So in the administration of justice. A bar, freedom of speech, and the examination of witnesses viva voce in open court, are found to be excellent means for the discharge of the duties with which courts of justice are intrusted. Not that the system is not open to many real objections; but because its evils, when they are compared with the opposite ones, have been proved by experience to be the least mischievous of the two. The best way of improving the system is, not on the one hand to set up an impracticable standard of professional perfection; nor, on the other, to deny to advocates a single privilege necessary for the due protection of their clients. Still less would a rational friend to truth and justice seek to cover them with the indiscriminate ridicule and vituperation to which Mr Bentham had recourse whenever he mentioned lawyers. An advocate is bound to restrain himself within those privileges; he is not to mis-state facts in behalf of his client; he is not to supply want of merits or want of argument by abuse of the opposite party, he is not to browbeat and confuse a witness, whose evidence he cannot otherwise contradict. On these occasions, the actual injustice of the immediate proceeding is the least part of the evil. Its tendency to weaken and discredit the best means which have been yet devised for the administration of justice, is a still greater injury to society. When once a profession rises up as a necessary part of a necessary institution, every power which can be wanted for the efficient discharge of its duty should be openly and liberally given it. On the other hand, these powers are the very cases where it is most important that every clear abuse of them should be instantly discountenanced and peremptorily repressed. After all, there are a thousand niceties which neither legal sanction nor the supremacy of judicial revision can ever reach. In these, the chief and best security against abuse is individual honour. A profession is a trust in which a man will not acquit himself honourably and usefully unless he learns to think highly of it, and is enabled to respect himself as a member of it. And herein, of this we may be certain, the good opinion and sympathy of the public are indispensable conditions. For this purpose they are not only the rewards, they are the means. There is a close analogy between the press and the instances which we have prayed in aid, for the sake of a more extended inference and illustration. The amusement, of which the theatre had formerly the monopoly, is now very much supplied by light literature under every variety of form; especially under that of periodical publications. Political science is near akin to jurisprudence; and it happens that the professional writer upon temporary politics, and the professional practiser of the law, stand in almost similar positions, and are exposed to similar temptations. They both owe a kind of divided allegiance. But it is the duty of both alike, not to sell themselves out and out to the prejudices and passions of the party they may represent. The interests of their respective clientelas cannot be honestly maintained by them, except in subordination to the interests of the community at large. To seek under a professional disguise the gratification of any purely personal object, whether of emolument, feeling, or ambition, at the risk of the public tranquillity or public service, is to be guilty, of course, of a still more unpardonable offence. Before a political writer can pretend to class himself amongst public instructors, we must have proof of some sort, or at least presumption that he is morally and intellectually superior to so much of the public as he is to instruct. In the absence of such qualifications, it is the office only of trumpeter which he is filling, not of guide. Among these qualifications are a love of truth and justice; the power of holding the scales steadily while the advantages and disadvantages of every question are fairly weighed; that proportion in the faculties, and that moderation in the temper, which are the more usual groundworks of good sense and good humour than of eloquence or wit. Our catalogue, we fear, is scarcely such as will be thought, under our existing habits, to contain the most suitable elements for the leading articles of popular journals. Honest writers, we reply, must approach it as near as their several circles will admit. The reproach is, in wilfully stopping short of the approximations which might be reached with ease and safety. The prudish moralist who should try to tie down the spirit of journalism too tight, would make as great a mistake, we are aware, as the statesman who should attempt to conjure it into a bottle. All that we want is, evidence in their proceedings of that superiority to their average readers, that the office on which they have entered assuredly assumes. The difficulty of obtaining the professional character and conduct which we are requiring, is the greatest in the most popular states, and at periods of political excitement. The newspapers of the United States, soon got terribly wrong in one of the worst, though commonest errorsviolence and exaggeration. Jefferson, who ought to have had the hide, as he had the tastes of a rhinoceros, winced under their attacks. He declares, in his correspondence, that from the effect which he had seen produced on Washington by the misrepresentations and injustice of a comparatively reasonable press, he is convinced that the intemperance and calumnies of a later period would have driven that pure and virtuous patriot from public life. We have seen a French engraving, entitled L'Ecrivain Politique. -- To judge by it, our neighbours are equally unfortunate in the temperament of this class of their public instructors. The sketch might have been taken from the political ward in Bedlam; or from the perturbed features by which Milton supposes Satan to have been discovered, on arriving in Paradise, notwithstanding his disguise. English statesmen are not sensitive enough to withdraw from public life from the dread of being abused. Partywriting has been carried to a length that defeats itself. The principle on which it paints, either black or white, is thoroughly understood by the parties and by the public. No man in his senses would ever think of taking a prominent part in politics. who did not feel that he knew the value of both; and was proof alike to the censures of hostile newspapers, and the panegyrics of admiring ones. It is no small evil if the press, by hardening the best and wisest of our public men against the accredited organs of public opinion, has so far a tendency to disturb its course and criterions, and to lower its estimation. The exchange of the calm and grateful approbation of his fellow-citizens for the huzzas of a faction is, to a man of generous ambition, a losing bargain. While this perverseness and confusion lasts, he may look for his standard and his consolation to other quarters. The public also is pretty well aware of the effects, for the producing of which this kind of scene-painting is got up. Still some unlucky people are misled by it; while we have known others change their paper from sheer dislike at seeing the opinions, in which they agreed, made so disagreeable by the manner in which they were expressed. The injustice and unfairness of which we are speaking, is the worst point of view from which our periodical literature can be regarded. Before newspapers can be said to have entered systematically and designedly on the course of usefulness and happiness, which we would willingly believe is open to them, the representatives of opposite opinions must be able to believe that political differences may exist, without the persons who differ being necessarily, one of them, either rogue or fool. Extreme violence is part of the loose political morality still so common. The real fanaticism of ignorance differs from the counterfeited zeal of base trafficking spéculation more in cause than in effect. While either one or the other continues to be received with favour, what is to be expected? Can a due proportion of judgment, integrity, and candour, possibly dedicate itself to this service, unless it is generally understood, not merely that political questions are capable of being treated with the same reason and charity as any other questions, but that they ought to be so? Is the prolonged existence of a candid newspaper a phenomenon which the Critical Faculty must declare impossible? Is the general discouragement of a dishonest one, by all honest men of all parties, a dream out of Utopia? Cobbett, in his day, was the most distinguished writer in this department. He was equally successful in raising its intellectual, and lowering its moral reputation. In his own case, he became a warning (of what writers who are to appear constantly before the public cannot be too constantly reminded), that there is a want of principle for which no degree of talent and assurance can make up. He did all he could to establish against his contemporaries a partnership in this disgrace. One of his favourite topics was abusing the London press. We remember his once suggesting a novel kind of censorship, which was to consist in setting out the editors in a line in Hyde Park, in order that their comparative merits and general title to consideration might be determined upon view. The sneer, in proportion to its probability of truth with respect to the parties principally concerned in it, is a much severer satire on the folly of the public. Gross misconduct on the part of the public, in leaving the class in question in what is called a false position, can alone have given a plausible handle to such a jest. No large body of men can be wisely left so. This is true of every kind of occupation, and of every kind of talent unworthily degraded. But the stronger the temptations which are to be withstood by any class, the greater the dependence of society upon their honour and discretion, the more visible their power-the higher of course ought to be their personal reputation; and the more liberal the terms on which society should endeavour to secure their loyal fidelity to its interests. The profession of letters deserves in this respect a more careful superintendence and judicious encouragement, than professions which are employed upon matters of taste and amusement only. It is among the surest ways by which writers of the required character, and of a suitable station and attainment, can be attracted to it. Yet it was not the least of Garrick's merits that he succeeded in withdrawing performers on the stage from their old statutory classification among rogues and vagabonds; and that he made the first circles in London seek the company of a player as an honour. The English public have benefited as much as English artists by the gracious welcome in society which the arts first received there in the person of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Among the labourers in the literary vineyard, there are none whom, as a class, it is more desirable to raise, by due sympathy and favour, from the obscurity and discontent of a life of neglected literary adventure, than those who devote their talents to the service of the public press. Good feeling and good policy are equally violated by an opposite course. The evil of which the fastidious, and people who are far from being so, complain is, that newspapers are frequently wanting in the self-respect, good faith, and courtesy which belong to good society. To this, it would be a proper answer to ask, whether scornful exclusion from good society is the appropriate remedy for this specific evil? But one example will go farther than fifty lectures. There is nobody who need feel ashamed of a profession of which Mr Fonblanque is a member. He may well be expected to do for his profession what Garrick and Reynolds did for theirs. -- Mr Fonblanque has shown, by the present publication, a proper confidence in himself. It lays before the reader, as in a map, the weekly course of the Examiner for the last ten years. We often differ from him in his judgments, both on generals and particulars, on men and measures. To be so bad a judge of character as to delight in sneering at honest Lord Althorp, is to neutralize as far as in his power any sarcastic delineation of Mephistopheles and Joseph Surface. We perceive, in the republication before us, repetitions, and evidences of a mannerism and sameness, which had escaped us from week to week. Articles which had thrown a pleasant sunshine, one by one, on our breakfast table, when they are transferred to a successive and continuous perusal in our study, through three octavo volumes, have wearied us by their fragmentary nature, and their scattered lights. In the same manner, Mr Fonblanque's greatest fault, a tone of habitual contempt, becomes more painful when it meets us-not as the morning's jest, to be laughed over and forgotten, but-embodied in a classical and standard form. Bitters are more agreeable in drops than in spoonfuls. Notwithstanding these differences, and although they had been more and greater than they really are, we feel very grateful to Mr Fonblanque for the instruction and pleasure his writings have afforded us. This, however, we do not know that we should have stopped to tell him. But we could not resist the opportunity of expressing our sense of the obligation conferred by him upon as many of his countrymen as concur with us in our opinion on the capabilities and destinies of the daily press. The example which Mr Fonblanque has set is a merit of the very highest order. To have begun by combating from the outset the characteristic difficulties by which this species of authorship is surrounded, was an enterprise of great integrity and courage. To have succeeded, in overcoming them to the extent that he has succeeded, could have been the triumph only of talents equal-whether similar or dissimilar-to his own. He has written on certain principles systematically and fearlessly. He VOL. LXV. NO. CXXXII. 21 |