered by itself. The influence of the crown, it ought always to be remembered, can no otherwise receive with propriety the epithet sinister, than in so far as, by being directed to and reaching a member of parliament or a parliamentary elector, it affects the purity of parliament. But by a system of measures properly directed to that end, the constitution of parliament might be effectually guarded against any degree of impurity capable of being productive of any sensible inconvenience, whatsoever were the lucrativeness of the utmost number of offices, for the creation or preservation of which so much as a plausible reason could be found: and were it otherwise, the proper remedy would be found, not in the refusal to create any new office, the service of which was understood to over-balance in any determinate and unquestionable degree the mischief of the expense, but in the taking the nomination out of the hands of the crown, and vesting it in some other and independent hands.

The putting all places in these respects upon the same footing,—necessary and unnecessary ones—properly paid and overpaid ones,—wears out and weakens that energy which should be reserved for, and directed with all its force against, unnecessary places, and the overplus part of the pay of overpaid ones.

Another occasion on which this fallacy is often wont to be applied, is the case in which, from the mere observation of a profit as likely from any transaction to accrue to this or that individual, a censure is grounded, pronouncing it a job.

The error in case of sincerity, the fallacy in case of insincerity, consists, in forgetting that individuals are the stuff of which the public is made; that there is no way of benefiting the public but by benefiting individuals; and that a benefit which, in the shape of pleasure or exemption from pain, does not sooner or later come home to the bosom of at least some one individual, is not in reality a benefit—is not entitled to that name.

So far then from constituting an argument in disfavour of the proposed measure, every benefit that can be pointed out as accruing, or likely to accrue, to any determinate individual or individuals, constitutes, as far as it goes, an argument in favour of the measure.

In no case whatsoever—on no imaginable supposition—can this consideration serve with propriety in the character of an argument in disfavour of any measure. In no case whatsoever—on no imaginable supposition—can it, so far as it goes, fail of serving with propriety in the character of an argument in favour of the measure. Is the measure good?—it adds to the mass of its advantages. Is the measure upon the whole a bad one?—it subtracts, by the whole amount of it, from the real amount of the disadvantages attached to the measure.

At the same time, in practice, there is no argument, perhaps, which is more frequently employed, or on which more stress is laid, without doors at any rate, if not within doors, than this, in the character of an argument in disfavour of a proposed measure—no argument which, even when taken by itself, is with more confidence relied on in the character of a conclusive one.

To what cause is so general a perversion of the faculty of reason to be ascribed?

Two causes present themselves as acting in this character:—

1. It is apt to be received (and that certainly not without reason) in the character of evidence—conclusive evidence—of the nature of the motive, to the influence of which the part taken by the supporters of the measure, or some of them (viz. all who in any way are partakers of the private benefit in question,) ought to be ascribed.

In this character, to the justness of the conclusion thus drawn, there can in general be nothing to object.

But the consideration of the motive in which the part taken, either by the supporters or the opposers of a measure, finds its cause, has elsewhere been shown to be a consideration altogether irrelevant;* and the use of the argument has been shown to be of the number of those fallacies, the influence of which is in its natural and general tendency unfavourable to every good cause.

The other cause is, the prevalence of the passion of envy. To the man to whom it is an object of envy, the good of another man is evil to himself. By the envy of the speaker or writer, the supposed advantage to the third person is denounced in the character of an evil, to the envy of the hearers or the readers:—denounced, and perhaps without any perception of the mistake, so rare is the habit of self-examination, and so gross and so perpetual the errors into which, for want of it, the human mind is capable of being led.

In speaking of the passion or affection of envy, as being productive of this fallacious argument, and of the error but for which shame would frequently restrain a man from the employment of it,—it is not meant to speak of this passion or this affection as one of which, on the occasion in question, the influence ought to be considered as pernicious on the whole.

So far from being pernicious, the more thoroughly it is considered, the more closely it will be seen to be salutary upon the whole; and not merely salutary, at least in the best state of things that has yet been realized, but so necessary, that without it, society would hardly have been kept together.

The legislator who resolves not to accept assistance from any but social motives—from none, save what in his vocabulary pass under the denomination of pure motives, will find his laws without vigour and without use.

The judge who resolves to have no prosecutors who are brought to him by any but pure motives, will not find that part of his emolument which, under the present system of abuse, is composed of fees, and may save himself the trouble of going into court—of sitting on penal causes. The judge who should determine to receive no evidence but what was at the same time brought to him, and, when before him, guided by pure motives, need scarcely trouble himself to hear evidence.

The practical inference is—that, if he would avoid drawing down disgrace upon himself instead of upon the measure he is opposing, a man ought to abstain from employing this argument in confutation of the fallacy; since, in as far as he employs it, he is employing in refutation of one fallacy (and that so gross an one, that the bare mention of it in that character may naturally be sufficient to reduce the employer to silence,)—he is employing another fallacy, which is of itself susceptible of a refutation no less easy and conclusive.

It is only by the interests, the affections the passions—(all these words mean nothing more than the same psychological object appearing in different characters)—that the legislator, labouring for the good and in the service of mankind, can effect his purposes. Those interests, acting in the character of motives, may be of the self-regarding class, the dissocial, or the social:—the social he will, on every occasion where he finds them already in action, endeavour not only to engage in his service, but cherish and cultivate: the self-regarding and the dissocial, though his study will be rather to restrain than encourage them, he will at any rate, wherever he sees them in action or likely to come into action, use his best endeavours to avail himself of directing their influence, with whatever force he can muster, to his own social purposes.

CHAPTER I.

CHARACTERS COMMON TO ALL THESE FALLACIES.

Upon the whole, the following are the characters which appertain in common to all the several arguments here distinguished by the name of fallacies:—

1. Whatsoever be the measure in hand, they are, with relation to it, irrelevant.

2. They are all of them such, that the application of these irrelevant arguments affords a presumption either of the weakness or total absence of relevant arguments on the side on which they are employed.

3. To any good purpose they are all of them unnecessary.

4. They are all of them not only capable of being applied, but actually in the habit of being applied, and with advantage, to bad purposes; viz. to the obstruction and defeat of all such measures as have for their object and their tendency, the removal of the abuses or other imperfections still discernible in the frame and practice of the government.

5. By means of their irrelevancy, they all of them consume and misapply time, thereby obstructing the course, and retarding the progress of all necessary and useful business.

6. By that irritative quality which, in virtue of their irrelevancy, with the improbity or weakness of which it is indicative, they possess, all of them, in a degree more or less considerable, but, in a more particular degree such of them as consist in personalities, they are productive of ill-humour, which in some instances has been productive of bloodshed, and is continually productive, as above, of waste of time and hindrance of business.

7. On the part of those who, whether in spoken or written discourses, give utterance to them, they are indicative either of improbity or intellectual weakness, or of a contempt for the understandings of those on whose minds they are destined to operate.

8. On the part of those on whom they operate, they are indicative of intellectual weakness: and on the part of those in and by whom they are pretended to operate, they are indicative of improbity; viz. in the shape of insincerity.

The practical conclusion is, that in proportion as the acceptance, and thence the utterance of them, can be prevented, the understanding of the public will be strengthened, the morals of the public will be purified, and the practice of government improved.

CHAPTER II.

OF THE MISCHIEF PRODUCIBLE BY FALLACIES.

The first division that presents itself in relation to the mischief of a fallacy, may be expressed by the words specific and general.

The specific mischief of a fallacy consists in the tendency which it has to prevent or obstruct the introduction of this or that useful measure in particular.

The general mischief consists in that moral or intellectual depravation which produces habits of false reasoning and insincerity:—this mischief may again be distinguished into mischief produced within doors and mischief produced withoutl doors.

Under the appellation of mischief within doors, is to be understood all that mischief, that deception, which has its seat in the bosom of any member of the supreme legislative body.

Under the appellation of mischief without doors, all that which has its seat in the bosom of any person not included in that body—of any person whose station is among the people at large:—

CHAPTER III.

CAUSES OF THE UTTERANCE OF THESE FALLACIES.

The causes of the utterance of these fallacies may, it should seem, be thus denominated and enumerated:—

1. Sinister interest—self-conscious sinister interest.

2. Interest-begotten prejudice.

3. Authority-begotten prejudice.

4. Self-defence, i. e. sense of the need of self-defence against counter-fallacies.

CHAPTER IV.

SECOND CAUSE—INTEREST BEGOTTEN-PREJUDICE.

If by interest in some shape or other—that is, by a motive of some sort or other—every act of the will, and thence every act of the hand, is produced, so, directly or indirectly, must every act of the intellectual faculty: though in this case the influence of the interest, of this or that motive, is neither so perceptible, nor in itself so direct as in the other.

But how (it may be asked) is it possible that the motive a man is actuated by can be secret to himself? Nothing is more easy—nothing more frequent: indeed the rare case is, not that of his not knowing, but that of his knowing it.

It is with the anatomy of the human mind as with the anatomy and physiology of the human body: the rare case is, not that of a man’s being unconversant, but that of his being conversant with it.

The physiology of the body is not without its difficulties: but in comparison of those by which the knowledge of the physiology of the mind has been obstructed, the difficulties are slight indeed.

Not unfrequently, as between two persons living together in a state of intimacy, either or each may possess a more correct and complete view of the motives by which the mind of the other, than of those by which his own mind, is governed.

Many a woman has in this way had a more correct and complete acquaintance with the internal causes by which the conduct of her husband has been determined, than he has had himself.

The cause of this is easily pointed out.—By interest, a man is continually prompted to make himself as correctly and completely acquainted as possible with the springs of action by which the minds of those are determined, on whom he is more or less dependent for the comfort of his life.

But by interest, he is at the same time diverted from any close examination into the springs by which his own conduct is determined.

From such knowledge he has not, in any ordinary shape, anything to gain,—he finds not in it any source of enjoyment.

In any such knowledge he would be more likely to find mortification than satisfaction. The purely social motives, the semi-social motives, and, in the case of the dissocial motives, such of them as have their source in an impulse given by the purely social or by the semi-social motives,*—these are the motives, the prevalence of which he finds mentioned as matter of praise in the instance of other men: it is by the supposed prevalence of these amiable motives, that he finds reputation raised, and that respect and good-will in which every man is obliged to look for so large a portion of the comfort of his life.

In these same amiable and desirable endowments he finds the minds of other men actually abounding and overflowing: abounding during their lifetime by the testimony of their friends, and after their departure by the recorded testimony enregistered in some monthly magazine, with the acclamation of their friends, and with scarce a dissenting voice from among their enemies.

But the more closely he looks into the mechanism of his own mind, the less of the mass of effects produced he finds referable to any of those amiable and delightful causes; he finds nothing, therefore, to attract him towards this study—he finds much to repel him from it.

Praise and self-satisfaction on the score of moral worth, being accordingly hopeless, it is in intellectual that he will seek for it. “All men who are actuated by regard for anything but self, are fools; those only whose regard is confined to self, are wise. I am of the number of the wise.”

Perhaps he is a man with whom a large proportion of the self-regarding motives may be mixed up with a slight tincture of the social motives operating upon the private scale. What in this case will he do? In investigating the source of a given action, he will in the first instance set it down, the whole of it, to the account of the amiable and conciliatory—in a word, the social motives. This, in the study of his own mental physiology, will always be his first step, and this will commonly be his last. Why should he look further?—why take in hand the probe?—why undeceive himself, and substitute a whole truth that would mortify him, for a half truth that flatters him?

The greater the share which the motives of the social class have in the production of the general tenour of a man’s conduct, the less irksome, it seems evident, this sort of psychological self-anatomy will be. The first view is pleasing; and the more virtuous the man, the more pleasing is that study which to every man has been pronounced the proper one.

But the less irksome any pursuit is, the greater, if the state of faculties, intellectual and active, permit, will be a man’s progress in it.

CHAPTER V.

THIRD CAUSE—AUTHORITY-BEGOTTEN PREJUDICE.

Prejudice is the name given to an opinion of any sort, on any subject, when considered as having been embraced without sufficient examination: it is a judgment, which being pronounced before evidence, is therefore pronounced without evidence.

Now, at the hazard of being deceived, and by deception led into a line of conduct prejudicial either to himself or to some one to whom it would rather be his wish to do service, what is it that could lead a man to embrace an opinion without sufficient examination?

One cause is, the uneasiness attendant on the labour of examination: he takes the opinion up as true, to save the labour that might be necessary to enable him to discern the falsity of it.

Of the propensity to take not only facts but opinions upon trust, the universality is matter of universal observation. Pernicious as it is in some of its applications, it has its root in necessity, in the weakness of the human mind. In the instance of each individual, the quantity of opinion which it is possible for him to give acceptance or rejection to, on the ground of examination performed by himself, bears but a small proportion to that in which such judgment as he passes upon it cannot have any firmer or other ground than that which is composed of the like judgment pronounced by some other individual or aggregate of individuals: the cases in which it is possible for his opinion to be home-made, bear but a small proportion to the cases in which, if any opinion at all be entertained by him, that opinion must necessarily have been imported.

But in the case of the public man, this necessity forms no justification either for the utterance or for the acceptance of such arguments of base alloy, as those which are represented under the name of fallacies.

These fallacies are not less the offspring of sinister interest, because the force of authority is more or less concerned. Where authority has a share in the production of them, there are two distinguishable ways in which sinister interest may also have its share.

A fallacy which, in the mouth of A, had its root immediately in interest—in self-conscious sinister interest—receiving utterance from his pen or his lips, obtains, upon the credit of his authority, credence among acceptors in any multitude. Having thus rooted itself in the minds of men, it becomes constitutive of a mass of authority, under favour of which, such fallacies as appear conducive to the planting or rooting in the minds of men in general, the erroneous notion in question, obtain, at the hands of other men, utterance and acceptance.

2. Having received the prejudice at the hands of authority—viz. of the opinion of those whose adherence to it was produced immediately or mediately by the operation of sinister interest,—sinister interest operating on the mind of the utterer or acceptor of the fallacy in question, prompts him to bestow on it, in the character of a rational argument, a degree of attention exceeding that which could otherwise have been bestowed on it; he fixes, accordingly, his attention on all considerations, the tendency of which is to procure for it utterance or acceptance, and keeps at a distance all considerations by which the contrary tendency is threatened.

CHAPTER VI.

FOURTH CAUSE—SELF-DEFENCE AGAINST COUNTER-FALLACIES.

The opposers of a pernicious measure may be sometimes driven to employ fallacies, from their supposed utility as an answer to counter-fallacies.

“Such is the nature of men,” they may say, “that these arguments, weak and inconclusive as they are, are those which on the bulk of the people (upon whom ultimately everything depends) make the strongest and most effectual impression: the measure is a most mischievous one;—it were a crime on our parts to leave unemployed any means not criminal, that promise to be contributory to its defeat. It is the weakness of the public mind, not the weakness of our cause, that compels us to employ such engines in the defence of it.”

This defence might indeed be satisfactory, where the fallacies in question are employed—not as substitutes, but only as supplements to relevant and direct arguments.

But if employed as supplements, to prove their being employed in that character, and in that character only, and that the use thus made of them is not inconsistent with sincerity, two conditions seem requisite:—

1. That arguments of the direct and relevant kind be placed in the front of the battle, declared to be the main arguments, the arguments and considerations by which the opposition or support to the proposed measure was produced;

2. That on the occasion of employing the fallacies in question, an acknowledgment should be made of their true character, of their intrinsic weakness, and of the considerations which, as above, seemed to impose on the individual in question the obligation of employing them, and of the regret with which the consciousness of such an obligation was accompanied.

If, even when employed in opposition to a measure really pernicious, these warnings are omitted to be annexed to them, the omission affords but too strong a presumption of general insincerity. On the occasion in question, a man would have nothing to fear from any avowal made of their true character. Yet he omits to make this avowal. Why? Because he foresees that, on some other occasion or occasions, arguments of this class will constitute his sole reliance.

The more closely the above considerations are adverted to, the stronger is the proof which the use of such arguments, without such warnings, will be seen to afford of improbity or imbecility, or a mixture of the two, on the part of him by whom they are employed: of imbecility of mind, if the weakness of such arguments has really failed of becoming visible to him; of improbity, if, conscious of their weakness, and of their tendency to debilitate and pervert the faculties, intellectual and moral, of such persons as are swayed by them, he gives currency to them unaccompanied by such warning.

Is it of the one or of the other species of imperfection, or of a mixture of both, that such deceptious argumentation is evidentiary? On this occasion, as on others, the answer is not easy; nor, fortunately, is it material to estimate the connexion between these two divisions of the mental frame: so constantly and so materially does each of them exert an influence on the other, that it is difficult for either to suffer, but the other must suffer more or less along with it. On many a well-meaning man this base and spurious metal has no doubt passed for sterling; but if you see it burnished, and held up in triumph by the hands of a man of strong as well as brilliant talents—by a very Master of the Mint—set him down, without fear of injuring him, upon the list of those who deceive, without having any such excuse to plead as that of having been deceived.

CHAPTER VII.

USE OF THESE FALLACIES TO THE UTTERERS AND ACCEPTORS OF THEM.

Being all of them to such a degree replete with absurdity—many of them upon the face of them composed of nothing else—a question that naturally presents itself is, how it has happened that they have acquired so extensive a currency?—how it is that so much use has been made, and continues to be made, of them?

Is it credible (it may be asked,) that, to those by whom they are employed, the inanity and absurdity of them should not be fully manifest?—is it credible, that on such grounds political measures should proceed?

No, it is not credible: to the very person by whom the fallacy is presented in the character of a reason—of a reason on the consideration of which his opinion has been formed, and on the strength of which his conduct is grounded—it has presented itself in its genuine colours.

But in all assemblies in which shares in power are exercised by votes, there are two descriptions of persons whose convenience requires to be consulted—the speakers and the hearers.

To the convenience of persons in both these situations, the class of arguments here in question are in an eminent degree favourable:—

As to the situation of the speaker:—the more numerous and efficient the titles to respect which his argument enables him to produce, the more convenient and agreeable is that situation made to him. Probity in the shape of independence—superiority in the article of wisdom—superiority in the scale of rank: of all these qualities, the reputation is matter of convenience to a man; and of all these qualities, the reputation is by these arguments promised to be made secure.

1. As to independence:—when a man stands up to speak for the purpose of reconciling men to the vote he purposes to give, or for the purpose of giving to the side which he espouses whatsoever weight is regarded by him as attached to his authority,—the nature of the purpose imposes on him a sort of necessity of finding something in the shape of a reason to accompany and recommend it.

Though in fact directed and governed by some other will behind the curtain, and by the interest by which that other will is governed, decency is understood to require, that it is from his own understanding, not from the will of any other person, that his own will should be understood to have received its direction.

But it is not by the matter of punishment or the matter of reward—it is not by fears or hopes—it is not by threats or promises—it is by something of the nature, or in the shape at least of a reason, that understanding is governed and determined. To show, then, that it is by the determination of his own judgment that his conduct is determined, it is deemed advisable to produce some observation or other in the character of the determinate reason, from which, on the occasion in question, his judgment, and thence his will, and active faculty, have received their direction.

The argument is accordingly produced, and by this exhibition the independent character of his mind is established by irrefragable evidence.

To this purpose, every article in the preceding catalogue may with more or less effect be made to serve, according to the nature of the case.

2. Next as to superiority in the scale of wisdom:—on running over the list, different articles will be seen to present in this respect different degrees of convenience.

Some of them will be seen scarcely putting in any special title to this praise.

In others, while the reputation of prudence is secured, yet it is that sort of prudence, which by the timidity attached to it is rendered somewhat the less acceptable to an erect and commanding mind.

To this class may be referred the arguments ad metum and ad verecundiam,—the hydrophobia of innovation, and argument of the ghost-seer, whose nervous system is kept in a state of constant agitation by the phantom of Jacobinism dancing before his eyes,—the idolator, who beholding in ancestry, in authority, in allegorical personages of various sorts and sizes, in precedents of all sorts, in great characters dead and living, placed in high situations, so many tyrants to whose will, real or supposed, blind obsequiousness at the hands of the vulgar of all classes, may by apt ceremonies and gesticulation be secured, makes himself the first prostration, in the hope and confidence of finding it followed by much and still more devout prostration, on the part of the crew of inferior idolators, in whose breasts the required obsequiousness has been implanted by long practice.

Other arguments, again, there are, in and for the delivery of which the wisdom of the orator places itself upon higher ground. His acuteness has penetrated to the very bottom of the subject—his comprehension has embraced the whole mass of it—his adroitness has stripped the obnoxious proposal of the delusive colouring by which it had recommended itself to the eye of ignorance: he pronounces it speculative, theoretical, romantic, visionary: it may be good in theory, but it would be bad in practice: it is too good to be practicable: the goodness which glitters on the outside is sufficient proof, is evidence, and that conclusive, of the worthlessness that is within: its apparent facility suffices to prove it to be impracticable. The confidence of the tone in which the decision is conveyed, is at once the fruit and the sufficient evidence of the complete command which the glance of the moment sufficed to give him of the subject in all its bearings and dependencies. By the experience which his situation has led him to acquire, and the use which his judgment has enabled him to make of that experience, he catches up at a single glance those features which suffice to indicate the class to which the obnoxious proposal belongs.

3. By the same decision, delivered in the same tone, superiority of rank is not less strikingly displayed, than superiority of talent. It is no new observation how much the persuasion, or at least the expression given to it, is strengthened by the altitude of the rank as constituted or accompanied by the fullness of the purse.

The labour of the brain, no less than that of the hand, is a species of drudgery which the man of elevated station sees the propriety and facility of turning over to the base-born crowd below—to the set of plodders whom he condescends upon occasion to honour with his conversation and his countenance. By his rank and opulence he is enabled in this, as in other ways, to pick and choose what is most congenial to his taste. By the royal hand of Frederic, philosophers and oranges were subjected to the same treatment, and put to the same use. The sweets, the elaboration of which had been the work of years, were elicited in a few moments by the pressure of an expert hand.

The praise of the receiver of wisdom is always inferior to that of the utterer; but neither is the receiver, so he but make due profit of what he receives, without his praise.

The advantage he acquires from these arguments, is—that of being enabled to give the reason of the faith that is, or is supposed to be, in him.

In some circumstances, in which silence will not serve a man, it will, and to a certainty, be construed into a confession of self-convicting consciousness;—consciousness that what he does is wrong and indefensible,—that what he gives men to understand to be his opinion, is not really his opinion,—that of the supposed facts, which he has been asserting to form an apparent foundation for his supposed opinion, the existence is not true.

By a persuasion to any such effect, on the part of those with whom he has to do, his credit, his reputation, would be effectually destroyed.

Something, therefore, must be said, of which it may be supposed that, how little soever may be the weight properly belonging to it, it may have operated on his mind in the character of a reason. By this means his reputation for wisdom is all that is exposed to suffer;—his reputation for probity is saved.

Thus, in the case of this sort of base argument, as sometimes in the case of bad money, each man passes it off upon his neighbour, not as being unconscious of its worthlessness—not so much as expecting his neighbour to be really insensible of its worthlessness—but in the hope and expectation that the neighbour, though not insensible of its worthlessness, may yet not find himself altogether debarred from the supposition, that to the utterer of the base argument, the badness of it may possibly not have been clearly understood.

But the more generally current in the character of an argument any such absurd notion is, the greater is the apparent probability of its being really entertained: for there is no notion, actual or imaginable, that a man cannot be brought to entertain, if he be but satisfied of its being generally or extensively entertained by others.

CHAPTER VIII.

PARTICULAR DEMAND FOR FALLACIES UNDER THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION.

Two considerations will suffice to render it apparent that, under the British Constitution, there cannot but exist, on the one hand, such a demand for fallacies—and, on the other hand, such a supply of them, as, for copiousness and variety taken together, cannot be to be matched elsewhere.

1. In the first place, a thing necessary to the existence of the demand is, discussion to a certain degree free.

Where there are no such institutions as a popular assembly taking an efficient part in the government, and publishing or suffering to be published accounts of its debates,—nor yet any free discussion through the medium of the press,—there is, consequently, no demand for fallacies. Fallacy is fraud, and fraud is useless when everything may be done by force.

The only case which can enter into comparison with the English government, is that of the Anglo-American United States.

There, on the side of the outs, the demand for fallacies stands, without any difference worth noticing, on a footing similar to that on which it stands under the English constitution.

But the side of the outs is that side on which the demand for fallacies is by much the least urgent and abundant.

On the side of the ins, the demand for fallacies depends upon the aggregate mass of abuse: its magnitude and urgency depend upon the magnitude of that mass, and its variety upon the variety of the shapes in which abuse has manifested itself.

On crossing the water, fortune gave to British America, the relief that policy gave to the fox; of the vermin by which she had been tormented, a part were left behind.

No deaf auditors of the Exchequer,—no blind surveyors of melting irons,—no non-registering registrars of the Admiralty court, or of any other judicatory,—no tellers, by whom no money is told, but that which is received into their own pockets,—no judge acting as clerk under himself,—no judge pocketing £7000 a-year for useless work, for which men are forced to address his clerks,—no judge, who in the character of judge over himself sits in one place to protect, by storms of fallacy and fury, the extortions and oppressions habitually committed in another,—no tithe-gatherers exacting immense retribution for minute or never-rendered service.

With respect to the whole class of fallacies built upon authority,—precedent, wisdom of ancestors, dread of innovation, immutable laws, and many others, occasioned by ancient ignorance and ancient abuses—what readers soever there may be, by whom what is to be found under those several heads has been perused, to them it will readily occur, that in the American Congress the use made of these fallacies is not likely to be so copious as in that august assembly, which, as the only denomination it can with propriety be called by, has been pleased to give itself that of the Imperial Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland.

CHAPTER IX.

THE DEMAND FOR POLITICAL FALLACIES:—HOW CREATED BY THE STATE OF INTERESTS.

In order to have a clear view of the object to which political fallacies will in the greatest number of instances be found to be directed, it will be necessary to advert to the state in which, with an exception comparatively inconsiderable, the business of government ever has been, and still continues to be, in every country upon earth; and for this purpose must here be brought to view a few positions, the proof of which, if they require any, would require too large a quantity of matter for this place—positions which, if not immediately assented to, will at any rate, even by those whom they find most adverse, be allowed to possess the highest claim to attention and examination:

1. The end or object in view, to which every political measure, whether established or proposed, ought according to the extent of it to be directed, is the greatest happiness of the greatest number of persons interested in it, and that for the greatest length of time.

2. Unless the United States of North America be virtually an exception, in every known state the happiness of the many has been at the absolute disposal either of the one or of the comparatively few.

3. In every human breast—rare and short-lived ebullitions, the result of some extraordinary strong stimulus or incitement excepted—self-regarding interest is predominant over social interest: each person’s own individual interest, over the interests of all other persons taken together.

4. In the few instances, if any, in which, throughout the whole tenor or the general tenor of his life, a person sacrifices his own individual interest to that of any other person or persons, such person or persons will be a person or persons with whom he is connected by some domestic or other private and narrow tie of sympathy; not the whole number, or the majority of the whole number, of the individuals of which the political community to which he belongs is composed.

5. If in any political community there be any individuals by whom, for a constancy, the interests of all the other members put together are preferred to the interest composed of their own individual interest, and that of the few persons particularly connected with them these public-spirited individuals will be so few, and at the same time so impossible to distinguish from the rest, that to every practical purpose they may, without any practical error, be laid out of the account.

6. In this general predominance of self-regarding over social interest, when attentively considered, there will not be found any just subject of regret, any more than of contestation; for it will be found, that but for this predominance, no such species as that which we belong to could have existence: and that, supposing it, if possible, done away, insomuch that all persons, or most persons, should find respectively, some one or more persons, whose interest was respectively, through the whole of life, dearer to them, and as such more anxiously and constantly watched over than their own, the whole species would necessarily, within a very short space of time, become extinct.

7. If this be true, it follows, by the unchangeable constitution of human nature, that in every political community, by the hands by which the supreme power over all the other members of the community is shared, the interest of the many over whom the power is exercised, will on every occasion, in case of competition, be in act or in endeavour sacrificed to the particular interest of those by whom the power is exercised.

8. But every arrangement by which the interest of the many is sacrificed to that of the few, may with unquestionable propriety, if the above position be admitted, and to the extent of the sacrifice, be termed a bad arrangement; indeed, the only sort of bad arrangement—those excepted, by which the interest of both parties is sacrificed.

9. A bad arrangement, considered as already established and in existence, is, or may be termed, an abuse.

10. In so far as any competition is seen, or supposed to have place, the interests of the subject many being on every occasion, as above, in act or in endeavour constantly sacrificed by the ruling few to their own particular interests,—hence, with the ruling few, a constant object of study and endeavour is the preservation and extension of the mass of abuse: at any rate, such is the constant propensity.

11. In the mass of abuse, which, because it is so constantly their interest, it is constantly their endeavour to preserve, is included not only that portion from which they derive a direct and assignable profit, but also that portion from which they do not derive any such profit. For the mischievousness of that from which they do not derive any such direct and particular profit, cannot be exposed but by facts and observations, which, if pursued, would be found to apply also to that portion from which they do derive direct and particular profit. Thus it is, that in every community, all men in power—or, in one word, the ins—are, by self-regarding interest, constantly engaged in the maintenance of abuse in every shape in which they find it established.

12. But whatsoever the ins have in possession, the outs have in expectancy. Thus far, therefore, there is no distinction between the sinister interests of the ins and those of the outs, nor, consequently, in the fallacies by which they respectively employ their endeavours in the support of their respective sinister interests.

13. Thus far the interests of the outs coincide with the interest of the ins. But there are other points in which their interests are opposite. For procuring for themselves the situations and mass of advantages possessed by the ins, the outs have one, and but one, mode of proceeding. This is the raising their own place in the scale of political reputation, as compared with that of the ins. For effecting this ascendency, they have accordingly two correspondent modes: the raising their own, and the depreciating that of their successful rivals.

14. In addition to that particular and sinister interest which belongs to them in their quality of ruling members, these rivals have their share in the universal interest which belongs to them in their quality of members of the community at large. In this quality, they are sometimes occupied in such measures as in their eyes are necessary for the maintenance of the universal interest—for the preservation of that portion of the universal happiness of which their regard for their own interests does not seem to require the sacrifice: for the preservation, and also for the increase of it; for by every increase given to it they derive advantage to themselves, not only in that character which is common to them with all the other members of the community, but, in the shape of reputation, in that character of ruling members which is peculiar to themselves.

15. But in whatsoever shape the ins derive reputation to themselves, and thus raise themselves to a higher level in the scale of comparative reputation, it is the interest of the outs, as such, not only to prevent them from obtaining this rise, but if possible, and as far as possible, to cause their reputation to sink. Hence, on the part of the outs there exists a constant tendency to oppose all good arrangements proposed by the ins. But, generally speaking, the better an arrangement really is, the better it will generally be thought to be; and the better it is thought to be, the higher will the reputation of its supporters be raised by it. In so far, therefore, as it is in their power, the better a new arrangement proposed by the ins is, the stronger is the interest by which the outs are incited to oppose it. But the more obviously and indisputably good it is when considered in itself, the more incapable it is of being successfully opposed in the way of argument otherwise than by fallacies; and hence, in the aggregate mass of political fallacies, may be seen the character and general description of that portion of it which is employed chiefly by the outs.

16. In respect and to the extent of their share in the universal interest, an arrangement which is beneficial to that interest will be beneficial to themselves: and thus, supposing it successful, the opposition made by them to the arrangement would be prejudicial to themselves. On the supposition, therefore, of the success of such opposition, they would have to consider which in their eyes would be the greater advantage—their share in the advantage of the arrangement, or the advantage promised to them by the rise of their place in the comparative scale of reputation, by the elevation given to themselves, and the depression caused to their adversaries.

But, generally speaking, in a constitution such as the English in its present state, the chances are in a prodigious degree against the success of any opposition made by the outs to even the most flagrantly bad measure of the ins: much more, of course, to a really good one. Hence it is, that when the arrangement is in itself good, if with any prospect of success or advantage, any of the fallacies belonging to their side can be brought up against the arrangement, and this without prejudice to their own reputation,—they have nothing to stand in the way of the attempt.

17. In respect of those bad arrangements which by their sinister interest the ins stand engaged to promote, and in the promotion of which the outs have, as above, a community of interest,—the part dictated by their sinister interest is a curious and delicate one. By success, they would lessen that mass of sinister advantage which, being that of their antagonists in possession, is theirs in expectancy. They have, therefore, their option to make between this disadvantage and the advantage attached to a correspondent advance in the scale of comparative reputation. But, their situation securing to them little less than a certainty of failure, they are, therefore, as to this matter, pretty well at their ease. At the same time, seeing that whatsoever diminution from the mass of abuse they were to propose in the situation of outs, they could not, without loss of reputation, unless for some satisfactory reason, avoid bringing forward, or at least supporting, in the event of their changing places with the ins,—hence it is, that any such defalcation which they can in general prevail upon themselves to propose, will in general be either spurious and fallacious, or at best inadequate:—inadequate,—and by its inadequacy, and the virtual confession involved in it, giving support and confirmation to every portion of kindred abuse which it leaves untouched.

CHAPTER X.

DIFFERENT PARTS WHICH MAY BE BORNE IN RELATION TO FALLACIES.

As in the case of bad money, so in the case of bad arguments: in the sort and degree of currency which they experience, different persons acting so many different parts are distinguishable.

Fabricator, utterer, acceptor, these are the different parts acted in the currency given to a bad shilling: these are the parts acted on the occasion of the currency given to a bad argument.

In the case of a bad argument, he who is fabricator must be utterer likewise, or in general it would not make its appearance. But for one fabricator who is an utterer, there may be utterers in any number, no one of whom was fabricator.

In the case of the bad argument, as in the case of the bad shilling, in the instance of each actor, the mind is, with reference to the nature and tendency of the transaction, capable of bearing different aspects, which, for purposes of practical importance, it becomes material to distinguish:—

1. Evil consciousness (in the language of Roman lawyers, dolus; in the language of Roman, and thence of English lawyers, mala fides:) 2. Blameable ignorance or inattention, say, in one word, Temerity, (in the same language sometimes culpa, sometimes temeritas:) 3. Blameless agency, actus; which, notwithstanding any mischief that may have been the casual result of it, was free of blame:—by these several denominations are characterized so many habitudes, of which, with relation to any pernicious result, the mind is susceptible.

In the case of the argument, as in the case of the shilling, where the mind is in that state in which the charge of evil-consciousness may with propriety be made, that which the man is conscious of is, the badness of the article which he has in hand.

In general, it is in the case of the fabricator that the mind is least apt to be free from the imputation of evil-consciousness. Be it the bad shilling—be it the bad argument—the making of it will have cost more or less trouble; which trouble, generally speaking, the fabricator will not have taken but in the design of utterance, and in the expectation of making, by means of such utterance, some advantage. In the instance of the bad shilling, it is certain—in the instance of the bad argument, it is more or less probable (more probable in the case of the fabricator than in the case of the mere utterer)—that the badness of it was known and understood. It is certainly possible that the badness of the argument may never have been perceived by the fabricator, or that the bad argument may have been framed without any intention of applying it to bad purposes. But in general, the more a man is exposed to the action of sinister interest, the more reason there is for charging him with evil-consciousness, supposing him to be aware of the action of the sinister interest.

However the action of the sinister interest may have been either perceived or unperceived—for without a certain degree of attention, a man no more perceives what is passing in his own, than what is passing in other minds—the book that lies open before him, though it be the object nearest to him, and though he be ever so much in the habit of reading, may, even while two eyes are fixed upon it, be read or not read, according as it happens that circumstances have, or have not, called his attention to the contents.

The action of a sinister interest may have been immediate or un-immediate.

Immediate; it may have been perceived or not perceived: un-immediate; it has, almost to a certainty, been unperceived.

Sinister interest has two media through which it usually operates. These are prejudice and authority; and hence, we have for the immediate progeny of sinister interest, interest-begotten prejudice and authority-begotten prejudice.

In what case soever a bad argument has owed its fabrication or its utterance to sinister interest, and that interest is not, at the time of fabrication or utterance, perceived, it has for its immediate parent either in-bred prejudice or authority.

Of the three operations thus intimately connected—viz. fabrication, utterance, and acceptance—that the two first are capable of having evil-consciousness for their accompaniment, is obvious. As to acceptance, a distinction must be made before an answer can be given to the question, whether it is accompanied with evil-consciousness.

It may be distinguished into interior and exterior. Where the opinion, how false soever, is really believed to be true by the person to whom it has been presented, the acceptance given to it may be termed internal: where, whether by discourse, by department, or other tokens, a belief of its having experienced an internal acceptance at his hands is, with or without design on his part, entertained by other persons; in so far may it be said to have experienced at his hands an external acceptance.

In the natural state of things, both these modes of acceptance have place together: upon the internal, the external mode follows as a natural consequence. Either of them is, however, capable of having place without the other: feeling the force of an argument, I may appear as if I had not felt it; not having received any impression from it, I may appear as if I had received an impression of greater or less strength, whichever best suits my purpose.

It is sufficiently manifest, that evil-consciousness cannot be the accompaniment of internal acceptance; but it may be an accompaniment, and actually is the accompaniment of external acceptance, as often as the external has not for its accompaniment the internal acceptance.

Supposing the argument such that the appellation of fallacy is justly applicable to it, whatsoever part is borne in relation to it—viz. fabrication, utterance, or acceptance—may with propriety be ascribed to want of probity or want of intelligence.

Hitherto the distinction appears plain and broad enough; but upon a closer inspection, a sort of a mixed, or a middle state between that of evil-consciousness and that of pure temerity—between that of improbity and that of imbecility—may be observed.

This is where the persuasive force of the argument admits of different degrees—as when an argument, which operates with a certain degree of force on the utterer’s mind, is, in the utterance given to it, represented as acting with a degree of force to any amount more considerable.

Thus, a man who considers his opinion as invested only with a certain degree of probability, may speak of it as of a matter of absolute certainty. The persuasion he thus expresses is not absolutely false, but it is exaggerated; and this exaggeration is a species of falsehood.

The more frequent the trumpeter of any fallacy is in its performance, the greater the progress which his mind is apt to make from the state of evil-consciousness to the state of temerity—from the state of improbity to the state of imbecility; that is, imbecility with respect to the subject-matter. It is said of gamblers, that they begin their career as dupes, and end as thieves: in the present case, the parties begin with craft, and end with delusion.

A phenomenon, the existence of which seems to be out of dispute, is that of a liar, by whom a lie of his own invention has so often been told as true, that at length it has come to be accepted as such even by himself.

But if such is the case with regard to a statement composed of words, every one of which finds itself in manifest contradiction to some determinate truth, it may be imagined how much more easily, and consequently how much more frequently, it may come to be the case, in regard to a statement of such nicety and delicacy, as that of the strength of the impression made by this or that instrument of persuasion, of which the persuasive force is susceptible of innumerable degrees, no one of which has ever yet been distinguished from any other, by any externally sensible signs or tokens, in the form of discourse or otherwise.

If substitution of irrelevant arguments to relevant ones is evidence of a bad cause, and of consciousness of the badness of that bad cause, much more is the substitution of application made to the will, to applications made to the understanding:—of the matter of punishment or reward, to the matter of argument.

Arguments addressed to the understanding may, if fallacious, be answered; and any mischief they had a tendency to produce, be prevented by counter-arguments addressed to the understanding.

Against arguments addressed to the will, those addressed to the understanding are altogether without effect, and the mischief produced by them is without remedy.

CHAPTER XI.

USES OF THE PRECEDING EXPOSURE.

But of these disquisitions concerning the state and character of the mind of those by whom these instruments of deception are employed, what, it may be asked, is the practical use?

The use is, the opposing such check as it may be in the power of reason to apply, to the practice of employing these poisoned weapons. In proportion as the virtue of sincerity is an object of love and veneration, the opposite vice is held in abhorrence:—the more generally and intimately the public in general are satisfied of the insincerity of him by whom the arguments in question are employed, in that same proportion will be the efficiency of the motives by the force of which a man is withheld from employing these arguments.

Suppose the deceptious and pernicious tendency of these arguments, and thence the improbity of him who employs them, in such sort held up to view as to find the minds of men sufficiently sensible of it—and suppose, that in the public mind in general, virtue in the form of sincerity is an object of respect, vice in the opposite form an object of aversion and contempt,—the practice of this species of improbity will become as rare, as is the practice of any other species of improbity to which the restrictive action of the same moral power is in the habit of applying itself with the same force.

If, on this occasion, the object were to prove the deceptious nature and inconclusiveness of these arguments, the exposure thus given of the mental character of the persons by whom they are employed, would not have any just title to be received into the body of evidence applicable to this purpose. Be the improbity of the persons by whom these arguments are employed ever so glaring, the arguments themselves are exactly what they are—neither better nor worse. To employ as a medium of proof for demonstrating the impropriety of the arguments, the improbity of him by whom they are uttered, is an expedient which stands itself upon the list of fallacies, and which in the foregoing pages has been brought to view.

But on the present occasion, and for the present purpose, the impropriety as well as the mischievousness of these arguments is supposed to be sufficiently established on other, and those unexceptionable, grounds: the object in view now is, to determine by what means an object so desirable as the general disuse of these poisonous weapons may in the completest and most effectual degree be attained.

Now, the mere utterance of these base arguments is not the only—it is not so much as the principal mischief in the case. It is the reception of them in the character of conclusive or influential arguments that constitutes the principal and only ultimate mischief. To the object of making men ashamed to utter them, must therefore be added, the ulterior object of making men ashamed to receive them—ashamed as often as they are observed to see or hear them—ashamed to be known to turn towards them any other aspect than that of aversion and contempt.

But if the practice of insincerity be a practice which a man ought to be ashamed of, so is the practice of giving encouragement to—of forbearing to oppose discouragement to that vice: and to this same desirable and useful end does that man most contribute, by whom the immorality of the practice is held up to view in the strongest and clearest colours.

Nor, upon reflection, will the result be found so hopeless as at first sight might be supposed. In the most numerous assembly that ever sat in either House, perhaps, not a single individual could be found, by whom, in the company of a chaste and well-bred female, an obscene word was ever uttered. And if the frown of indignation were as sure to be drawn down upon the offender by an offence against this branch of the law of probity as by an offence against the law of delicacy, transgression would not be less effectually banished from both those great public theatres, than it is already from the domestic circle.

If, of the fallacies in question, the tendency be really pernicious,—whosoever he be, who by lawful and unexceptionable means of any kind shall have contributed to this effect, will thereby have rendered to his country and to mankind good service.

But whosoever he be, who to the intellectual power adds the moderate portion of pecuniary power necessary, in his power it lies completely to render this good service.

In any printed report of the debates of the assembly in question, supposing any such instruments of deception discoverable, in each instance in which any such instrument is discoverable, let him, at the bottom of the page, by the help of the usual marks of reference, give intimation of it: describing it, for instance, if it be of the number of those which are included in the present list, by the name by which it stands designated in this list, or by any more apt and clearly designative denomination that can be found for it.

The want of sufficient time for adequate discussion, when carried on orally in a numerous assembly, has in no inconsiderable extent been held out by experience in the character of a real and serious evil. To this evil, the table of fallacies furnishes, to an indefinite extent, a powerful remedy.

There are few men of the class of those who read, to whose memory Goldsmith’s delightful novel, the Vicar of Wakefield, is not more or less present. Among the disasters into which the good Vicar is betrayed by his simplicity, is the loss inflicted on him by the craft of Ephraim Jenkins. For insinuating himself into the good opinion and confidence of men of more learning than caution, the instrument he had formed to himself consisted apparently of an extempore sample of recondite learning, in which, in the character of the subject, the cosmogony, and in the character of one of the historians, Sanchoniathon, were the principal figures. On one or two of the occasions on which it was put to use, the success corresponded with the design, and Ephraim remained undetected and triumphant. But at last, as the devil by his cloven foot, so was Ephraim, though in a fresh disguise, betrayed by the cosmogony and Sanchoniathon, to some persons to whose lot it had fallen to receive the same proof of recondite learning, word for word. Immediately the chamber rings, with—“Your servant, Mr. Ephraim!”

In the course of time, when these imperfect sketches shall have received perfection and polish from some more skilful hand, so shall it be done unto him (nor is there need of inspiration for the prophecy)—so shall it be done unto him, who in the tabernacle of St. Stephen’s, or in any other mansion, higher or lower, of similar design and use, shall be so far off his guard, as through craft or simplicity to let drop any of these irrelevant, and at one time deceptious arguments: and instead of, Order! Order! a voice shall be heard, followed, if need be, by voices in scores, crying aloud, “Stale! Stale! Fallacy of authority! Fallacy of distrust!” &c. &c.

The faculty which detection has of divesting deception of her power, is attested by the poet:—

“Quære peregrinum, vicinia rauca reclamat.”

The period of time at which, in the instance of the instruments of deception here in question, this change shall have been acknowledged to have been completely effected, will form an epoch in the history of civilization.