132-057.xml

Title: [[copyist’s hand] nd [wm 1818]]

Description: [copyist’s hand]

nd [wm 1818]

To Erskine

5.

In this same order, I now have to submitt to your Lordships these same alledged Whig Merits with a few remarks:

1. Liberticide wars opposed. Execrable indeed these same wars – But, bad is good, in so far as by comparison any war can be stiled good, whatever be the opposition, war will be seen to be opposed by it. Be it ever so necessary, War abroad will always be not only a bad thing, but the worst of all bad things, except despotism at home.

But no degree of readiness to oppose unnecessary war can exceed their readiness to make it. Under the notion of serving the Country where he was born, never was George the 2 d so eager to sacrifice to his ambition the welfare of that native Country of his which gave him a ducal, together with that of the Country which gave him a royal throne, as Charles Fox and Lord Grenville were to please George the 3 d who had never been there. “Witness Hanover and Hampshire”. The Eloquence of Charles Fox had provided him with a short word, with which he declared himself ready to justify any war, for any thing or for nothing, at any time. Witness Hanover: Witness, Glory: or, if neither be sufficient, | | both together. | | in, Johnson’s Every Man in his humour, was the prototype of Charles Fox. This, My Lord, was eloquence. – Ah was eloquence! Human comforts – human afflictions! – dull elements of calculation! how are ye looked down upon by eloquence!

104_440.xml

Title: [1819 Mar. 28 To Erskine 3 Whig Merits]

Description: 1819 Mar. 28

To Erskine 3 Whig Merits[?]

The original unpopularity of the King, with the additional stock laid in by the American war not being yet sufficient, in 1780 or thereabouts, the Whigs betook themselves to Parliamentary Reform Having dissipated his part of the /a[?]/ unaccounted millions, starving for want of more /of the public money/, Charles Fox took a leading part, joined with Pitt in this last thought of and desperate resource for getting at it.

Pitt the second getting in, Fox the second was left out. Pitt's reform ended in a remedy which would have exasperated the disease: oppressing the country /cramming the House/ with an additional hundred of fox-hunting and coronet-hunting idlers. Not a party in the country, scarcely an individual in the country except the hundred knights and their near connections, to which this reform would not have been worse than useless.

Thereupon came the Coalition. Whig Fox and Whig Burke gave the right hand of fellowship to Tory North: Antony embraced Lepidus. Now came another Revolution in view: Now come in again the great cause, Aristocracy against Monarchy. Aristocracy, a house divided against itself could not stand. No James was at hand. George's Wife had given him so many children, she had made him popular. George triumphed. For some time however it had been a measuring cast. Passing not long after through Germany, I visited his /the/ Hanoverian palace. I found it newly swept and garnished. How comes this? Sir, (said the Major-domo) his Majesty was expected here.

No sooner had his Majesty lost his royal senses, than his popularity became complete: no recovery could shake it.

132-043.xml

Title: [1819 Mar. + To Erskine II.]

Description: 1819 Mar. +

To Erskine

II. Whig Merits

§.3. J.B. Remarks

12

6

10

Irish nation, and those by which, in 1789, the aristocratical body, composed of the 80,000 French Noblesse, gave up, all in one day, so large a portion of that power under the weight of which the thirty millions had for so many centuries been crushed.

To return to the Whigs. Notwithstanding this unchangeable determination to keep what power they had, such, as early as the year 1780, was their appetite for that which they had not, and so deep the game which it was the effect of that appetite to make them play for it – that, in 1780, under the lead of Charles Fox, that prince of gamesters, to which Brookes’s was supplied one gaming-table and S t Stephens another, they had actually been brought to continue in their adherence to him, after he had signed a declaration in favour of annuality of election, and even of unlimited universality of suffrage. +

To the next page, p. 12.

From the next page p. 12

As to the one party, that on their part from that time and earlier, down to the present, the show of desire of reform, never has been any thing more than a show – that it never has been either their endeavour, or their desire, to help to bestow upon the subject many any the least particle of those means of security which it was in their power to withhold, among the propositions, which, by Your Lordships defence of them I have been engaged to endeavour to prove: to prove more to the conviction than I fear to the satisfaction of a Noble Lord, whose eloquence has lifted him up, as well as so many of his admirers, so much above the sphere of the old philosophers, whose chief study as well as difficulty, was, as he informs us, to know himself.