Truth is compared in scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity, and tradition.18 The necessity for liberty of thinking is thus solidly established. Milton points out that, besides, political liberty is necessary to the full development of intellectual life. Thus, in Italy, the fall of liberty brought intellectual decadence." But political liberty is the main object of the prose works. D. Political liberty: no tyrants Milton applies to politics his fundamental principles. Man is a part of God; therefore he is free. But he is free only when reason dominates over the passions in him; otherwise, he is not "of Christ," and he has no right to external liberty. Milton develops those ideas in the fine pages at the end of the Defensio secunda. Institutions in themselves have no value; the vote has a meaning only if the citizens are enlightened and freed from passions. Man must first govern himself, and then choose as leaders men who can govern themselves: For it is of no little consequence, O citizens, by what principles you are governed, either in acquiring liberty, or in retaining it when acquired. And unless that liberty which is of such a kind as arms can neither procure nor take away, which alone is the fruit of piety, of justice, of temperance, and unadulterated virtue, shall have taken deep root in your minds and hearts, there will not long be wanting one who will snatch from you by treachery what you have acquired by arms. War has made many great whom peace makes small. If after being released from the toils of war, you neglect the arts of peace, if your peace and your liberty be a state of warfare, if war be your only virtue, the summit of your praise, you 19 See above, p. 75. 18 Ibid., II, 85. will, believe me, soon find peace the most adverse to your interests. Your peace will be only a more distressing war; and that which you imagined liberty will prove the worst of slavery. Unless by the means of piety, not frothy and loquacious, but operative, unadulterated, and sincere, you clear the horizon of the mind from those mists of superstition which arise from the ignorance of true religion, you will always have those who will bend your necks to the yoke as if you were brutes, who, notwithstanding all your triumphs, will put you up to the highest bidder, as if you were mere booty made in war; and will find an exuberant source of wealth in your ignorance and superstition. Unless you will subjugate the propensity to avarice, to ambition, and sensuality, and expel all luxury from yourselves and from your families, you will find that you have cherished a more stubborn and intractable despot at home, than you ever encountered in the field; and even your very bowels will be continually teeming with an intolerable progeny of tyrants. Let these be the first enemies whom you subdue; this constitutes the campaign of peace; these are triumphs, difficult indeed, but bloodless; and far more honourable than those trophies which are purchased only by slaughter and by rapine. Unless you are victors in this service, it is in vain that you have been victorious over the despotic enemy in the field. . . . But from such an abyss of corruption into which you so readily fall, no one, not even Cromwell himself, nor a whole nation of Brutuses, if they were alive, could deliver you if they would, or would deliver you if they could. For who would vindicate your right of unrestrained suffrage, or of choosing what representatives you like best, merely that you might elect the creatures of your own faction, whoever they might be, or him, however small might be his worth, who would give you the most lavish feasts, and enable you to drink to the greatest excess? Thus not wisdom and authority, but turbulence and gluttony, would soon exalt the vilest miscreants from our taverns and our brothels, from our towns and villages, to the rank and dignity of senators. For, should the management of the republic be entrusted to persons to whom no one would willingly entrust the management of his private concerns; and the treasury of the state be left to the care of those who had lavished their own fortunes in an infamous prodigality? Should they have the charge of the public purse, which they would soon convert into a private, by their unprincipled peculations? Are they fit to be the legislators of a whole people who themselves know not what law, what reason, what right and wrong, what crooked and straight, what licit and illicit means? who think that all power consists in outrage, all dignity in the parade of insolence? who neglect every other consideration for the corrupt gratification of their friendships, or the prosecution of their resentments? who disperse their own relations and creatures through the provinces, for the sake of levying taxes and confiscating goods; men, for the greater part, the most profligate and vile, who buy up for themselves what they pretend to expose to sale, who thence collect an exorbitant mass of wealth, which they fraudulently divert from the public service; who thus spread their pillage through the country, and in a moment emerge from penury and rags to a state of splendour and of wealth? . . . It is also sanctioned by the dictates of justice and by the constitution of nature, that he who from the imbecility or derangement of his intellect, is incapable of governing himself, should, like a minor, be committed to the government of another; and least of all should he be appointed to superintend the affairs of others or the interest of the state. You, therefore, who wish to remain free, either instantly be wise, or, as soon as possible, cease to be fools; if you think slavery an intolerable evil, learn obedience to reason and the government of yourselves, and finally bid adieu to your dissensions, your jealousies, your superstitions, your outrages, your rapine, and your lusts.20 Learn obedience to reason and the government of yourselves. Such is Milton's fundamental principle, from religion to politics. But the regenerate man in whom reason rules, is " of Christ," and therefore free. We read in the First Defence: If one should consider attentively the countenance of a man, and inquire after whose image so noble a creature was framed, would not any one that heard him presently make answer, that he was made after the image of God himself? Being therefore peculiarly God's own, and consequently things that are to be given to him, we are entirely free by nature and cannot without the greatest sacrilege imaginable be reduced into a condition of slavery to any man, especially to a wicked, unjust, cruel tyrant.21 20 Prose Works, I, 295–99. 21 Ibid., I, 63. Had men remained in their normal state, no government would have been necessary. The origin of all government is in the Fall." Consequently, for true men, government is not needed. In a country, government is only a necessary evil; therefore there must be as little as possible. The best government is that which governs least. There must be few laws. Milton tells Cromwell in the Second Defence: "you will do well, Since there are often in a republic men who have the same itch for making a multiplicity of laws, as some poetasters have for making many verses, and since laws are usually worse in proportion as they are more numerous, if you shall not enact so many new laws as you abolish old, which do not operate so much as warnings against evil, as impediments in the way of good; and if you shall retain only those which are necessary, which do not confound the distinctions of good and evil, which while they prevent the frauds of the wicked, do not prohibit the innocent freedoms of the good, which punish crimes, without interdicting those things which are lawful only on account of the abuses to which they may occasionally be exposed. For the intention of laws is to check the commission of vice; but liberty is the best school of virtue, and affords the strongest encouragements to the practice.23 Especially must the State not legislate for the church. We have seen all the bitterness of Milton against his hero Cromwell who had not abstained on this point. That ruined in Milton's mind the whole of the Protector's work. Then the government must ensure free discussion: If you permit the free discussion of truth without any hazard to the author, or any subjection to the caprice of an individual, which is the best way to make truth flourish and knowledge abound, the censure of the half-learned, the envy, the pusillanimity, or the prejudice which measure the discoveries of others, and in short 22 Tenure in Prose Works, II, 9. See above, p. 82. every degree of wisdom, by the measure of its own capacity, will be prevented from doling out information to us according to their own arbitrary choice.24 The only positive duty of a government is to spread education. We have seen that Milton was not pleased with the state of education in England. Here again he advises Cromwell: Then, if you make a better provision for the education of our youth than has hitherto been made, if you prevent the promiscuous instruction of the docile and the indocile, of the idle and the diligent, at the public cost, but reserve the rewards of learning for the learned, and of merit for the meritorious.25 26 For all power belongs to the people, returns to the people when the king and magistrates use it unwisely but then the people must be enlightened: that remains the basis of the whole system. The central idea is given in the lines of Paradise Lost: He made not lord; such title to himself In these lines, Milton establishes a distinction between the true ruler and the tyrant. For Milton, absolute power may be welcome; tyranny alone is abhorred. Tyrants are the rulers who follow their personal interests or passions - we have seen Charles I attainted on these grounds -even though they may have been elected by the suffrage of the people: 28 Who could endure such thievish servants, such vicegerents of their lords? Who could believe that the masters and the patrons of a banditti could be the proper guardians of liberty? or who would suppose that he should ever be made one hair more free by 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 2.6 See above, p. 89, for the texts. 28 Cf. First Defence in Prose Works, I, 97. |