Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke:
On Patriotism, 1730-1754
1730. Impossibility of Universal Empire. All the inhabitants of some other planet may have
been, perhaps, from their creation united in one great society, speaking the same language,
and living under the same government; or too perfect by their nature to need the restraint
of any. But mankind is constituted very differently and although the natural law of our
whole species be the same, yet we are by nature incapable, on many accounts, of uniting
under one form of government, or of submitting to one rule of life....
1736. On The Spirit of Patriotism. The service of our country is no chimerical, but a
real duty. He who admits the proofs of any other moral duty, drawn from the constitution
of human nature, or from the moral fitness and unfitness of things, must admit them in
favor of this duty, or be reduced to the most absurd inconsistency. When he has once
admitted the duty on these proofs, it will be no difficult matter to demonstrate to him, that
his obligation to the performance of it is in proportion to the means and the opportunities
he has of performing it; and that nothing can discharge him from this obligation as long as
he has these means and these opportunities in his power, and as long as his country
continues in the same want of his services. These obligations, then, to the public service
may become obligations for life on certain persons. No doubt they may: and shall this
consideration become a reason for denying or evading them? On the contrary, sure it
should become a reason for acknowledging and fulfilling them, with the greatest gratitude
to the Supreme Being, who has made us capable of acting so excellent a part, and with the
utmost benevolence to mankind.
Superior talents, and superior rank among our fellow-creatures, whether acquired by birth,
or by the course of accidents, and the success of our own industry, are noble prerogatives.
Shall he, who possesses them, repine at the obligation they lay him under of passing his
whole life in the noblest occupation of which human nature is capable? To what higher
station, to what greater glory can any mortal aspire, than to be, during the whole course of
his life, the support of good, the control of bad government, and the guardian of public
liberty? . . . A life dedicated to the service of our country admits the full use, and no life
should admit the abuse of pleasures; the least are consistent with a constant discharge of
our public duty, the greatest arise from it.
The common, the sensual pleasures to which nature prompts us, and which reason
therefore does not forbid, though she should always direct, are so far from being excluded
out of a life of business, that they are sometimes necessary in it, and are always heightened
by it; those, of the table, for instance, may be ordered so as to promote that which the
elder Cato calls vitae conjunctionem. In the midst of public duties, private studies, and an
extreme old age, he found time to frequent the sodalitates, or clubs of friends, at Rome,
and to sit up all night with his neighbors in the country of the Sabines. Cato's virtue often
glowed with wine; and the love of women did not hinder Caesar from forming and
executing the greatest projects that ambition ever suggested. But if Caesar, while he
labored to destroy the liberties of his country, enjoyed these inferior pleasures of life,
which a man who labors to save those liberties may enjoy as well as he; there are superior
pleasures in a busy life, that Caesar never knew; those, I mean, that arise from a faithful
discharge of our duty to the commonwealth. Neither Montaigne in writing his essays, nor
Des Cartes in building new worlds, nor Burnet in framing an antediluvian earth, no, nor
Newton in discovering and establishing the true laws of nature on experiment and a
sublimer geometry, felt more intellectual joys, than he feels who is a real patriot, who
bends all the force of his understanding, and directs all his thoughts and actions to the
good of his country. When such a man forms a political scheme, and adjusts various and
seemingly independent parts in it to one great and good design, he is transported by
imagination, or absorbed in meditation, as much and as agreeably as they: and the
satisfaction, that arises from the different importance of these objects in every step of the
work, is vastly in his favor.... |
