[No. 125. Tuesday, July 24, 1711. ADDISON.]
Ne pueri, ne tanta animis assuescite bella: Neu patriae validas in viscera vertite vires.
My worthy friend, Sir Roger, when we are talking of the malice of parties, very frequently tells us an accident that happened to him when he was a schoolboy, which was at a time when the feuds ran high between the Roundheads and Cavaliers. This worthy knight, being then but a stripling, (155: 5) had occasion to inquire which was the way to St. Anne's Lane; upon which the person whom he spoke to, instead of answering his question, called him a young popish cur, and asked him who had made Anne a saint! The boy, being in some confusion, inquired of the next he met, (10) which was the way to Anne's Lane; but was called a prick-eared cur for his pains, and instead of being shown the way, was told that she had been a saint before he was born, and would be one after he was hanged. "Upon this," says sir Roger, "I did not think fit to repeat the (15) former question, but going into every lane of the neighbourhood, asked what they called the name of that lane." By which ingenious artifice, he found out the place he inquired after without giving offence to any party. Sir Roger generally closes this narrative with reflections on the mischief that parties do in the country; how they spoil good neighbourhood, and make honest gentlemen hate one another; besides that they manifestly tend to the prejudice of the land-tax, and the destruction of the game. (156: 5)
There cannot a greater judgment befall a country than such a dreadful spirit of division as rends a government into two distinct people, and makes them greater strangers and more averse to one another than if they were actually two different nations. The effects of such a division (10) are pernicious to the last degree, not only with regard to those advantages which they give the common enemy, but to those private evils which they produce in the heart of almost every particular person. This influence is very fatal both to men's morals and their understandings; it (15) sinks the virtue of a nation, and not only so, but destroys even common sense.
A furious party spirit, when it rages in its full violence, exerts itself in civil war and bloodshed; and when it is under its greatest restraints naturally breaks out in false-hood, (20) detraction, calumny, and a partial administration of justice. In a word, it fills a nation with spleen and rancour, and extinguishes all the seeds of good-nature, compassion, and humanity.