It is sometimes thought, and very often said, that political writing, after its special day is done, becomes more dead than any other kind of literature, or even journalism.  I do not know whether my own judgment is perverted by the fact of a special devotion to the business, but it certainly seems to me that both the thought and the saying are mistakes.  Indeed, a rough-and-ready refutation of them is supplied by the fact that, in no few cases, political pieces have entered into the generally admitted stock of the best literary things.  If they are little read, can we honestly say that other things in the same rank are read much more?  And is there not the further plea, by no means contradictory, nor even merely alternative, that the best examples of them are, as a rule, merged in huge collected ‘Works,’ or, in the case of authors who have not attained to that dignity, simply inaccessible to the general?  At any rate my publishers have consented to let me try the experiment of gathering certain famous things of the sort in this volume, and the public must decide.

I do not begin very early, partly because examples of the Elizabethan political pamphlet, or what supplied its place, will be given in another volume of the series exclusively devoted to the pamphlet literature of the reigns of Eliza and our James, partly for a still better reason presently to be explained.  On the other hand, though another special volume is devoted to Defoe, the immortal Shortest Way with the Dissenters is separated from the rest of his work, and given here.  Most of the contents, however, represent authors not otherwise represented in the series, and though very well known indeed by name, less read than quoted.  The suitableness of the political pamphlet, both by size and self-containedness, for such a volume as this, needs no justification except that which it, like everything else, must receive, by being put to the proof of reading.

There is no difficulty in showing, with at least sufficient critical exactness, why it is not possible or not desirable to select examples from very early periods even of strictly modern history.  The causes are in part the same as those which delayed the production of really capital political verse (which has been treated in another volume), but they are not wholly the same.  The Martin Marprelate pamphlets are strictly political; so are many things earlier, later, and contemporary with them, by hands known and unknown, great and small, skilled and unskilled; so are some even in the work of so great a man as Bacon.  But very many things were wanting to secure the conditions necessary to the perfect pamphlet.  There was not the political freedom; there was not the public; there was not the immediate object; there was not, last and most of all, the style.  Political utterances under a more or less despotic, or, as the modern euphemism goes, ‘personal’ government, were almost necessarily those of a retained advocate, who expected his immediate reward, on the one hand; or of a rebel, who stood to make his account with office if he succeeded, or with savage punishment if he failed, on the other.  A distant prospect of impeachment, of the loss of ears, hands, or life if the tide turns, is a stimulant to violence rather than to vigour.  I do not think, however, that this is the most important factor in the problem.  Parliamentary government, with a limited franchise of tolerably intelligent voters, a party system, and newspapers comparatively undeveloped, may not suit an ideally perfect politeia, but it is the very hotbed in which to nourish the pamphlet.  There is also a style, as there is a time, for all things; and no style could be so well suited for the pamphlet as the balanced, measured, pointed, and polished style which Dryden and Tillotson and Temple brought in during the third quarter of the seventeenth century, and which did not go out of fashion till the second quarter of the nineteenth.  We have indeed seen pamphlets proper exercising considerable influence in quite recent times; but in no instance that I can remember has this been due to any literary merits, and I doubt whether even the bare fact will be soon or often renewed in our days.  The written word ­the written word of condensed, strengthened, spirited literature ­has lost much, if not all, of its force with an enormously increased electorate, and a bewildering multiplicity of print and speech of all kinds.

Whatever justice these reasonings may have or may lack, the facts speak for themselves, as facts intelligently regarded have a habit of doing.  The first pamphlets proper of great literary merit and great political influence are those of Halifax in the first movement of real party struggle during the reign of Charles the Second; the last which unite the same requisites are those of Scott on the eve of the first Reform Bill.  The leaflet and circular war of the anti-Corn Law League must be ruled out as much as Mr. Gladstone’s Bulgarian Horrors.

This leaves us a period of almost exactly a hundred and fifty years, during which the kind, whether in good or bad examples, was of constant influence; while its best instances enriched literature with permanent masterpieces in little.  I do not think that any moderately instructed person will find much difficulty in comprehending the specimens here given.  I am sure that no moderately intelligent one will fail, with a very little trouble, to take delight in them.  I do not know whether an artful generaliser could get anything out of the circumstances in which the best of them grew; I should say myself that nothing more than the system of government, the conditions of the electorate and the legislature, and the existence from time to time of a superheated state in political feeling, can or need be collected.  In some respects, to my own taste, the first of these examples is also the best.  To Halifax full justice has never been done, for we have had no capable historian of the late seventeenth century but Macaulay, and Halifax’s defect of fervour as a Jacobite was more than made up to Macaulay by his defect of fervour as a Williamite.  As for the moderns, I have myself more than once failed to induce editors of ‘series’ to give Halifax a place.  Yet Macaulay himself has been fairer to the great Trimmer than to most persons with whom he was not in full sympathy.  The weakness of Halifax’s position is indeed obvious.  When you run first to one side of the boat and then to the other, you have ten chances of sinking to one of trimming her.  To hold fast to one party only, and to keep that from extremes, is the only secret, and it is no great disgrace to Halifax, that in the very infancy of the party and parliamentary system, he did not perceive it.  But this hardly interferes at all with the excellence of his pamphlets.  The polished style, the admirable sense, the subdued and yet ever present wit, the avoidance of excessive cleverness (the one thing that the average Briton will not stand), the constant eye on the object, are unmistakable.  They are nearly as forcible as Dryden’s political and controversial prefaces, which are pamphlets themselves in their way, and they excel them in knowledge of affairs, in urbanity, in adaptation to the special purpose.  In all these points they resemble more than anything else the pamphlets of Paul Louis Courier, and there can be no higher praise than this.

No age in English history was more fertile in pamphlets than the reigns of William and of Anne.  Some men of real distinction occasionally contributed to them, and others (such as Ferguson and Maynwaring) obtained such literary notoriety as they possess by their means.  The total volume of the kind produced during the quarter of a century between the Revolution and the accession of George the First would probably fill a considerable library.  But the examples which really deserve exhumation are very few, and I doubt whether any can pretend to vie with the masterpieces of Defoe and Swift.  Both these great writers were accomplished practitioners in the art, and the characteristics of both lent themselves with peculiar yet strangely different readiness to the work.  They addressed, indeed, different sections of what was even then the electorate.  Defoe’s unpolished realism and his exact adaptation of tone, thought, taste, and fancy to the measure of the common Englishman were what chiefly gave him a hearing.  Swift aimed and flew higher, but also did not miss the lower mark.  No one has ever doubted that Johnson’s depreciation of The Conduct of the Allies was half special perversity (for he was always unjust to Swift), half mere humorous paradox.  For there was much more of this in the doctor’s utterances than his admirers, either in his own day or since, have always recognised, or have sometimes been qualified by Providence to recognise.  As for the Drapier’s Letters I can never myself admire them enough, and they seem to me to have been on the whole under-rather than over-valued by posterity.

The ‘Great Walpolian Battle’ and the attacks on Bute and other favourite ministers were very fertile in the pamphlet, but already there were certain signs of alteration in its character.  Pulteney and Walpole’s other adversaries had already glimmerings of the newspaper proper, that is to say, of the continual dropping fire rather than the single heavy broadside; to adopt a better metaphor still, of a regimental and professional soldiery rather than of single volunteer champions.  The Letters of Junius, which for some time past have been gradually dropping from their former somewhat undue pride of place (gained and kept as much by the factitious mystery of their origin as by anything else) to a station more justly warranted, are no doubt themselves pamphlets of a kind; but they are separated from pamphlets proper not less by their contents than by their form and continuity.  The real difference is this, that the pamphlet, though often if not always personal enough, should always and generally does affect at least to discuss a general question of principle or policy, whereas Junius is always personal first, and very generally last also.  On the other hand, Burke, whether his productions be called Speeches or Letters, Thoughts or Reflections, is always a pamphleteer in heart and soul, in form and matter.  If the resemblance of his pamphlets to speeches gives the force and fire, it is certain that the resemblance of his speeches to pamphlets accounts for that ‘dinner-bell’ effect of his which has puzzled some people and shocked others.  Burke always argued the point, if he only argued one side of it, and it is the special as it is the saving grace of the pamphlet that it must, or at least should, be an argument, and not merely an invective or an innuendo, a sermon or a lampoon.

Sydney Smith belonged both to the old school and the new.  He was both pamphleteer and journalist; but he kept the form and even to some extent the style of his pamphlets and his articles well apart.  I may seem likely to have some difficulty in admitting the claim of Cobbett after disallowing that of Junius under the definition just given, but I have no very great fear of being unable to making it good.  Much as Cobbett disliked persons, and crotchety as he was in his dislikes, they were always dislikes of principle in the bottom.  The singular Tory-Radicalism which Cobbett exhibited, and which has made some rank him unduly low, was no doubt partly due to accidents of birth and education, and to narrowness of intellectual form.  But boroughmongering after all was a Whig rather than a Tory institution, and Cobbett’s hatred of it, as well as that desire for the maintenance of a kind of manufacturing yeomanry (not wholly different from the later ideal of Mr. William Morris,) which was his other guiding principle throughout, was by no means alien from pure Toryism.  His work in relation to Reform, moreover, is unmistakable ­as unmistakable as is that of Sydney Smith, who precedes him here, with regard to Catholic Emancipation.  I should have voted and written against both these things had I lived then; but this does not make me enjoy Cobbett or Sydney any the less.

As for the latest example I have selected, it is a crucial one.  The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther come from a man who is not often rated high as a political thinker, even by those who sympathise with his political views.  But here as elsewhere the politician, no less than the poet, the critic, the historian, bears the penalty of the pre-eminent greatness of the novelist.  Nothing is more uncritical than to regard Scott as a mere sentimentalist in politics, and I cannot think that any competent judge can do so after reading Malagrowther, even after reading Scott’s own Diary and letters on the subject.  As he there explains, he was not greatly carried, as a rule, to interest himself in the details of politics.  As both Lockhart and he admit, he might not have been so interested even at this juncture had it not been for the chagrin at his own misfortunes, which, nobly and stoically repressed as it was, required some issue.  But his general principle on this occasion was clear; it can be thoroughly apprehended and appreciated even by an Englishman of Englishmen.  It was thoroughly justified by the event, and, I may perhaps be permitted to observe, ran exactly contrary to a sentiment rather widely adopted of late.  No man, whether in public writings or private conduct, could be more set than Scott was against a spurious Scotch particularism.  He even earned from silly Scots malédictions for the chivalrous justice he dealt to England in The Lord of the Isles, and the common-sense justice he dealt to her in the mouth of Bailie Jarvie.  But he was not more staunch for the political Union than he was for the preservation of minor institutions, manners, and character; and the proposed interference with Scotch banking seemed to him to be one of the things tending to make good Scotchmen, as he bluntly told Croker, ’damned mischievous Englishmen.’  Therefore he arose and spoke, and though he averted the immediate attempt, yet the prophecies which he uttered were amply fulfilled in other ways after the Reform Bill.

These, then, are the principles on which I have selected the pieces that follow (some minor reasons for the particular choices being given in the special introductions): ­That they should be pamphlets proper (Malachi appeared first in a newspaper, but that was a sign of the time chiefly, and the numbers of Cobbett’s Register were practically independent pieces); that they should deal with special subjects of burning political, and not merely personal, interest; and that they should either directly or in the long-run have exercised an actual determining influence on the course of politics and history.  This last point is undoubted in the case of the examples from Halifax, Swift, Burke (who more than any one man pointed and steeled the resistance of England to Jacobin tyranny), and Scott; it was less immediate, but scarcely more dubious in those of Defoe, Cobbett, and Sydney Smith.  And so in all humility I make my bow as introducer once more to the English public of these Seven Masters of English political writing.