is hatred of the Americans was
complicated by his hatred of slave-owners. He anticipated Lincoln in
proposing the emancipation of the negroes as a military measure. His
uniform hatred for the slave trade scandalised poor Boswell, who held
that its abolition would be equivalent to 'shutting the gates of mercy
on mankind.' His language about the blundering tyranny of the English
rule in Ireland would satisfy Mr. Froude, though he would hardly have
loved a Home Ruler. He denounces the frequency of capital punishment and
the harshness of imprisonment for debt, and he invokes a compassionate
treatment of the outcasts of our streets as warmly as the more
sentimental Goldsmith. His conservatism may be at times obtuse, but it
is never of the cynical variety. He hates cruelty and injustice as
righteously as he hates anarchy. Indeed, Johnson's contempt for mouthing
agitators of the Wilkes and Junius variety is one which may be shared by
most thinkers who would not accept his principles. There is a vigorous
passage in the 'False Alarm' which is scarcely unjust to the patriots of
the day. He describes the mode in which petitions are generally got up.
They are sent from town to town, and the people flock to see what is to
be sent to the king. 'One man signs because he hates the Papists;
another because he has vowed destruction to the turnpikes; one because
it will vex the parson; another because he owes his landlord nothing;
one because he is rich; another because he is poor; one to show that he
is not afraid, and another to show that he can write.' The people, he
thinks, are as well off as they are likely to be under any form of
government; and grievances about general warrants or the rights of
juries in libel cases are not really felt so long as they have enough to
eat and drink and wear. The error, we may probably say, was less in the
contempt for a very shallow agitation than in the want of perception
that deeper causes of discontent were accumulating in the background.
Wilkes in himself was a worthless demagogue; but Wilkes was the straw
carried by the rising tide of revolutionary sentiment, to which Johnson
was entirely blind. Yet whatever we may think of his political
philosophy, the value of these solid sturdy prejudices is undeniable. To
the fact that Johnson was the typical representative of a large class of
Englishmen, we owe it that the Society of Rights did not develop into a
Jacobin Club. The fine phrases on which French