Birmingham button, which has passed through an hundred hands, and after all is not
worth three halfpence a dozen.” Speech, January 25, 1771. The illustration of “current
coin” is applied to personal popularity, Correspondence, i. 108. Molière, Bourgeois Gent.
Act i. sc. 2: “Ses louanges sont monnoyées—His praises are Current Coin.” Works,
French and English, viii. 15. Lord Brooke wished laws to be written in English, in order
to prove “coyns for traffick general.” Treat. of Monarchie, sect. vii. “The greatest part of
these opinions, like current coin in its circulation, we are used to take without weighing
or examining; but by this inevitable inattention, many adulterated pieces are received,
which, when we seriously estimate our wealth, we must throw away. So the collector of
popular opinions,” &c. Reynolds, Discourse vii. Cp. Goldsmith, Traveller:
Honour, that praise which real merit gains,
Or e’en imaginary worth obtains,
Here passes current; paid from hand to hand,
It shifts in splendid traffic round the land.
Bacon wished the existing systems of philosophy, which he was undermining, to be still
used as “current coin.” Nov. Org. I. Aph. 128.
L. 11. cant of “Not men but measures.” “I was always for Liberty and Property,
Sir,” says Bristle in the Craftsman’s Dialogue (No. 58, Aug. 12, 1727), “and am so still;
and that I thought was a Whiggish principle; but if the parties change sides, ’tis none of
my fault d’ye see. I shall always follow the Principles, whatever the Persons may be that
espouse them.” Brown, Thoughts on Civil Liberty, &c., p. 124. “As to my future conduct,
your Lordship will pardon me if I say, ‘Measures, and not men,’ will be the rule of it.”
Lord Shelburne to Lord Rockingham, refusing to join the administration, July 11, 1765;
Rockingham Memoirs, i. 235. “How vain, then, how idle, how presumptuous is the
opinion, that laws can do every thing! and how weak and pernicious the maxim founded
upon it, that measures, not men, are to be attended to!” Fox, Hist. of James II, ch. i;
cp. Canning’s Speech on the Army Estimate, December 8, 1802. “Away with the cant of
measures, not men—the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that
draw the chariot along. No, Sir; if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must
be taken; measures are comparatively nothing, men everything. I speak, Sir, of times
of difficulty and danger, of times when precedents and general rules of conduct fail.
Then it is that not to this or that measure, however prudently desired, however
blameless in execution, but to the energy and character of individuals a state must be
indebted for its salvation.” On the Whig maxim of “not measures but men,” see the
amusing discussion in Bentham’s Book of Fallacies, part iv. ch. 14. Goldsmith (1768)
puts the Court phrase into the mouth of Lofty in the “Good-natured Man”: “Measures,
not men, have always been my mark,” &c., Act ii.
L. 20. a gentleman with great visible emoluments. Most obviously applicable to
General Conway, the brother of Lord Hertford. He came in as one of the Secretaries
Pa
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