Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/133

 The doctrine of "millions made for one" has to be sure got a tolerable footing in the East. It has attained a very venerable old age there—it is mature even to rottenness, but without decay. "Old, old, Master Shallow," but eternal. It is transmitted down in unimpaired succession from sire to son. Snug's the word. Legitimacy is not there militant, but triumphant, as the Editor of The Times would wish. It is long since the people had any thing to do with the laws but to obey them, or any laws to obey but the will of their task-masters. This is the necessary end of legitimacy. The Princes and Potentates cut one another's throats as they please, but the people have no hand in it. They have no French Revolutions there, no rights of man to terrify barbarous kings, no republicans or levellers, no weathercock deliverers and redeliverers of mankind, no Mr. Southeys nor Mr. Wordsworths. In this they are happy. Things there are perfectly settled, in the state in which they should be,—still as death, and likely to remain so. Mr. Southey's exquisite reason for supposing that a crusade to pull down divine right would succeed in the East, is that a crusade to prop it up has just succeeded in the West. That will never do. Besides, what security can he give, if he goes on improving in wisdom for the next five and twenty years as he has done for the last, that he would not in the end be as glad to see these "barbarous kings" restored to their rightful thrones, as he is now anxious to see them tumbled from them? The doctrine of "divine right" is of longer standing and more firmly established in the East than in the West, because the Eastern world is older than ours. We might say of it, "The wars it well remembers of King Nine, "Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine." It is fixed on the altar and the throne, safe, quite safe against Mr. Southey's enthusiasm in its second spring, his Missionary Societies, and his Schools for All. It overlays that vast continent, like an ugly incubus, sucking the blood and stopping up the breath of man's life. That detestable doctrine, which in