t popular commonplaces of the day was the mischief of luxury. That we
were all on the high road to ruin on account of our wealth, our
corruption, and the growth of the national debt, was the text of any
number of political agitators. The whole of this talk was, to his mind,
so much whining and cant. Luxury did no harm, and the mass of the
people, as indeed was in one sense obvious enough, had only too little
of it. The pet 'state of nature' of theorists was a silly figment. The
genuine savage was little better than an animal; and a savage woman,
whose contempt for civilised life had prompted her to escape to the
forest, was simply a 'speaking cat.' The natural equality of mankind was
mere moonshine. So far is it from being true, he says, that no two
people can be together for half an hour without one acquiring an evident
superiority over the other. Subordination is an essential element of
human happiness. A Whig stinks in his nostrils because to his eye modern
Whiggism is 'a negation of all principles.' As he said of Priestley's
writings, it unsettles everything and settles nothing. 'He is a cursed
Whig, a _bottomless_ Whig as they all are now,' was his description
apparently of Burke. Order, in fact, is a vital necessity; what
particular form it may take matters comparatively little; and therefore
all revolutionary dogmas were chimerical as an attack upon the
inevitable conditions of life, and mischievous so far as productive of
useless discontent. We need not ask what mixture of truth and falsehood
there may be in these principles. Of course, a Radical, or even a
respectable Whig, like Macaulay, who believed in the magical efficacy of
the British Constitution, might shriek or laugh at such doctrine.
Johnson's political pamphlets, besides the defects natural to a writer
who was only a politician by accident, advocate the most retrograde
doctrines. Nobody at the present day thinks that the Stamp Act was an
admirable or justifiable measure; or would approve of telling the
Americans that they ought to have been grateful for their long exemption
instead of indignant at the imposition. 'We do not put a calf into the
plough; we wait till he is an ox'--was not a judicious taunt. He was
utterly wrong; and, if everybody who is utterly wrong in a political
controversy deserves unmixed contempt, there is no more to be said for
him. We might indeed argue that Johnson was in some ways entitled to the
sympathy of enlightened people. H