‘A Panoramic View of London’ by Pierre Prévost (1764–1823), painted in 1815, and showing Houses of Parliament as Goldsmith knew them; a devastating fire destroyed these buildings in 1834. Goldsmith did not believe that English liberty depended on Parliament’s wise deliberations. It depended on allowing ordinary people to exercise discretion, and on the authorities imposing discipline only when matters seemed to be getting out of hand. Journalist A. G. Gardiner offered similar advice to an over-zealous bus conductor. See The Letter of the Law.
Part 1 of 2
IN England, from a variety of happy accidents, their constitution is just strong enough, or if you will, monarchical enough, to permit a relaxation of the severity of laws, and yet those laws still to remain sufficiently strong to govern the people. This is the most perfect state of civil liberty, of which we can form any idea: here we see a greater number of laws than in any other country, while the people at the same time obey only such as are immediately conducive to the interests of society; several are unnoticed, many unknown; some kept to be revived and enforced upon proper occasions, others left to grow obsolete, even without the necessity of abrogation.
There is scarce an Englishman who does not almost every day of his life offend with impunity against some express law, and for which, in a certain conjuncture of circumstances, he would not receive punishment. Gaming-houses, preaching at prohibited places, assembled crowds, nocturnal amusements, public shows, and an hundred other instances, are forbid and frequented.
Précis
In the person of a Chinese merchant explaining to a colleague what made England so free, Oliver Goldsmith argued that it was not a lack of laws but a culture in which ordinary citizens could to some extent dispense themselves from laws they found irksome. He traced this liberty to Britain’s unique constitutional blend of democracy and monarchy. (58 / 60 words)
Part Two
‘A group at Bath,’ a print by Isaac Cruikshank published in 1796. Goldsmith gave gambling as an example of one of those vices which could be winked it so long as it did not get out of hand, in which case the law was there to protect society from the consequences. He would have disapproved as strongly of the legalisation of gambling as he would of its zealous policing.
THESE prohibitions are useful; though it be prudent in their magistrates, and happy for the people, that they are not enforced, and none but the venal or mercenary attempt to enforce them. The law in this case, like an indulgent parent, still keeps the rod, though the child is seldom corrected. Were those pardoned offences to rise into enormity, were they likely to obstruct the happiness of society, or endanger the state, it is then that justice would resume her terrors, and punish those faults she had so often overlooked with indulgence. It is to this ductility of the laws, that an Englishman owes the freedom he enjoys superior to others in a more popular government.
Every popular government seems calculated to last only for a time; it grows rigid with age, new laws are multiplying, and the old continue in force; the subjects are oppressed, burthened with a multiplicity of legal injunctions; there are none from whom to expect redress, and nothing but a strong convulsion in the state can vindicate them into former liberty.*
* ‘Popular’ here is not used in the sense of ‘widely liked’ but in the sense of a government in which the general public, as opposed to a closed political class, plays a dominant role in making policy. Goldsmith was one of a number of English political writers who welcomed a degree of popular government as a brake on the Crown, but feared the consequences of too much. Another Irishman, William Lecky (1838-1903), foresaw a day when a deluded public might even vote for a dictator, which Germany did in 1933. See Democracy in Europe.
Précis
Of course (Goldsmith added) if the relaxed attitude to regulation began to cause harm to wider society, then magistrates still retained the power to exact punishment. This was, however, not an option in Continental countries, where their forms of government piled on more and more regulations and rigorously enforced them — a state of affairs he could not see lasting long. (61 / 60 words)
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