Lectures on the French RevolutionActon, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron
History
Lectures on the French Revolution
Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron
France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799
At other times he spoke as follows:--"Nothing less than a convulsion
that will shake the globe to its centre can ever restore the European
nations to that liberty by which they were once so much distinguished.
The Western world was the seat of freedom until another, more Western,
was discovered; and that other will probably be its asylum when it is
hunted down in every other part. Happy it is that the worst of times
may have one refuge still left for humanity. If the Irish resisted
King William, they resisted him on the very same principle that the
English and Scotch resisted King James. The Irish Catholics must have
been the very worst and the most truly unnatural of rebels, if they
had not supported a prince whom they had seen attacked, not for any
designs against their religion or their liberties, but for an extreme
partiality for their sect. Princes otherwise meritorious have violated
the liberties of the people, and have been lawfully deposed for such
violation. I know no human being exempt from the law. I consider
Parliament as the proper judge of kings, and it is necessary that they
should be amenable to it. There is no such thing as governing the
whole body of the people contrary to their inclination. Whenever they
have a feeling they commonly are in the right. Christ appeared in
sympathy with the lowest of the people, and thereby made it a firm and
ruling principle that their welfare was the object of all government.
"In all forms of government the people is the true legislator. The
remote and efficient cause is the consent of the people, either actual
or implied, and such consent is absolutely essential to its validity.
Whiggism did not consist in the support of the power of Parliament or
of any other power, but of the rights of the people. If Parliament
should become an instrument in invading them, it was no better in any
respect, and much worse in some, than any other instrument of
arbitrary power. They who call upon you to belong wholly to the people
are those who wish you to belong to your proper home, to the sphere of
your duty, to the post of your honour. Let the Commons in Parliament
assembled be one and the same thing with the Commons at large. I see
no other way for the preservation of a decent attention to public
interest in the representatives, but the interposition of the body of
the people itself, whenever, it shall appear by some flagrant and
notorious act, by some capital innovation, that those representatives
are going to overleap the fences of the law and to introduce an
arbitrary power. This interposition is a most unpleasant remedy; but
if it be a legal remedy, it is intended on some occasion to be
used--to be used then only when it is evident that nothing else can
hold the Constitution to its true principles. It is not in Parliament
alone that the remedy for parliamentary disorders can be completed;
hardly, indeed, can it begin there. A popular origin cannot therefore
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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