BURKE

BY

JOHN MORLEY

London

MACMILLAN AND CO. , LIMITED

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1907

_Printed 1888. Reprinted 1892, 1897, 1902, 1907_

(_A Library Edition, of the book published in the "English Men ofLetters Series_)

NOTE

The present writer published a study on Burke some twenty years ago. It was almost entirely critical, and in no sense a narrative. Thevolume that is now submitted to my readers first appeared in theseries of _English Men of Letters_. It is biographical ratherthan critical, and not more than about a score of pages have beenreproduced in it from the earlier book. Three pages have been insertedfrom an article on Burke contributed by me to the new edition of the_Encyclopoedia Britannica_; and I have to thank Messrs. Black forthe great courtesy with which they have allowed me to transcribe thepassage here. These borrowings from my former self, the reader willperhaps be willing to excuse, on the old Greek principle that a manmay once say a thing as he would have it said, [Greek: dis de oukendechetai]--he can hardly say it twice. 

J. M. 

1888. 

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

EARLY LIFE AND FIRST WRITINGS

CHAPTER II

IN IRELAND--PARLIAMENT--BEACONSFIELD

CHAPTER III

THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE

CHAPTER IV

THE ROCKINGHAM PARTY--PARIS--ELECTION AT BRISTOL--THE AMERICAN WAR

CHAPTER V

ECONOMICAL REFORM--BURKE IN OFFICE--FALL OF HIS PARTY

CHAPTER VI

BURKE AND HIS FRIENDS

CHAPTER VII

THE NEW MINISTRY--WARREN HASTINGS--BURKE'S PUBLIC POSITION

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER IX

BURKE AND HIS PARTY--PROGRESS OF THE REVOLUTION--IRELAND--LAST YEARS

CHAPTER X

BURKE'S LITERARY CHARACTER

BURKE

CHAPTER I

EARLY LIFE, AND FIRST WRITINGS

It will soon be a hundred and twenty years since Burke first took hisseat, in the House of Commons, and it is eighty-five years since hisvoice ceased to be heard there. Since his death, as during his life, opinion as to the place to which he is entitled among the eminent menof his country has touched every extreme. Tories have extolled him asthe saviour of Europe. Whigs have detested him as the destroyer of hisparty. One undiscriminating panegyrist calls him the most profound andcomprehensive of political philosophers that has yet existed in theworld. Another and more distinguished writer insists that he is aresplendent and far-seeing rhetorician, rather than a deep and subtlethinker. A third tells us that his works cannot be too much our study, if we mean either to understand or to maintain against its variousenemies, open and concealed, designing and mistaken, the singularconstitution of this fortunate island. A fourth, on the contrary, declares that it would be hard to find a single leading principle orprevailing sentiment in one half of these works, to which somethingextremely adverse cannot be found in the other half. A fifth callshim one of the greatest men, and, Bacon alone excepted, the greatestthinker, who ever devoted himself to the practice of English politics. Yet, oddly enough, the author of the fifth verdict will have it thatthis great man and great thinker was actually out of his mind whenhe composed the pieces for which he has been most widely admired andrevered. 

A sufficient interval has now passed to allow all the sediment ofparty fanaticism to fall to the bottom. The circumstances of the worldhave since Burke's time undergone variation enough to enable usto judge, from many points of view, how far he was the splendidpamphleteer of a faction, and how far he was a contributor to theuniversal stock of enduring wisdom. Opinion is slowly, but withoutreaction, settling down to the verdict that Burke is one of theabiding names in our history, not because he either saved Europeor destroyed the Whig party; but because he added to the permanentconsiderations of wise political thought, and to the maxims of wisepractice in great affairs, and because he imprints himself upon uswith a magnificence and elevation of expression that places him amongthe highest masters of literature, in one of its highest and mostcommanding senses. Those who have acquired a love for abstractpolitics amid the almost mathematical closeness and precision ofHobbes, the philosophic calm of Locke or Mill, or even the majesticand solemn fervour of Milton, are revolted by the unrestrained passionand the decorated style of Burke. His passion appears hopelesslyfatal to success in the pursuit of Truth, who does not usually revealherself to followers thus inflamed. His ornate style appears fatal tothe cautious and precise method of statement, suitable to matter whichis not known at all unless it is known distinctly. Yet the naturalardour which impelled Burke to clothe his judgments in glowing andexaggerated phrases, is one secret of his power over us, becauseit kindles in those who are capable of that generous infection arespondent interest and sympathy. But more than this, the reader isspeedily conscious of the precedence in Burke of the facts of moralityand conduct, of the many interwoven affinities of human affection andhistorical relation, over the unreal necessities of mere abstractlogic. Burke's mind was full of the matter of great truths, copiouslyenriched from the fountains of generous and many-coloured feeling. Hethought about life as a whole, with all its infirmities and all itspomps. With none of the mental exclusiveness of the moralist byprofession, he fills every page with solemn reference and meaning;with none of the mechanical bustle of the common politician, heis everywhere conscious of the mastery of laws, institutions, andgovernment over the character and happiness of men. Besides thusdiffusing a strong light over the awful tides of human circumstance, Burke has the sacred gift of inspiring men to use a grave diligencein caring for high things, and in making their lives at once rich andaustere. Such a part in literature is indeed high. We feel no emotionof revolt when Mackintosh speaks of Shakespeare and Burke in the samebreath as being both of them above mere talent. And we do not dissentwhen Macaulay, after reading Burke's works over, again, exclaims, "Howadmirable! The greatest man since Milton. "

The precise date of Burke's birth cannot be stated with certainty. Allthat we can say is that it took place either in 1728 or 1729, and itis possible that we may set it down in one or the other year, as wechoose to reckon by the old or the new style. The best opinion is thathe was born at Dublin on the 12th of January 1729 (N. S. ) His fatherwas a solicitor in good practice, and is believed to have beendescended from some Bourkes of county Limerick, who held a respectablelocal position in the time of the civil wars. Burke's mother belongedto the Nagle family, which had a strong connection in the county ofCork; they had been among the last adherents of James II. , and theyremained firm Catholics. Mrs. Burke remained true to the Church of herancestors, and her only daughter was brought up in the same faith. Edmund Burke and his two brothers, Garret and Richard, were bred inthe religion of their father; but Burke never, in after times, lost alarge and generous way of thinking about the more ancient creed of hismother and his uncles. 

In 1741 he was sent to school at Ballitore, a village some thirtymiles away from Dublin, where Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker fromYorkshire, had established himself fifteen years before, and hadearned a wide reputation as a successful teacher and a good man. According to Burke, he richly deserved this high character. It was toAbraham Shackleton that he always professed to owe whatever gain hadcome to him from education. If I am anything, he said many yearsafterwards, it is the education I had there that has made me so. Hismaster's skill as a teacher did not impress him more than the examplewhich was every day set before him, of uprightness and simplicity ofheart. Thirty years later, when Burke had the news of Shackleton'sdeath (1771), "I had a true honour and affection, " he wrote, "for thatexcellent man. I feel something like a satisfaction in the midst of myconcern, that I was fortunate enough to have him once under my roofbefore his departure. " No man has ever had a deeper or more tenderreverence than Burke for homely goodness, simple purity, and all thepieties of life; it may well be that this natural predisposition ofall characters, at once so genial and so serious as his, was finallystamped in him by his first schoolmaster. It is true that he was onlytwo years at Ballitore, but two years at that plastic time often buildup habits in the mind that all the rest of a life is unable to pulldown. 

In 1743 Burke became a student of Trinity College, Dublin, and heremained there until 1748, when he took his Bachelor's degree. Thesefive years do not appear to have been spent in strenuous industry inthe beaten paths of academic routine. Like so many other men of greatgifts, Burke in his youth was desultory and excursive. He roamed atlarge over the varied heights that tempt our curiosity, as the dawn ofintelligence first lights them up one after another with bewitchingvisions and illusive magic. "All my studies, " Burke wrote in 1746, when he was in the midst of them, "have rather proceeded from salliesof passion, than from the preference of sound reason; and, like allother natural appetites, have been very violent for a season, andvery soon cooled, and quite absorbed in the succeeding. I have oftenthought it a humorous consideration to observe and sum up all themadness of this kind I have fallen into, this two years past. First, Iwas greatly taken with natural philosophy; which, while I should havegiven my mind to logic, employed me incessantly. This I call my _furormathematicus_. But this worked off as soon as I began to read it inthe college, as men by repletion cast off their stomachs all they haveeaten. Then I turned back to logic and metaphysics. Here I remained agood while, and with much pleasure, and this was my _furor logicus_, a disease very common in the days of ignorance, and very uncommon inthese enlightened times. Next succeeded the _furor historicus_, whichalso had its day, but is now no more, being entirely absorbed in the_furor poeticus_. "

This is from one of Burke's letters to Richard Shackleton, the sonof his schoolmaster, with whom he had formed one of those closefriendships that fill the life of generous youth, as ambition fills anenergetic manhood. Many tears were shed when the two boys parted atBallitore, and they kept up their intimacy by a steady correspondence. They discuss the everlasting dispute as to the ultimate fate of thosewho never heard the saving name of Christ. They send one anothercopies of verses, and Burke prays for Shackleton's judgment on aninvocation of his new poem, to beauteous nymphs who haunt the duskywood, which hangs recumbent o'er the crystal flood. Burke is warned byShackleton to endeavour to live according to the rules of the Gospel, and he humbly accepts the good advice, with the deprecatory pleathat in a town it is difficult to sit down to think seriously. It iseasier, he says, to follow the rules of the Gospel in the country thanat Trinity College, Dublin. In the region of profaner things thetwo friends canvass the comparative worth of Sallust and of Tully'sEpistles. Burke holds for the historian, who has, he thinks, afine, easy, diversified narrative, mixed with reflection, moral andpolitical, neither very trite nor obvious, nor out of the way andabstract; and this is the true beauty of historical observation. 

Some pages of verse describe to Shackleton how his friend passes theday, but the reader will perhaps be content to learn in humbler prosethat Burke rose with the dawn, and strode forth into the countrythrough fragrant gardens and the pride of May, until want of breakfastdrove him back unwillingly to the town, where amid lectures andbooks his heart incessantly turned to the river and the fir-woods ofBallitore. In the evening he again turned his back on the city, takinghis way "where Liffey rolls her dead dogs to the sea, " along to thewall on the shore, whence be delighted to see the sun sink into thewaters, gilding ocean, ships, and city as it vanished. Alas, it wasbeneath the dignity of verse to tell us what we should most gladlyhave known. For, "The muse nor can, nor will declare, What is my work, and what my studies there. "

What serious nourishment Burke was laying in for his understanding wecannot learn from any other source. He describes himself as spendingthree hours almost every day in the public library; "the best way inthe world, " he adds oddly enough, "of killing thought. " I have readsome history, he says, and among other pieces of history, "I amendeavouring to get a little into the accounts of this, our own poorcountry, "--a pathetic expression, which represents Burke's perpetualmood, as long as he lived, of affectionate pity for his native land. Of the eminent Irishmen whose names adorn the annals of TrinityCollege in the eighteenth century, Burke was only contemporary at theUniversity with one, the luckless sizar who in the fulness of timewrote the _Vicar of Wakefield_. There is no evidence that at this timehe and Goldsmith were acquainted with one another. Flood had gone toOxford some time before. The one or two companions whom Burke mentionsin his letters are only shadows of names. The mighty Swift died in1745, but there is nothing of Burke's upon the event. In the same yearcame the Pretender's invasion, and Burke spoke of those who had takenpart in it in the same generous spirit that he always showed to thepartisans of lost historic causes. 

Of his own family Burke says little, save that in 1746 his mother hada dangerous illness. In all my life, he writes to his friend, I neverfound so heavy a grief, nor really did I well know what it was before. Burke's father is said to have been a man of angry and irritabletemper, and their disagreements were frequent. This unhappycircumstance made the time for parting not unwelcome. In 1747 Burke'sname had been entered at the Middle Temple, and after taking hisdegree, he prepared to go to England to pursue the ordinary course ofa lawyer's studies. He arrived in London in the early part of 1750. 

A period of nine years followed, in which the circumstances of Burke'slife are enveloped in nearly complete obscurity. He seems to have kepthis terms in the regular way at the Temple, and from the masteryof legal principles and methods which he afterwards showed in someimportant transactions, we might infer that he did more to qualifyhimself for practice than merely dine in the hall of his inn. For law, alike as a profession and an instrument of mental discipline, he hadalways the profound respect that it so amply deserves, though he sawthat it was not without drawbacks of its own. The law, he said, inhis fine description of George Grenville, in words that all who thinkabout schemes of education ought to ponder, "is, in my opinion, one ofthe first and noblest of human sciences; _a science which does more toquicken and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds oflearning put together_; but it is not apt, except in persons veryhappily born, to open and to liberalise the mind exactly in thesame proportion. "[1] Burke was never called to the bar, and thecircumstance that, about the time when he ought to have been lookingfor his first guinea, he published a couple of books which had aslittle as possible to do with either law or equity, is a tolerablysure sign that he had followed the same desultory courses at theTemple as he had followed at Trinity College. We have only to tellover again a very old story. The vague attractions of literatureprevailed over the duty of taking up a serious profession. His father, who had set his heart on having a son in the rank of a barrister, wasfirst suspicious, then extremely indignant, and at last he withdrewhis son's allowance, or else reduced it so low that the recipientcould not possibly live upon it. This catastrophe took place some timein 1755, --a year of note in the history of literature, as the date ofthe publication of Johnson's _Dictionary_. It was upon literature, themost seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions, that Burke, like so many hundreds of smaller men before and since, nowthrew himself for a livelihood. 

[Footnote 1: _American Taxation_. ]

Of the details of the struggle we know very little. Burke was not fondin after life of talking about his earlier days, not because hehad any false shame about the straits and hard shifts of youthfulneediness, but because he was endowed with a certain inbornstateliness of nature, which made him unwilling to waste thoughts onthe less dignified parts of life. This is no unqualified virtue, andBurke might have escaped some wearisome frets and embarrassments inhis existence, if he had been capable of letting the detail of the daylie more heavily upon him. So far as it goes, however, it is a sign ofmental health that a man should be able to cast behind him the barrenmemories of bygone squalor. We may be sure that whatever were theexternal ordeals of his apprenticeship in the slippery craft of theliterary adventurer, Burke never failed in keeping for his constantcompanions generous ambitions and high thoughts. He appears to havefrequented the debating clubs in Fleet Street and the Piazza of CoventGarden, and he showed the common taste of his time for the theatre. He was much of a wanderer, partly from the natural desire of restlessyouth to see the world, and partly because his health was weak. Inafter life he was a man of great strength, capable not only of bearingthe strain of prolonged application to books and papers in thesolitude of his library, but of bearing it at the same time with thedistracting combination of active business among men. At the date ofwhich we are speaking, he used to seek a milder air at Bristol, or inMonmouthshire, or Wiltshire. He passed the summer in retired countryvillages, reading and writing with desultory industry, in companywith William Burke, a namesake but perhaps no kinsman. It wouldbe interesting to know the plan and scope of his studies. We arepractically reduced to conjecture. In a letter of counsel to his sonin after years, he gave him a weighty piece of advice, which, ispretty plainly the key to the reality and fruitfulness of his ownknowledge. "_Reading_, " he said, "_and much reading, is good. But thepower of diversifying the matter infinitely in your own mind, and ofapplying it to every occasion that arises, is far better; so don'tsuppress the_ vivida vis. " We have no more of Burke's doings thanobscure and tantalising glimpses, tantalising, because he was then atthe age when character usually either fritters itself away, or growsstrong on the inward sustenance of solid and resolute aspirations. Writing from Battersea to his old comrade, Shackleton, in 1757, he begins with an apology for a long silence which seems to havecontinued from months to years. "I have broken all rules; I haveneglected all decorums; everything except that I have never forgot afriend, whose good head and heart have made me esteem and love him. What appearance there may have been of neglect, arises from mymanner of life; chequered with various designs; sometimes in London, sometimes in remote parts of the country; sometimes in France, andshortly, please God, to be in America. "

One of the hundred inscrutable rumours that hovered about Burke's namewas, that he at one time actually did visit America. This was just asuntrue as that he became a convert to the Catholic faith; or that hewas the lover of Peg Woffington; or that he contested Adam Smith'schair of moral philosophy at Glasgow along with Hume, and that bothBurke and Hume were rejected in favour of some fortunate Mr. JamesClow. They are all alike unfounded. But the same letter informsShackleton of a circumstance more real and more important than anyof these, though its details are only doubtfully known. Burke hadmarried--when and where, we cannot tell. Probably the marriage tookplace in the winter of 1756. His wife was the daughter of Dr. Nugent, an Irish physician once settled at Bath. One story is that Burkeconsulted him in one of his visits to the west of England, and fell inlove with his daughter. Another version makes Burke consult him afterDr. Nugent had removed to London; and tells how the kindly physician, considering that the noise and bustle of chambers over a shop musthinder his patient's recovery, offered him rooms in his own house. However these things may have been, all the evidence shows Burke tohave been fortunate in the choice or accident that bestowed upon himhis wife. Mrs. Burke, like her father, was, up to the time of hermarriage, a Catholic. Good judges belonging to her own sex describeher as gentle, quiet, soft in her manners, and well-bred. She had thequalities which best fitted and disposed her to soothe the vehemenceand irritability of her companion. Though she afterwards conformed tothe religion of her husband, it was no insignificant coincidencethat in two of the dearest relations of his life the atmosphere ofCatholicism was thus poured round the great preacher of the crusadeagainst the Revolution. 

About the time of his marriage, Burke made his first appearance as anauthor. It was in 1756 that he published _A Vindication of NaturalSociety_, and the more important essay, _A Philosophical Inquiry intothe Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful_. The latter ofthem had certainly been written a long time before, and there is evena traditional story that Burke wrote it when he was only nineteenyears old. Both of these performances have in different degrees ahistoric meaning, but neither of them would have survived to our ownday unless they had been associated with a name of power. A fewwords will suffice to do justice to them here. And first as to the_Vindication of Natural Society_. Its alternative title was, _A Viewof the Miseries and Evils arising to Mankind from every Species ofCivil Society, in a Letter to Lord ----, by a late Noble Writer_. 

Bolingbroke had died in 1751, and in 1754 his philosophical workswere posthumously given to the world by David Mallet, Dr. Johnson'sbeggarly Scotchman, to whom Bolingbroke had left half-a-crown in hiswill, for firing off a blunderbuss which he was afraid to fireoff himself. The world of letters had been keenly excited aboutBolingbroke. His busy and chequered career, his friendship with thegreat wits of the previous generation, his splendid style, his boldopinions, made him a dazzling figure. This was the late Noble Writerwhose opinions Burke intended to ridicule, by reducing them to anabsurdity in an exaggeration of Bolingbroke's own manner. As ithappened, the public did not readily perceive either the exaggerationin the manner, or the satire in the matter. Excellent judges of stylemade sure that the writing was really Bolingbroke's, and seriouscritics of philosophy never doubted that the writer, whoever he was, meant all that he said. We can hardly help agreeing with Godwin, whenhe says that in Burke's treatise the evils of existing politicalinstitutions, which had been described by Locke, are set forth more atlarge, with incomparable force of reasoning and lustre of eloquence, though the declared intention of the writer was to show that suchevils ought to be considered merely trivial. Years afterwards, Boswellasked Johnson whether an imprudent publication by a certain friend ofhis at an early period of his life would be likely to hurt him? "No, sir, " replied the sage; "not much; it might perhaps be mentioned at anelection. " It is significant that in 1765, when Burke saw his chanceof a seat in Parliament, he thought it worth while to print a secondedition of his _Vindication_, with a preface to assure his readersthat the design of it was ironical. It has been remarked as a veryextraordinary circumstance that an author who had the greatest fameof any man of his day as the master of a superb style, for this wasindeed Bolingbroke's position, should have been imitated to suchperfection by a mere novice, that accomplished critics likeChesterfield and Warburton should have mistaken the copy for afirstrate original. It is, however, to be remembered that the veryboldness and sweeping rapidity of Bolingbroke's prose rendered it morefit for imitation than if its merits had been those of delicacy orsubtlety; and we must remember that the imitator was no pigmy, buthimself one of the giants. What is certain is that the study ofBolingbroke which preceded this excellent imitation left a permanentmark, and traces of Bolingbroke were never effaced from the style ofBurke. 

The point of the _Vindication_ is simple enough. It is to show thatthe same instruments which Bolingbroke had employed in favour ofnatural against revealed religion, could be employed with equalsuccess in favour of natural as against, what Burke calls, artificialsociety. "Show me, " cries the writer, "an absurdity in religion, andI will undertake to show you a hundred for one in political laws andinstitutions. . . . If, after all, you should confess all these things, yet plead the necessity of political institutions, weak and wicked asthey are, I can argue with equal, perhaps superior force, concerningthe necessity of artificial religion; and every step you advance inyour argument, you add a strength to mine. So that if we are resolvedto submit our reason and our liberty to civil usurpation, we havenothing to do but to conform as quietly as we can to the vulgarnotions which are connected with this, and take up the theology ofthe vulgar as well as their politics. But if we think this necessityrather imaginary than real, we should renounce their dreams ofsociety, together with their visions of religion, and vindicateourselves into perfect liberty. "

The most interesting fact about this spirited performance is, that itis a satirical literary handling of the great proposition which Burkeenforced, with all the thunder and lurid effulgence of his mostpassionate rhetoric, five and thirty years later. This proposition isthat the world would fall into ruin, "if the practice of all moralduties, and the foundations of society, rested upon having theirreasons made clear and demonstrative to every individual. " The satireis intended for an illustration of what with Burke was the cardinaltruth for men, namely, that if you encourage every individual to letthe imagination loose upon all subjects, without any restraint from asense of his own weakness, and his subordinate rank in the long schemeof things, then there is nothing of all that the opinion of ageshas agreed to regard as excellent and venerable, which would not beexposed to destruction at the hands of rationalistic criticism. Thiswas Burke's most fundamental and unswerving conviction from the firstpiece that he wrote down to the last, and down to the last hour of hisexistence. 

It is a coincidence worth noticing that only two years before theappearance of the _Vindication_, Rousseau had published the secondof the two memorable Discourses in which he insisted with seriouseloquence on that which Burke treats as a triumph of irony. Hebelieved, and many thousands of Frenchmen came to a speculativeagreement with him, that artificial society had marked a decline inthe felicity of man, and there are passages in the Discourse in whichhe demonstrates this, that are easily interchangeable with passagesin the _Vindication_. Who would undertake to tell us from internalevidence whether the following page, with its sombre glow, is anextract from Burke, or an extract from the book which Rousseau beginsby the sentence that man is born free, yet is he everywhere inchains?--

 There are in Great Britain upwards of a hundred thousand people employed in lead, tin, iron, copper, and coal mines; these unhappy wretches scarce ever see the light of the sun; they are buried in the bowels of the earth; there they work at a severe and dismal task, without the least prospect of being delivered from it; they subsist upon the coarsest and worst sort of fare; they have their health miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being perpetually confined in the close vapour of these malignant minerals. A hundred thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery, necessary in refining and managing the products of those mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy sufferers, and how great would be our just indignation against those who inflicted so cruel and ignominious a punishment!. . . But this number, considerable as it is, and the slavery, with all its baseness and horror, which we have at home, is nothing to what the rest of the world affords of the same nature. Millions daily bathed in the poisonous damps and destructive effluvia of lead, silver, copper, and arsenic, to say nothing of those other employments, those stations of wretchedness and contempt, in which civil society has placed the numerous _enfans perdus_ of her army. Would any rational man submit to one of the most tolerable of these drudgeries, for all the artificial enjoyments which policy has made to result from them?. . . Indeed the blindness of one part of mankind co-operating with the frenzy and villainy of the other, has been the real builder of this respectable fabric of political society: and as the blindness of mankind has caused their slavery, in return their state of slavery is made a pretence for continuing them in a state of blindness; for the politician will tell you gravely that their life of servitude disqualifies the greater part of the race of man for a search of truth, and supplies them with no other than mean and insufficient ideas. This is but too true; and this is one of the reasons for which I blame such institutions. 

From the very beginning, therefore, Burke was drawn to the deepest ofall the currents in the thought of the eighteenth century. Johnson andGoldsmith continued the traditions of social and polite literaturewhich had been established by the Queen Anne men. Warburton and awhole host of apologists carried on the battle against deism andinfidelity. Hume, after furnishing the arsenal of scepticism witha new array of deadlier engines and more abundant ammunition, hadbetaken himself placidly to the composition of history. What isremarkable in Burke's first performance is his discernment of theimportant fact, that behind the intellectual disturbances in thesphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere oftheology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the wholefabric of civil society itself. In France, as all students of itsspeculative history are agreed, there came a time in the eighteenthcentury when theological controversy was turned into politicalcontroversy. Innovators left the question about the truth ofChristianity, and busied themselves with questions about the endsand means of governments. The appearance of Burke's _Vindicationof Natural Society_ coincides in time with the beginning of thisimportant transformation. Burke foresaw from the first what, ifrationalism were allowed to run an unimpeded course, would be thereally great business of the second halt of his century. 

If in his first book Burke showed how alive he was to the profoundmovement of the time, in the second he dealt with one of the mostserious of its more superficial interests. The essay on the Sublimeand Beautiful fell in with a set of topics on which the curiosity ofthe better minds of the age, alike in France, England, and Germany, was fully stirred. In England the essay has been ordinarily slighted;it has perhaps been overshadowed by its author's fame in weightiermatters. The nearest approach to a full and serious treatment of itsmain positions is to be found in Dugald Stewart's lectures. Thegreat rhetorical art-critic of our own day refers to it in words ofdisparagement, and in truth it has none of the flummery of moderncriticism. It is a piece of hard thinking, and it has the distinctionof having interested and stimulated Lessing, the author of _Laoköon_(1766), by far the most definitely valuable of all the contributionsto aesthetic thought in an age which was not poor in them. Lessing wasso struck with the _Inquiry_ that he set about a translation of it, and the correspondence between him and Moses Mendelssohn on thequestions which Burke had raised contains the germs of the doctrine asto poetry and painting which _Laoköon_ afterwards made so famous. Itsinfluence on Lessing and on Kant was such as to justify the Germanhistorian of the literature of the century in bestowing on it thecoveted epithet of epoch-making. 

The book is full of crudities. We feel the worse side of theeighteenth century when Burke tells us that a thirst for Variety inarchitecture is sure to leave very little true taste; or that an airof robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty; or that sadfuscous colours are indispensable for sublimity. Many of the sections, again, are little more than expanded definitions from the dictionary. Any tyro may now be shocked at such a proposition as that beauty actsby relaxing the solids of the whole system. But at least one signalmerit remains to the _Inquiry_. It was a vigorous enlargement of theprinciple, which Addison had not long before timidly illustrated, thatcritics of art seek its principles in the wrong place, so long asthey limit their search to poems, pictures, engravings, statues, andbuildings, instead of first arranging the sentiments and faculties inman to which art makes its appeal. Addison's treatment was slight andmerely literary; Burke dealt boldly with his subject on the base ofthe most scientific psychology that was then within his reach. Toapproach it on the psychological side at all was to make a distinctand remarkable advance in the method of the inquiry which he had takenin hand. 

CHAPTER II

IN IRELAND--PARLIAMENT--BEACONSFIELD

Burke was thirty years old before he approached even the threshold ofthe arena in which he was destined to be so great a figure. He hadmade a mark in literature, and it was to literature rather than topublic affairs that his ambition turned. He had naturally becomeacquainted with the brother-authors who haunted the coffee-houses inFleet Street; and Burke, along with his father-in-law, Dr. Nugent, was one of the first members of the immortal club where Johnson didconversational battle with all comers. We shall, in a later chapter, have something to say on Burke's friendships with the followers ofhis first profession, and on the active sympathy with which he helpedthose who were struggling into authorship. Meanwhile, the fragmentsthat remain of his own attempts in this direction are no considerablecontributions. His _Hints for an Essay on the Drama_ are jejune andinfertile, when compared with the vigorous and original thought ofDiderot and Lessing at about the same period. He wrote an Account ofthe European Settlements in America. His _Abridgment of the History ofEngland_ comes down no further than to the reign of John. A much moreimportant undertaking than his history of the past was his design fora yearly chronicle of the present. The _Annual Register_ began toappear in 1759. Dodsley, the bookseller of Pall Mall, provided thesinews of war, and he gave Burke a hundred pounds a year for hissurvey of the great events which were then passing in the world. Thescheme was probably born of the circumstances of the hour, for thiswas the climax of the Seven Years' War. The clang of arms was heard inevery quarter of the globe, and in East and West new lands were beingbrought under the dominion of Great Britain. 

In this exciting crisis of national affairs, Burke began to beacquainted with public men. In 1759 he was introduced, probably byLord Charlemont, to William Gerard Hamilton, who only survives in ourmemories by his nickname of Single-speech. As a matter of fact, hemade many speeches in Parliament, and some good ones, but none sogood as the first, delivered in a debate in 1755, in which Pitt, Fox, Grenville, and Murray all took part, and were all outshone by thenew luminary. But the new luminary never shone again with its firstbrilliance. He sought Burke out on the strength of the success of the_Vindication of Natural Society_, and he seems to have had a taste forgood company. Horace Walpole describes a dinner at his house in thesummer of 1761. "There were Garrick, " he says, "and a young Mr. Burke, who wrote a book in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, that is muchadmired. He is a sensible man, but has not worn off his authorism yet, and thinks there is nothing so charming as writers, and to be one. Hewill know better one of these days. " The prophecy came true in time, but it was Burke's passion for authorism that eventually led to arupture with his first patron. Hamilton was a man of ability, butselfish and unreasonable. Dr. Leland afterwards described himcompendiously as a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, canker-hearted, envious reptile. 

In 1761 Hamilton went to Ireland as secretary to Lord Halifax, andBurke accompanied him in some indefinite capacity. "The absenteeism ofher men of genius, " an eminent historian has said, "was a worse wrongto Ireland than the absenteeism of her landlords. If Edmund Burke hadremained in the country where Providence had placed him, he might havechanged the current of its history. " [1] It is at least to be saidthat Burke was never so absorbed in other affairs as to forget thepeculiar interests of his native land. We have his own word, and hiscareer does not belie it, that in the elation with which he was filledon being elected a member of Parliament, what was first and uppermostin his thoughts was the hope of being somewhat useful to the place ofhis birth and education; and to the last he had in it "a dearness ofinstinct more than he could justify to reason. " In fact the affairsof Ireland had a most important part in Burke's life at one or twocritical moments, and this is as convenient a place as we are likelyto find for describing in a few words what were the issues. The briefspace can hardly be grudged in an account of a great political writer, for Ireland had furnished the chief ordeal, test, and standard ofEnglish statesmen. 

[Footnote 1: Fronde's _Ireland_, ii. 214. ]

Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century was to England justwhat the American colonies would have been, if they had contained, besides the European settlers, more than twice their number ofunenslaved negroes. After the suppression of the great rebellion ofTyrconnel by William of Orange, nearly the whole of the land wasconfiscated, the peasants were made beggars and outlaws, the PenalLaws against the Catholics were enacted and enforced, and thegrand reign of Protestant Ascendancy began in all its vileness andcompleteness. The Protestants and landlords were supreme; the peasantsand the Catholics were prostrate in despair. The Revolution broughtabout in Ireland just the reverse of what it effected in England. Hereit delivered the body of the nation from the attempted supremacy of asmall sect. There it made a small sect supreme over the body of thenation. "It was, to say the truth, " Burke wrote, "not a revolution buta conquest, " and the policy of conquest was treated as the just andnormal system of government. The last conquest of England was in theeleventh century. The last conquest of Ireland was at the very end ofthe seventeenth. 

Sixty years after the event, when Burke revisited Ireland, someimportant changes had taken place. The English settlers of thebeginning of the century had formed an Irish interest. They had becomeAnglo-Irish, just as the colonists still further west had formed acolonial interest and become Anglo-American. The same conduct onthe part of the mother country promoted the growth of these hostileinterests in both cases. The commercial policy pursued by Englandtowards America was identical with that pursued towards Ireland. Theindustry of the Anglo-Irish traders was restricted, their commerceand even their production fettered, their prosperity checked, for thebenefit of the merchants of Manchester and Bristol. _Crescit RomaAlbae ruinis_. "The bulk of the people, " said Stone, the Primate, "arenot regularly either lodged, clothed, or fed; and those things whichin England are called necessaries of life, are to us only accidents, and we can, and in many places do, subsist without them. " On theother hand, the peasantry had gradually taken heart to resent theirspoliation and attempted extirpation, and in 1761 their miseryunder the exactions of landlords and a church which tried to spreadChristianity by the brotherly agency of the tithe-proctor, gave birthto Whiteboyism--a terrible spectre, which, under various names andwith various modifications, has ridden Ireland down to our own time. 

Burke saw the Protestant traders of the dependency the victims ofthe colonial and commercial system; the Catholic landowners legallydispossessed by the operation of the penal laws; the Catholicpeasantry deeply penetrated with an insurgent and vindictive spirit;and the Imperial Government standing very much aloof, and leaving thecountry to the tender mercies of the Undertakers and some Protestantchurchmen. The Anglo-Irish were bitterly discontented with themother country; and the Catholic native Irish were regarded by theirProtestant oppressors with exactly that combination of intensecontempt and loathing, and intense rage and terror, which theirAmerican counterpart would have divided between the Negro and the RedIndian. To the Anglo-Irish the native peasant was as odious as thefirst, and as terrible as the second. Even at the close of the centuryBurke could declare that the various descriptions of the people werekept as much apart as if they were not only separate nations, butseparate species. There were thousands, he says, who had never talkedto a Roman Catholic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talkto a gardener's workman or some other labourer of the second or thirdorder; while a little time before this they were so averse to havethem near their persons, that they would not employ even those whocould never find their way beyond the stables. Chesterfield, athoroughly impartial and just observer, said in 1764 that the poorpeople in Ireland were used worse than negroes by their masters andthe middlemen. We should never forget that in the transactions withthe English Government during the eighteenth century, the peopleconcerned were not the Irish, but the Anglo-Irish, the colonistsof 1691. They were an aristocracy, as Adam Smith said of them, notfounded in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth andfortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those ofreligious and political prejudices--distinctions which, more than anyother, animate both the insolence of the oppressors and the hatred andindignation of the oppressed. 

The directions in which Irish improvement would move were clear fromthe middle of the century to men with much less foresight thanBurke had. The removal of all commercial restrictions, either byIndependence or Union, on the one hand, and the gradual emancipationof the Catholics, on the other, were the two processes to which everyconsideration of good government manifestly pointed. The first proveda much shorter and simpler process than the second. To the firstthe only obstacle was the blindness and selfishness of the Englishmerchants. The second had to overcome the virulent opposition of thetyrannical Protestant faction in Ireland, and the disgraceful butdeep-rooted antipathies of the English nation. The history of therelation between the mother country and her dependency during Brake'slife, may be characterised as a commercial and legislative strugglebetween the imperial government and the Anglo-Irish interest, in whicheach side for its own convenience, as the turn served, drew supportfrom the Catholic majority. 

A Whiteboy outbreak, attended by the usual circumstances of disorderand violence, took place while Burke was in Ireland. It suited theinterests of faction to represent these commotions as the symptoms ofa deliberate rebellion. The malcontents were represented as carryingon treasonable correspondence, sometimes with Spain and sometimeswith France; they were accused of receiving money and arms from theirforeign sympathisers, and of aiming at throwing off the English rule. Burke says that he had means and the desire of informing himself tothe bottom upon the matter, and he came strongly to the conclusionthat this was not a true view of what had happened. What had happenedwas due, he thought, to no plot, but to superficial and fortuitouscircumstances. He consequently did not shrink from describing it ascriminal, that the king's Catholic subjects in Ireland should havebeen subjected, on no good grounds, to harassing persecution, and thatnumbers of them should have been ruined in fortune, imprisoned, tried, and capitally executed for a rebellion which was no rebellion at all. The episode is only important as illustrating the strong and manlytemper in which Burke, unlike too many of his countrymen with fortunesto make by English favour, uniformly considered the circumstances ofhis country. It was not until a later time that he had an opportunityof acting conspicuously on her behalf, but whatever influence he cameto acquire with his party was unflinchingly used against the crueltyof English prejudice. 

Burke appears to have remained in Ireland for two years (1761-63). In1763 Hamilton, who had found him an invaluable auxiliary, procured forhim, principally with the aid of the Primate Stone, a pension of threehundred pounds a year from the Irish Treasury. In thanking him forthis service, Burke proceeded to bargain that the obligation shouldnot bind him to give to his patron the whole of his time. He insistedon being left with a discreet liberty to continue a little work whichhe had as a rent-charge upon his thoughts. Whatever advantages he hadacquired, he says, had been due to literary reputation, and he couldonly hope for a continuance of such advantages on condition of doingsomething to keep the same reputation alive. What this literary designwas, we do not know with certainty. It is believed to have been ahistory of England, of which, as I have said, a fragment remains. Whatever the work may have been, it was an offence to Hamilton. Withan irrational stubbornness, that may well astound us when we think ofthe noble genius that he thus wished to confine to paltry personalduties, he persisted that Burke should bind himself to his service forlife, and to the exclusion of other interests. "To circumscribe myhopes, " cried Burke, "to give up even the possibility of liberty, toannihilate myself for ever!" He threw up the pension, which he hadheld for two years, and declined all further connection with Hamilton, whom he roundly described as an infamous scoundrel. "Six of thebest years of my life he took me from every pursuit of my literaryreputation, or of improvement of my fortune. . . . In all this time youmay easily conceive how much I felt at seeing myself left behindby almost all of my contemporaries. There never was a season morefavourable for any man who chose to enter into the career of publiclife; and I think I am not guilty of ostentation in supposing my ownmoral character and my industry, my friends and connections, when Mr. Hamilton first sought my acquaintance, were not at all inferior tothose of several whose fortune is at this day upon a very differentfooting from mine. "

It was not long before a more important opening offered itself, whichspeedily brought Burke into the main stream of public life. In thesummer of 1765 a change of ministry took place. It was the third sincethe king's accession five years ago. First, Pitt had been disgraced, and the old Duke of Newcastle dismissed. Then Bute came into power, but Bute quailed before the storm of calumny and hate which his Scotchnationality, and the supposed source of his power over the king, hadraised in every town in England. After Lord Bute, George Grenvilleundertook the Government. Before he had been many months in office, he had sown the seeds of war in the colonies, wearied Parliament, and disgusted the king. In June 1765 Grenville was dismissed. Withprofound reluctance the king had no other choice than to summon LordRockingham, and Lord Rockingham, in a happy moment for himself and hisparty, was induced to offer Burke a post as his private secretary. A government by country gentlemen is too apt to be a government ofignorance, and Lord Rockingham was without either experience orknowledge. He felt, or friends felt for him, the advantage of havingat his side a man who was chiefly known as an author in the serviceof Dodsley, and as having conducted the _Annual Register_ with greatability, but who even then was widely spoken of as nothing less thanan encyclopaedia of political knowledge. 

It is commonly believed that Burke was commended to Lord Rockingham byWilliam Fitzherbert. Fitzherbert was President of the Board of Tradein the new government, but he is more likely to be remembered as Dr. Johnson's famous example of the truth of the observation, that aman will please more upon the whole by negative qualities than bypositive, because he was the most acceptable man in London, and yetoverpowered nobody by the superiority of his talents, made no manthink worse of himself by being his rival, seemed always to listen, did not oblige you to hear much from him, and did not oppose whatyou said. Besides Fitzherbert's influence, we have it on Burke's ownauthority that his promotion was partly due to that mysterious person, William Burke, who was at the same time appointed an under-secretaryof state. There must have been unpleasant rumours afloat as to theBurke connection, and we shall presently consider what they wereworth. Meanwhile, it is enough to say that the old Duke of Newcastlehurried to the new premier, and told him the appointment would neverdo; that the new secretary was not only an Irish adventurer, which wastrue, but that he was an Irish papist, which was not true; that he wasa Jesuit, that he was a spy from Saint Omer's, and that his real namewas O'Bourke. Lord Rockingham behaved like a man of sense and honour, sent for Burke, and repeated to him what he had heard. Burke warmlydenounced the truthlessness of the Duke's tattle. He insisted thatthe reports which his chief had heard would probably, even unknown tohimself, create in his mind such suspicions as would stand in the wayof a thorough confidence. No earthly consideration, he said, shouldinduce him to continue in relations with a man whose trust in him wasnot entire; and he pressed his resignation. To this Lord Rockinghamwould not consent, and from that time until his death, seventeenyears afterwards, the relations between them were those of loyal andhonourable service on the one hand, and generous and appreciativefriendship on the other. Six and twenty years afterwards (1791) Burkeremembered the month in which he had first become connected with aman whose memory, he said, will ever be precious to Englishmen ofall parties, as long as the ideas of honour and virtue, public andprivate, are understood and cherished in this nation. 

The Rockingham ministry remained in office for a year and twenty days(1765-66). About the middle of this term (December 26, 1765) Burke wasreturned to Parliament for the borough of Wendover, by the influenceof Lord Verney, who owned it, and who also returned William Burke foranother borough. Lord Verney was an Irish peer, with large property inBuckinghamshire; he now represented that county in Parliament. Itwas William Burke's influence with Lord Verney that procured for hisnamesake the seat at Wendover. Burke made his first speech in theHouse of Commons a few days after the opening of the session of 1766(January 27), and was honoured by a compliment from Pitt, still theGreat Commoner. A week later he spoke again on the same momentoustheme, the complaints of the American colonists, and his success wasso marked that good judges predicted, in the stiff phraseology of thetime, that he would soon add the palm of the orator to the laurel ofthe writer and the philosopher. The friendly Dr. Johnson wrote toLangton that Burke had gained more reputation than any man at hisfirst appearance had ever gained before. The session was a greattriumph to the new member, but it brought neither strength norpopularity to the administration. At the end of it the king dismissedthem, and the Chatham Government was formed--that strange combinationwhich has been made famous by Burke's description of it as a piece ofjoinery so crossly indented and whimsically dovetailed, such a pieceof diversified mosaic, such a tessellated pavement without cement, that it was indeed a very curious show, but utterly unsafe to touchand unsure to stand upon. There was no obvious reason why Burke shouldnot have joined the new ministry. The change was at first one ofpersons rather than of principles or of measures. To put himself, asBurke afterwards said, out of the way of the negotiations which werethen being carried on very eagerly and through many channels with theEarl of Chatham, he went to Ireland very soon after the change ofministry. He was free from party engagements, and more than this, hewas free at the express desire of his friends; for on the very day ofhis return the Marquis of Rockingham wished him to accept office underthe new system. Burke "believes he might have had such a situation, but he cheerfully took his fate with his party. " In a short time herendered his party the first of a long series of splendid literaryservices by writing his _Observations on the Present State of theNation_ (1769). It was a reply to a pamphlet by George Grenville, inwhich the disappointed minister accused his successors of ruining thecountry. Burke, in answering the charge, showed a grasp of commercialand fiscal details at least equal to that of Grenville himself, thenconsidered the first man of his time in dealing with the nationaltrade and resources. To this easy mastery of the special facts of thediscussion, Burke added the far rarer art of lighting them up by broadprinciples, and placing himself and his readers at the highest andmost effective point of view for commanding their general bearings. 

If Burke had been the Irish adventurer that his enemies described, hemight well have seized with impatience the opening to office that therecent exhibition of his powers in the House of Commons had now madeaccessible to him. There was not a man in Great Britain to whom theemoluments of office would have been more useful. It is one of thestanding mysteries in literary biography how Burke could think ofentering Parliament without any means that anybody can now trace ofearning a fitting livelihood. Yet at this time Burke, whom we saw notlong ago writing for the booksellers, had become affluent enough topay a yearly allowance to Barry, the painter, in order to enable himto study the pictures in the great European galleries, and to make aprolonged residence at Rome. A little later he took a step whichmakes the riddle still more difficult, and which has given abundantemployment to wits who are _maximi in minimis_, and think that everyquestion which they can ask, yet to which history has thought it worthwhile to leave no answer, is somehow a triumph of their own learningand dialectic. 

In 1769 Burke purchased a house and lands known as Gregories, in theparishes of Penn and Beaconsfield, in the county of Bucks. It hasoften been asked, and naturally enough, how a man who, hardly morethan a few months before, was still contented to earn an extra hundredpounds a year by writing for Dodsley, should now have launched out asthe buyer of a fine house and estate, which cost upwards of twenty-twothousand pounds, which could not be kept up on less than two thousandfive hundred a year, and of which the returns did not amount toone-fifth of that sum. Whence did he procure the money, and what isperhaps more difficult to answer, how came he first to entertain theidea of a design so ill-proportioned to anything that we can nowdiscern in his means and prospects? The common answer from Burke'senemies, and even from some neutral inquirers, gives to every loverof this great man's high character an unpleasant shock. It is allegedthat he had plunged into furious gambling in East India stock. Thecharge was current at the time, and it was speedily revived whenBurke's abandonment of his party, after the French Revolution, exposedhim to a thousand attacks of reckless and uncontrolled virulence. Ithas been stirred by one or two pertinacious critics nearer our owntime, and none of the biographers have dealt with the perplexitiesof the matter as they ought to have done. Nobody, indeed, has everpretended to find one jot or tittle of direct evidence that Burkehimself took a part in the gambling in India or other stocks. There isevidence that he was a holder of the stock, and no more. But what isundeniable is that Richard Burke, his brother, William Burke, hisintimate if not his kinsman, and Lord Verney, his political patron, were all three at this time engaged together in immense transactionsin East India stock; that in 1769 the stock fell violently; that theywere unable to pay their differences; and that in the year when EdmundBurke bought Gregories, the other three were utterly ruined, two ofthem beyond retrieval. Again it is clear that, after this, RichardBurke was engaged in land-jobbing in the West Indies; that his claimswere disputed by the Government as questionable and dishonest; andthat he lost his case. Edmund Burke was said, in the gossip of theday, to be deeply interested in land at Saint Vincent's. But thereis no evidence. What cannot be denied is that an unpleasant taint ofspeculation and financial adventurership hung at one time about thewhole connection, and that the adventures invariably came to anunlucky end. 

Whether Edmund Burke and William Burke were relations or not, and ifso, in what degree they were relations, neither of them ever knew;they believed that their fathers sometimes called one another cousins, and that was all that they had to say on the subject. But they were asintimate as brothers, and when William Burke went to mend his brokenfortunes in India, Edmund Burke commended him to Philip Francis--thenfighting his deadly duel of five years with Warren Hastings atCalcutta--as one whom he had tenderly loved, highly valued, andcontinually lived with in an union not to be expressed, quite sincetheir boyish years. "Looking back to the course of my life, " he wrotein 1771, "I remember no one considerable benefit in the whole of itwhich I did not, mediately or immediately, derive from William Burke. "There is nothing intrinsically incredible, therefore, considering thisintimacy and the community of purse and home which subsisted among thethree Burkes, in the theory that when Edmund Burke bought his propertyin Buckinghamshire, he looked for help from the speculations ofRichard and William. However this may have been, from them no helpcame. Many years afterwards (1783) Lord Verney filed a bill inChancery claiming from Edmund Burke a sum of £6000, which he allegedthat he had lent at the instigation of William Burke, to assist incompleting the purchase of Beaconsfield. Burke's sworn answer deniedall knowledge of the transaction, and the plaintiff did not get therelief for which he had prayed. 

In a letter to Shackleton (May 1, 1768), Burke gave the followingaccount of what he had done:--"I have made a push, " he says, "with allI could collect of my own, and the aid of my friends, to cast a littleroot in this country. I have purchased a house, with an estate ofabout six hundred acres of land, in Buckinghamshire, twenty-four milesfrom London. It is a place exceedingly pleasant; and I propose, Godwilling, to become a farmer in good earnest. You, who are classical, will not be displeased to know that it was formerly the seat ofWaller, the poet, whose house, or part of it, makes at present thefarmhouse within an hundred yards of me. " The details of the actualpurchase of Beaconsfield have been made tolerably clear. The price wastwenty-two thousand pounds, more or less. Fourteen thousand were lefton mortgage, which remained outstanding until the sale of the propertyby Mrs. Burke in 1812. Garret Burke, the elder brother, had shortlybefore the purchase made Edmund his residuary legatee, and it isguessed that of this bequest two thousand pounds were in cash. Thebalance of six thousand was advanced by Lord Rockingham on Burke'sbond. 

The purchase after all was the smallest part of the matter, and itstill remains a puzzle not only how Burke was able to maintain sohandsome an establishment, but how he could ever suppose it likelythat he would be able to maintain it. He counted, no doubt, on makingsome sort of income by farming. The Irish estate, which he hadinherited from his brother, brought in five hundred a year (ArthurYoung's _Ireland_, ii. 193). For a short time he received a salary ofseven hundred pounds a year as agent for New York. We may perhapstake for granted that he made as much more out of his acres. Hereceived something from Dodsley for his work on the _Annual Register_down to 1788. But when all these resources have been counted up, wecannot but see the gulf of a great yearly deficit. The unhappy truthis that from the middle of 1769, when we find him applying to Garrickfor the loan of a thousand pounds, down to 1794, when the king gavehim a pension, Burke was never free from the harassing strain of debtsand want of money. It has been stated with good show of authority, that his obligations to Lord Rockingham amounted to not less thanthirty thousand pounds. When that nobleman died (1782), with agenerosity which is not the less honourable to him for having been sorichly earned by the faithful friend who was the object of it, heleft instructions to his executors that all Burke's bonds should bedestroyed. 

We may indeed wish from the bottom of our hearts that all this hadbeen otherwise. But those who press it as a reproach against Burke'smemory, may be justly reminded that when Pitt died, after drawing thepay of a minister for twenty years, he left debts to the amount offorty thousand pounds. Burke, as I have said elsewhere, had none ofthe vices of profusion, but he had that quality which Aristotle placeshigh among the virtues--the noble mean of Magnificence, standingmidway between the two extremes of vulgar ostentation and narrowpettiness. At least, every creditor was paid in good time, and nobodysuffered but himself. Those who think these disagreeable matters ofsupreme importance, and allow such things to stand between them andBrake's greatness, are like the people--slightly to alter a figurefrom a philosopher of old--who, when they went to Olympia, could onlyperceive that they were scorched by the sun, and pressed by the crowd, and deprived of comfortable means of bathing, and wetted by the rain, and that life was full of disagreeable and troublesome things, and sothey almost forgot the great colossus of ivory and gold, Phidias'sstatue of Zeus, which they had come to see, and which stood in all itsglory and power before their perturbed and foolish vision. 

There have been few men in history with whom personal objects countedfor so little as they counted with Burke. He really did what so manypublic men only feign to do. He forgot that he had any interests ofhis own to be promoted, apart from the interests of the party withwhich he acted, and from those of the whole nation, for which he heldhimself a trustee. What William Burke said of him in 1766 was truethroughout his life, "Ned is full of real business, intent upon doingsolid good to his country, as much as if he was to receive twentyper cent from the Empire. " Such men as the shrewd and impudent Bigbyatoned for a plebeian origin by the arts of dependence and a judiciousservility, and drew more of the public money from the pay-office inhalf a dozen quarter-days than Burke received in all his life. It wasnot by such arts that Burke rose. When we remember all the untoldbitterness of the struggle in which he was engaged, from the time whenthe old Duke of Newcastle tried to make the Marquis of Rockinghamdismiss his new private secretary as an Irish Jesuit in disguise(1765), down to the time when the Duke of Bedford, himself battening"in grants to the house of Russell, so enormous as not only to outrageeconomy, but even to stagger credibility, " assailed the Government forgiving Burke a moderate pension, we may almost imagine that if Johnsonhad imitated the famous Tenth Satire a little later, he would havebeen tempted to apply the poet's cynical criticism of the careerheroic to the greater Cicero of his own day. "I was not, " Burke said, in a passage of lofty dignity, "like his Grace of Bedford, swaddledand rocked and dandled into a legislator; _Nitor in adversum_ is themotto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, norcultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favour andprotection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. Aslittle did I follow the trade of winning the hearts, by imposing onthe understandings of the people. At every step of my progress inlife, for in every step was I traversed and opposed, and at everyturnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport, and again and againto prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my country, bya proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws and the wholesystem of its interests both abroad and at home; otherwise no rank, notoleration even for me. "

CHAPTER III

THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE

Foreign observers of our affairs looked upon the state of Englandbetween the accession of George III. And the loss of the Americancolonies (1760-76) with mixed disgust and satisfaction. Their instinctas absolute rulers was revolted by a spectacle of unbridled factionand raging anarchy; their envy was soothed by the growing weakness ofa power which Chatham had so short a time before left at the highestpoint of grandeur and strength. Frederick the Great spoke withcontempt of the insolence of Opposition and the virulence of parties;and vowed that, petty German prince as he was, he would not changeplaces with the King of England. The Emperor Joseph pronouncedpositively that Great Britain was declining, that Parliament wasruining itself, and that the colonies threatened a catastrophe. Catherine of Russia thought that nothing would restore its ancientvigour to the realm, short of the bracing and heroic remedy of a war. Even at home, such shrewd and experienced onlookers as Horace Walpolesuspected that the state of the country was more serious than it hadbeen since the Great Rebellion, and declared it to be approaching byfast strides to some sharp crisis. Men who remembered their Romanhistory, fancied that they saw every symptom of confusion thatpreceded the ruin of the Commonwealth, and began to inquire uneasilywhat was the temper of the army. Men who remembered the story of theviolence and insatiable factiousness of Florence, turned again toMacchiavelli and to Guicciardini, to trace a parallel between thefierce city on the Arno and the fierce city on the Thames. When theKing of Sweden, in 1772, carried out a revolution, by abolishing anoligarchic council and assuming the powers of a dictator, with theassent of his people, there were actually serious men in England whothought that the English, after having been guilty of every meannessand corruption, would soon, like the Swedes, own themselves unworthyto be free. The Duke of Richmond, who happened to have a claim to apeerage and an estate in France, excused himself for taking so muchpains to establish his claim to them, by gravely asking who knew thata time might not soon come when England would not be worth living in, and when a retreat to France might be a very happy thing for a freeman to have?

The reign had begun by a furious outbreak of hatred between theEnglish and the Scotch. Lord Bute had been driven from office, notmerely because he was supposed to owe his power to a scandalousfriendship with the king's mother, but because he was accused ofcrowding the public service with his detested countrymen from theother side of the Tweed. He fell, less from disapproval of his policy, than from rude prejudice against his country. The flow of angryemotion had not subsided before the whisper of strife in the Americancolonies began to trouble the air; and before that had waxed loud, theMiddlesex election had blown into a portentous hurricane. This was thefirst great constitutional case after Burke came into the House ofCommons. As, moreover, it became a leading element in the crisis whichwas the occasion of Burke's first remarkable essay in the literatureof politics, it is as well to go over the facts. 

The Parliament to which he had first been returned, now approachingthe expiry of its legal term, was dissolved in the spring of 1768. Wilkes, then an outlaw in Paris, returned to England, and announcedhimself as a candidate for the city. When the election was over, hisname stood last on the poll. But his ancient fame as the opponentand victim of the court five years before, was revived. After hisrejection in the city, he found himself strong enough to stand forthe county of Middlesex. Here he was returned at the head of the pollafter an excited election. Wilkes had been tried in 1764, and foundguilty by the King's Bench of republishing Number Forty-five of the_North Briton_, and of printing and publishing the _Essay on Woman_. He had not appeared to receive sentence, and had been outlawed inconsequence. After his election for Middlesex, he obtained a reversalof his outlawry on a point of technical form. He then came up forsentence under the original verdict. The court sent him to prisonfor twenty-two months, and condemned him to pay a fine of a thousandpounds. 

Wilkes was in prison when the second session of the new Parliamentbegan. His case came before the House in November 1768, on his ownpetition, accusing Lord Mansfield of altering the record at his trial. After many acrimonious debates and examinations of Wilkes and othersat the bar of the House, at length, by 219 votes against 136, thefamous motion was passed which expelled him from the House. Anotherelection for Middlesex was now held, and Wilkes was returned withoutopposition. The day after the return, the House of Commons resolved byan immense majority, that having been expelled, Wilkes was incapableof serving in that Parliament. The following month Wilkes was oncemore elected. The House once more declared the election void. In Aprilanother election took place, and this time the Government put forwardColonel Luttrell, who vacated his seat for Bossiney for the purpose ofopposing Wilkes. There was the same result, and for the fourth timeWilkes was at the head of the poll. The House ordered the return to bealtered, and after hearing by counsel the freeholders of Middlesex whopetitioned against the alteration, finally confirmed it (May 8, 1769)by a majority of 221 to 152. According to Lord Temple, this was thegreatest majority ever known on the last day of a session. 

The purport and significance of these arbitrary proceedings needlittle interpretation. The House, according to the authorities, had aconstitutional right to expel Wilkes, though the grounds on which eventhis is defended would probably be questioned if a similar case wereto arise in our own day. But a single branch of the legislature couldhave no power to pass an incapacitating vote either against Wilkes oranybody else. An Act of Parliament is the least instrument by whichsuch incapacity could be imposed. The House might perhaps expelWilkes, but it could not either legally or with regard to the lessdefinite limits of constitutional morality, decide whom the Middlesexfreeholders should not elect, and it could not therefore set asidetheir representative, who was then free from any disabling quality. Lord Camden did not much exaggerate, when he declared in a debate onthe subject in the House of Lords, that the judgment passed upon theMiddlesex election had given the constitution a more dangerouswound than any which were given during the twelve years' absenceof Parliament in the reign of Charles I. The House of Commons wasusurping another form of that very dispensing power, for pretendingto which the last of the Stuart sovereigns had lost his crown. If theHouse by a vote could deprive Wilkes of a right to sit, what legal orconstitutional impediment would there be in the way, if the majoritywere at any time disposed to declare all their most formidableopponents in the minority incapable of sitting?

In the same Parliament, there was another and scarcely less remarkablecase of Privilege, "that eldest son of Prerogative, " as Burke trulycalled it, "and inheriting all the vices of its parent. " Certainprinters were accused of breach of privilege for reporting the debatesof the House (March, 1771). The messenger of the serjeant-at-armsattempted to take one of them into custody in his own shop in thecity. A constable was standing by, designedly, it has been supposed, and Miller, the printer, gave the messenger into his custody for anassault. The case came on before the Lord Mayor, Alderman Wilkes, and Alderman Oliver, the same evening, and the result was that themessenger of the House was committed. The city doctrine was, thatif the House of Commons had a serjeant-at-arms, they had aserjeant-at-mace. If the House of Commons could send their citizensto Newgate, they could send its messenger to the Compter. Two otherprinters were collusively arrested, brought before Wilkes and Oliver, and at once liberated. 

The Commons instantly resolved on stern measures. The Lord Mayor andOliver were taken and despatched to the Tower, where they lay untilthe prorogation of Parliament. Wilkes stubbornly refused to pay anyattention to repeated summonses to attend at the bar of the House, very properly insisting that he ought to be summoned to attend _in hisplace_ as member for Middlesex. Besides committing Crosby and Oliverto the Tower, the House summoned the Lord Mayor's clerk to attend withhis books, and then and there forced him to strike out the record ofthe recognisances into which their messenger had entered on beingcommitted at the Mansion House. No Stuart ever did anything morearbitrary and illegal. The House deliberately intended to constituteitself, as Burke had said two years before, an arbitrary and despoticassembly. "The distempers of monarchy were the great subjects ofapprehension and redress in the last century. In this, the distempersof Parliament. "

Burke, in a speech which he delivered in his place in 1771, warned theHouse of the evils of the course upon which they were entering, anddeclared those to be their mortal enemies who would persuade them toact as if they were a self-originated magistracy, independent of thepeople, and unconnected with their opinions and feelings. But thesemortal enemies of its very constitution were at this time the majorityof the House. It was to no purpose that Burke argued with more thanlegal closeness that incapacitation could not be a power according tolaw, inasmuch as it had neither of the two properties of law: it wasnot _known_, "you yourselves not knowing upon what grounds you willvote the incapacity of any man;" and it was not _fixed_, becauseit was varied according to the occasion, exercised according todiscretion, and no man could call for it as a right. A strain ofunanswerable reasoning of this kind counted for nothing, in spite ofits being unanswerable. Despotic or oligarchic pretensions are proofagainst the most formidable battery that reason and experience canconstruct against them. And Wilkes's exclusion endured until thisParliament--the Unreported Parliament, as it was called, and in manyrespects the very worst that ever assembled at Westminster--wasdissolved, and a new one elected (1774), when he was once againreturned for Middlesex, and took his seat. 

The London multitude had grown zealous for Wilkes, and the town hadbeen harassed by disorder. Of the fierce brutality of the crowd ofthat age, we may form a vivid idea from the unflinching pencil ofHogarth. Barbarous laws were cruelly administered. The common peoplewere turbulent, because misrule made them miserable. Wilkes hadwritten filthy verses, but the crowd cared no more for this than theirbetters cared about the vices of Lord Sandwich. They made common causewith one who was accidentally a more conspicuous sufferer. Wilkes wasquite right when he vowed that he was no Wilkite. The masses werebetter than their leader. "Whenever the people have a feeling, " Burkeonce said, "they commonly are in the right: they sometimes mistake thephysician. " Franklin, who was then in London, was of opinion that ifGeorge III. Had had a bad character, and John Wilkes a good one, the latter might have turned the former out of the kingdom; for theturbulence that began in street riots, at one time threatened to endin revolt. The king himself was attacked with savage invective inpapers, of which it was said that no one in the previous century wouldhave dared to print any like them until Charles was fast locked up inCarisbrooke Castle. 

As is usual when the minds of those in power have been infected withan arbitrary temper, the employment of military force to crush civildisturbances became a familiar and favourite idea. The military, saidLord Weymouth, in an elaborate letter which he addressed to the Surreymagistrates, can never be employed to a more constitutional purposethan in the support of the authority and dignity of the magistracy. If the magistrate should be menaced, he is cautioned not to delay amoment in calling for the aid of the military, and making use of themeffectually. The consequence of this bloody scroll, as Wilkes rightlycalled it, was that shortly afterwards an affray occurred between thecrowd and the troops, in which some twenty people were killed andwounded (May 10, 1768). On the following day, the Secretary of War, Lord Barrington, wrote to the commanding officer, informing him thatthe king highly approved of the conduct both of officers and men, andwished that his gracious approbation of them should be communicated tothem. 

Burke brought the matter before the House in a motion for a Committeeof Inquiry, supported by one of the most lucid and able of his minorspeeches. "If ever the time should come, " he concluded, "when thisHouse shall be found prompt to execute and slow to inquire; readyto punish the excesses of the people, and slow to listen to theirgrievances; ready to grant supplies, and slow to examine the account;ready to invest magistrates with large powers, and slow to inquireinto the exercise of them; ready to entertain notions of the militarypower as incorporated with the constitution, --when you learn this inthe air of St. James's, then the business is done; then the House ofCommons will change that character which it receives from the peopleonly. " It is hardly necessary to say that his motion for a Committeewas lost by the overwhelming majority of 245 against 30. The generalresult of the proceedings of the Government from the accession ofGeorge III. To the beginning of the troubles in the American colonies, was in Burke's own words, that the Government was at once dreaded andcontemned; that the laws were despoiled of all their respected andsalutary terrors; that their inaction was a subject of ridicule, andtheir exertion of abhorrence; that our dependencies had slackenedin their affections; that we knew neither how to yield, nor how toenforce; and that disconnection and confusion, in offices, in parties, in families, in Parliament, in the nation, prevailed beyond thedisorders of any former time. 

It was in the pamphlet on the _Present Discontents_, published in1770, that Burke dealt at large with the whole scheme of policy ofwhich all these irregularities were the distempered incidents. Thepamphlet was composed as a manifesto of the Rockingham section of theWhig party, to show, as Burke wrote to his chief, how different itwas in spirit and composition from "the Bedfords, the Grenvilles, andother knots, who are combined for no public purpose, but only as ameans of furthering with joint strength their private and individualadvantage. " The pamphlet was submitted in manuscript or proof to theheads of the party. Friendly critics excused some inelegancies whichthey thought they found in occasional passages, by taking for granted, as was true, that he had admitted insertions from other hands. Herefor the first time he exhibited, on a conspicuous scale, the strongestqualities of his understanding. Contemporaries had an opportunity ofmeasuring this strength, by comparison with another performance ofsimilar scope. The letters of Junius had startled the world the yearbefore. Burke was universally suspected of being their author, and thesuspicion never wholly died out so long as he lived. There was no realground for it beyond the two unconnected facts, that the letters werepowerful letters, and that Burke had a powerful intellect. Dr. Johnsonadmitted that he had never had a better reason for believing thatBurke was Junius, than that he knew nobody else who had the ability ofJunius. But Johnson discharged his mind of the thought, at the instantthat Burke voluntarily assured him that he neither wrote the lettersof Junius, nor knew who had written them. The subjects and aim ofthose famous pieces were not very different from Burke's tract, butany one who in our time turns from the letters to the tract, willwonder how the author of the one could ever have been suspected ofwriting the other. Junius is never more than a railer, and veryoften he is third-rate even as a railer. The author of the _PresentDiscontents_ speaks without bitterness even of Lord Bute and the Dukeof Grafton; he only refers to persons, when their conduct or theirsituation illustrates a principle. Instead of reviling, he probes, hereflects, he warns; and as the result of this serious method, pursuedby a man in whom close mastery of detail kept exact pace with widegrasp of generalities, we have not the ephemeral diatribe of afaction, but one of the monumental pieces of political literature. 

The last great pamphlet in the history of English public affairs hadbeen Swift's tract _On the Conduct of the Allies_ (1711), in which thewriter did a more substantial service for the Tory party of his daythan Burke did for the Whig party of a later date. Swift's pamphlet isclose, strenuous, persuasive, and full of telling strokes; but nobodyneed read it to-day except the historical student, or a member of thePeace Society, in search of the most convincing exposure of the mostinsane of English wars. [1] There is not a sentence in it which doesnot belong exclusively to the matter in hand: not a line of thatgeneral wisdom which is for all time. In the _Present Discontents_ themethod is just the opposite of this. The details are slurred, and theyare not literal. Burke describes with excess of elaboration how thenew system is a system of double cabinets; one put forward withnominal powers in Parliament, the other concealed behind the throne, and secretly dictating the policy. The reader feels that this isworked out far too closely to be real. It is a structure of artificialrhetoric. But we lightly pass this over, on our way to more solidmatter; to the exposition of the principles of a constitution, theright methods of statesmanship, and the defence of party. 

[Footnote 1: This was not Burke's judgment on the long war againstLouis XIV. --See _Regicide Peace_, i. ]

It was Bolingbroke, and not Swift, of whom Burke was thinking, when hesat down to the composition of his tract. The _Patriot King_ wasthe fountain of the new doctrines, which Burke trained his party tounderstand and to resist. If his foe was domestic, it was from aforeign armoury that Burke derived the instruments of resistance. Thegreat fault of political writers is their too close adherence to theforms of the system of state which they happen to be expounding orexamining. They stop short at the anatomy of institutions, and do notpenetrate to the secret of their functions. An illustrious author inthe middle of the eighteenth century introduced his contemporariesto a better way. It is not too much to say that at that epoch thestrength of political speculation in this country, from Adam Smithdownwards, was drawn from France; and Burke had been led to someof what was most characteristic in his philosophy of society byMontesquieu's _Spirit of Laws_ (1748), the first great manual of thehistoric school. We have no space here to work out the relationsbetween Montesquieu's principles and Burke's, but the student of the_Esprit des Lois_ will recognise its influence in every one of Burke'smasterpieces. 

So far as immediate events were concerned, Burke was quick to discerntheir true interpretation. As has been already said, he attributed tothe king and his party a deliberateness of system which probably hadno real existence in their minds. The king intended to reassert theold right of choosing his own ministers. George II. Had made strenuousbut futile endeavours to the same end. His son, the father of GeorgeIII. , Frederick, Prince of Wales, as every reader of Dodington's Diarywill remember, was equally bent on throwing off the yoke of the greatWhig combinations, and making his own cabinets. George III. Was onlycontinuing the purpose of his father and his grandfather; and there isno reason to believe that he went more elaborately to work to obtainhis ends. 

It is when he leaves the artifices of a cabal, and strikes down belowthe surface to the working of deep social forces, that we feel thebreadth and power of Burke's method. "I am not one of those, " hebegan, "who think that the people are never wrong. They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. ButI do say that _in all disputes between them and their rulers, thepresumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people_. " Nay, experience perhaps justifies him in going further. When populardiscontents are prevalent, something has generally been found amiss inthe constitution or the administration. "The people have no interestin disorder. When they go wrong, it is their error, and not theircrime. " And then he quotes the famous passage from the Memoirs ofSully, which both practical politicians and political studentsshould bind about their necks, and write upon the tables of theirhearts:--"The revolutions that come to pass in great states are notthe result of chance, nor of popular caprice. . . . As for the populace, it is never from a passion for attack that it rebels, but fromimpatience of suffering. "

What really gives its distinction to the _Present Discontents_ is notits plea for indulgence to popular impatience, nor its plea for thesuperiority of government by aristocracy, but rather the presence init of the thought of Montesquieu and his school, of the necessityof studying political phenomena in relation, not merely to forms ofgovernment and law, but in relation to whole groups of social factswhich give to law and government the spirit that makes them workable. Connected with this, is a particularly wide interpretation and aparticularly impressive application of the maxims of expediency, because a wide conception of the various interacting elements ofa society naturally extends the considerations which a balance ofexpediencies will include. Hence, in time, there came a strongand lofty ideal of the true statesman, his breadth of vision, hisflexibility of temper, his hardly measurable influence. These are theprincipal thoughts in the _Discontents_ to which that tract owes itspermanent interest. "Whatever original energy, " says Burke, in oneplace, "may be supposed either in force or regulation, the operationof both is in truth merely instrumental. Nations are governed by thesame methods, and on the same principles, by which an individualwithout authority is often able to govern those who are his equalsor superiors; by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judiciousmanagement of it. . . . The laws reach but a very little way. ConstituteGovernment how you please, infinitely the greater part of it mustdepend upon the exercise of powers, which are left at large to theprudence and uprightness of ministers of state. Even all the use andpotency of the laws depends upon them. Without them, your Commonwealthis no better than _a scheme upon paper; and not a living, active, effective constitution_. " Thus early in his public career had Burkeseized that great antithesis which he so eloquently laboured inthe long and ever memorable episode of his war against the FrenchRevolution: the opposition between artificial arrangements inpolitics, and a living, active, effective organisation, formed by whathe calls elsewhere in the present tract the natural strength of thekingdom, and suitable to the temper and mental habits of the people. When he spoke of the natural strength of the kingdom, he gave nonarrow or conventional account of it. He included in the elementsof that strength, besides the great peers and the leading landedgentlemen, the opulent merchants and manufacturers, and thesubstantial yeomanry. Contrasted with the trite versions of Governmentas fixed in King, Lords, and Commons, this search for the real organsof power was going to the root of the matter in a spirit at oncethoroughly scientific and thoroughly practical. Burke had, by thespeculative training to which he had submitted himself in dealing withBolingbroke, prepared his mind for a complete grasp of the idea ofthe body politic as a complex growth, a manifold whole, with closelyinterdependent relations among its several parts and divisions. Itwas this conception from which his conservatism sprang. Revolutionarypolitics have one of their sources in the idea that societies arecapable of infinite and immediate modifications, without reference tothe deep-rooted conditions that have worked themselves into every partof the social structure. The same opposition of the positive to thedoctrinaire spirit is to be observed in the remarkable vindication ofParty, which fills the last dozen pages of the pamphlet, and whichis one of the most courageous of all Burke's deliverances. Partycombination is exactly one of those contrivances which, as it mightseem, a wise man would accept for working purposes, but about whichhe would take care to say as little as possible. There appears to besomething revolting to the intellectual integrity and self-respect ofthe individual in the systematic surrender of his personal action, interest, and power, to a political connection in which his ownjudgment may never once be allowed to count for anything. It is likethe surrender of the right of private judgment to the authority of theChurch, but with its nakedness not concealed by a mystic doctrine. Nothing is more easy to demolish by the bare logical reason. But Burkecared nothing about the bare logical reason, until it had beenclothed in convenience and custom, in the affections on one side, andexperience on the other. Not content with insisting that for somespecial purpose of the hour, "when bad men combine, the good mustassociate, " he contended boldly for the merits of fidelity to partycombination in itself. Although Burke wrote these strong pages as areply to Bolingbroke, who had denounced party as an evil, they remainas the best general apology that has ever been offered for thatprinciple of public action, against more philosophic attacks thanBolingbroke's. Burke admitted that when he saw a man acting adesultory and disconnected part in public life with detriment to hisfortune, he was ready to believe such a man to be in earnest, thoughnot ready to believe him to be right. In any case he lamented tosee rare and valuable qualities squandered away without any publicutility. He admitted, moreover, on the other hand, that peoplefrequently acquired in party confederacies a narrow, bigoted, andproscriptive spirit. "But where duty renders a critical situationa necessary one, it is our business to keep free from the evilsattendant upon it, and not to fly from the situation itself. It issurely no very rational account of a man that he has always actedright, but has taken special care to act in such a manner that hisendeavours could not possibly be productive of any consequence. . . . When men are not acquainted with each other's, principles, norexperienced in each other's talents, nor at all practised in theirmutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts of business; nopersonal confidence, no friendship, no common interest subsistingamong them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public partwith uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. "

In terms of eloquent eulogy he praised the sacred reverence with whichthe Romans used to regard the _necessitudo sortis_, or the relationsthat grew up between men who had only held office together by thecasual fortune of the lot. He pointed out to emulation the Whigjunto who held so close together in the reign of Anne--Sunderland, Godolphin, Somers, and Marlborough--who believed "that no men couldact with effect who did not act in concert; that no men could act inconcert who did not act with confidence; and that no men could actwith confidence who were not bound together by common opinions, common affections, and common interests. " In reading these energeticpassages, we have to remember two things: first, that the writerassumes the direct object of party combination to be generous, great, and liberal causes; and second, that when the time came, and when hebelieved that his friends were espousing a wrong and pernicious cause, Burke, like Samson bursting asunder the seven green withes, broke awayfrom the friendships of a life, and deliberately broke his party inpieces. [1]

[Footnote 1: See on the same subject, _Correspondence_, ii. 276, 277. ]

When Burke came to discuss the cure for the disorders of 1770, heinsisted on contenting himself with what he ought to have known to beobviously inadequate prescriptions. And we cannot help feeling that henever speaks of the constitution of the government of this country, without gliding into a fallacy identical with that which he himselfdescribed and denounced, as thinking better of the wisdom and powerof human legislation than in truth it deserved. He was uniformlyconsistent in his view of the remedies which the various sections ofOpposition proposed against the existing debasement and servility ofthe Lower House. The Duke of Richmond wanted universal suffrage, equal electoral districts, and annual parliaments. Wilkes proposedto disfranchise the rotten boroughs, to increase the countyconstituencies, and to give members to rich, populous, tradingtowns--a general policy which was accepted fifty-six years afterwards. The Constitutional Society desired frequent parliaments, theexclusion of placemen from the House, and the increase of the countyrepresentation. Burke uniformly refused to give his countenance to anyproposals such as these, which involved a clearly organic change inthe constitution. He confessed that he had no sort of relianceupon either a triennial parliament or a place-bill, and with thatreasonableness which as a rule was fully as remarkable in him as hiseloquence, he showed very good grounds for his want of faith in thepopular specifics. In truth, triennial or annual parliaments couldhave done no good, unless the change had been accompanied by the moreimportant process of amputating, as Chatham called it, the rottenboroughs. Of these the Crown could at that time reckon some seventy asits own property. Besides those which belonged to the Crown, there wasalso the immense number which belonged to the Peerage. If the kingsought to strengthen an administration, the thing needful was not toenlist the services of able and distinguished men, but to conciliate aduke, who brought with him the control of a given quantity of votingpower in the Lower House. All this patrician influence, which may befound at the bottom of most of the intrigues of the period, would nothave been touched by curtailing the duration of parliaments. 

What then was the remedy, or had Burke no remedy to offer for thesegrave distempers of Parliament? Only the remedy of the interpositionof the body of the people itself. We must beware of interpreting thisphrase in the modern democratic sense. In 1766 he had deliberatelydeclared that he thought it would be more conformable to the spirit ofthe constitution, "by lessening the number, to add to the weight andindependency of our voters. " "Considering the immense and dangerouscharge of elections, the prostitute and daring venality, thecorruption of manners, the idleness and profligacy of the lower sortof voters, no prudent man would propose to increase such an evil. "[1]In another place he denies that the people have either enough ofspeculation in the closet, or of experience in business, to becompetent judges, not of the detail of particular measures only, butof _general schemes of policy_. [2] On Burke's theory, the people, as arule, were no more concerned to interfere with Parliament, than a manis concerned to interfere with somebody whom he has voluntarily anddeliberately made his trustee. But here, he confessed, was a shamefuland ruinous breach of trust. The ordinary rule of government was beingevery day mischievously contemned and daringly set aside. Until theconfidence thus outraged should be once more restored, then the peopleought to be excited to a more strict and detailed attention to theconduct of their representatives. The meetings of counties andcorporations ought to settle standards for judging more systematicallyof the behaviour of those whom they had sent to Parliament. Frequentand correct lists of the voters in all important questions ought tobe procured. The severest discouragement ought to be given to thepernicious practice of affording a blind and undistinguishing supportto every administration. "Parliamentary support comes and goes withoffice, totally regardless of the man or the merit. " For instance, Wilkes's annual motion to expunge the votes upon the Middlesexelection had been uniformly rejected, as often as it was made whileLord North was in power. Lord North had no sooner given way to theRockingham Cabinet than the House of Commons changed its mind, andthe resolutions were expunged by a handsome majority of 115 to 47. Administration was omnipotent in the House, because it could be aman's most efficient friend at an election, and could most amplyreward his fidelity afterwards. Against this system Burke called onthe nation to set a stern face. Root it up, he kept crying; settle thegeneral course in which you desire members to go; insist that theyshall not suffer themselves to be diverted from this by the authorityof the government of the day; let lists of votes be published, sothat you may ascertain for yourselves whether your trustees have beenfaithful or fraudulent; do all this, and there will be no need toresort to those organic changes, those empirical innovations, whichmay possibly cure, but are much more likely to destroy. 

[Footnote 1: "Observations on State of the Nation, " _Works_, i. 105, b. ]

[Footnote 2: "Speech on Duration of Parliaments. "]

It is not surprising that so halting a policy should have given deepdispleasure to very many, perhaps to most, of those whose only commonbond was the loose and negative sentiment of antipathy to the court, the ministry, and the too servile majority of the House of Commons. The Constitutional Society was furious. Lord Chatham wrote to LordRockingham that the work in which these doctrines first appeared, must do much mischief to the common cause. But Burke's view of theconstitution was a part of his belief with which he neverpaltered, and on which he surrendered his judgment to no man. "Ourconstitution, " in his opinion, "stands on a nice equipoise, with steepprecipices and deep waters upon all sides of it. In removing it from adangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a risk of oversettingit on the other. "[1] This image was ever before his mind. It occursagain in the last sentence of that great protest against all changeand movement, when he describes himself as one who, when the equipoiseof the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading itupon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasonsto that which may preserve its equipoise. [2] When we think of theodious mis-government in England which the constitution permitted, between the time when Burke wrote and the passing of Lord Sidmouth'sSix Acts fifty years later, we may be inclined to class such aconstitution among the most inadequate and mischievous politicalarrangements that any free country has ever had to endure. Yet it wasthis which Burke declared that he looked upon with filial reverence. "Never will I cut it in pieces, and put it into the kettle of anymagician, in order to boil it with the puddle of their compounds intoyouth and vigour; on the contrary, I will drive away such pretenders;I will nurse its venerable age, and with lenient arts extend aparent's breath. "

[Footnote 1: _Present Discontents_. ]

[Footnote 2: _Reflections on the French Revolution_. ]

He was filled with the spirit, and he borrowed the arguments, whichhave always marked the champion of faith and authority against theimpious assault of reason or innovation. The constitution was sacredto him as the voice of the Church and the oracles of her saints aresacred to the faithful. Study it, he cried, until you know how toadmire it, and if you cannot know and admire, rather believe that youare dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed upon. Weought to understand it according to our measure and to venerate wherewe are not able presently to comprehend. Well has Burke been calledthe Bossuet of politics. 

Although, however, Burke's unflinching reverence for the constitution, and his reluctance to lay a finger upon it, may now seem clearlyexcessive, as it did to Chatham and his son, who were great men in theright, or to Beckford and Sawbridge, who were very little men in theright, we can only be just to him by comparing his ideas with thosewhich were dominant throughout an evil reign. While he opposed morefrequent parliaments, he still upheld the doctrine that "to governaccording to the sense, and agreeably to the interests, of the peopleis a great and glorious object of government. " While he declaredhimself against the addition of a hundred knights of the shire, hein the very same breath protested that, though the people might bedeceived in their choice of an object, he "could scarcely conceive anychoice they could make, to be so very mischievous as the existence ofany human force capable of resisting it. "[1] To us this may seem verymild and commonplace doctrine, but it was not commonplace in an agewhen Anglican divines--men like Archbishop Markham, Dr. Nowell orDr. Porteus--had revived the base precepts of passive obedience andnon-resistance, and when such a man as Lord Mansfield encouraged them. And these were the kind of foundations which Burke had been laying, while Fox was yet a Tory, while Sheridan was writing farces, and whileGrey was a schoolboy. 

[Footnote 1: "To the Chairman of the Buckinghamshire Meeting, " 1780. ]

It is, however, almost demonstrably certain that the vindication ofthe supremacy of popular interests over all other considerations wouldhave been bootless toil, and that the great constitutional strugglefrom 1760 to 1783 would have ended otherwise than it did, but forthe failure of the war against the insurgent colonies, and the finalestablishment of American Independence. It was this portentoustransaction which finally routed the arbitrary and despoticpretensions of the House of Commons over the people, and which put anend to the hopes entertained by the sovereign of making his personalwill supreme in the Chambers. Fox might well talk of an early Loyalistvictory in the war, as the terrible news from Long Island. Thestruggle which began unsuccessfully at Brentford in Middlesex, wascontinued at Boston in Massachusetts. The scene had changed, but theconflicting principles were the same. The war of Independence wasvirtually a second English civil war. The ruin of the American causewould have been also the ruin of the constitutional cause in England;and a patriotic Englishman may revere the memory of Patrick Henry andGeorge Washington not less justly than the patriotic American. Burke'sattitude in this great contest is that part of his history about themajestic and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute. 

CHAPTER IV

THE ROCKINGHAM PARTY--PARIS--ELECTION AT BRISTOL--THE AMERICAN WAR

The war with the American colonies was preceded by an interval ofstupor. The violent ferment which had been stirred in the nation bythe affairs of Wilkes and the Middlesex election, was followed, asBurke said, by as remarkable a deadness and vapidity. In 1770 thedistracted ministry of the Duke of Grafton came to an end, and wassucceeded by that of Lord North. The king had at last triumphed. Hehad secured an administration of which the fundamental principle wasthat the sovereign was to be the virtual head of it, and the realdirector of its counsels. Lord North's government lasted for twelveyears, and its career is for ever associated with one of the mostmomentous chapters in the history of the English nation and of freeinstitutions. 

Through this long and eventful period, Burke's was as the voice ofone crying in the wilderness. He had become important enough for theministry to think it worth while to take pains to discredit him. Theybusily encouraged the report that he was Junius, or a close ally ofJunius. This was one of the minor vexations of Burke's middle life. Even his friends continued to torment him for incessant disclaimers. Burke's lofty pride made him slow to deal positively with what hescorned as a malicious and unworthy imputation. To such a friend asJohnson he did not, as we have seen, disdain to volunteer a denial, but Charles Townshend was forced to write more than one importunateletter before he could extract from Burke the definite sentence(November 24, 1771):--"I now give you my word and honour that I am notthe author of Junius, and that I know not the author of that paper, and I do authorise you to say so. " Nor was this the only kind ofannoyance to which he was subjected. His rising fame kindled thecandour of the friends of his youth. With proverbial good-nature, theyadmonished him that he did not bear instruction; that he showed sucharrogance as in a man of his condition was intolerable; that hesnapped furiously at his parliamentary foes, like a wolf who hadbroken into the fold; that his speeches were useless declamations; andthat he disgraced the House by the scurrilities of the bear-garden. These sharp chastenings of friendship Burke endured with the perfectself-command, not of the cold and indifferent egotist, but of one whohad trained himself not to expect too much from men. He possessed thetrue solace for all private chagrins in the activity and the fervourof his public interests. 

In 1772 the affairs of the East India Company and its relations withthe Government had fallen into disorder. The Opposition, thoughpowerless in the Houses of Parliament, were often able to thwart theviews of the ministry in the imperial board-room in Leadenhall Street. The Duke of Richmond was as zealous and as active in his oppositionto Lord North in the business of the East Indies, as he was in thebusiness of the country at Westminster. A proposal was made to Burketo go out to India at the head of a commission of three supervisors, with authority to examine the concerns of every department, and fullpowers of control over the company's servants. Though this offer waspressed by the directors, Burke, after anxious consideration, declinedit. What his reasons were there is no evidence; we can only guess thathe thought less of his personal interests than of those of thecountry and of his party. Without him the Rockingham connectionwould undoubtedly have fallen to ruin, and with it the most upright, consistent, and disinterested body of men then in public life. "Yousay, " the Duke of Richmond wrote to him (November 15, 1772), "theparty is an object of too much importance to go to pieces. Indeed, Burke, you have more merit than any man in keeping us together. " Itwas the character of the party, almost as much as their principles, that secured Burke's zeal and attachment; their decorum, theirconstancy, their aversion to all cabals for private objects, theirindifference to office, except as an instrument of power and a meansof carrying out the policy of their convictions. They might easilyhave had office if they would have come in upon the king's terms. Ayear after his fall from power Lord Rockingham was summoned to theroyal closet, and pressed to resume his post. But office at any pricewas not in their thoughts. They knew the penalties of their system, and they clung to it undeterred. Their patriotism was deliberate andconsidered. Chalcedon was called the city of the blind, because itsfounders wilfully neglected the more glorious site of Byzantium whichlay under their eyes. "We have built our Chalcedon, " said Burke, "withthe chosen part of the universe full in our prospect. " They had thefaults to which an aristocratic party in opposition is naturallyliable. Burke used to reproach them with being somewhat languid, scrupulous, and unsystematic. He could not make the Duke of Richmondput off a large party at Goodwood for the sake of an importantdivision in the House of Lords; and he did not always agree with LordJohn Cavendish as to what constitutes a decent and reasonable quantityof fox-hunting for a political leader in a crisis. But it was part ofthe steadfastness of his whole life to do his best with such materialsas he could find. He did not lose patience nor abate his effort, because his friends would miss the opportunity of a great politicalstroke rather than they would miss Newmarket Races. He wrote theirprotests for the House of Lords, composed petitions for countymeetings, drafted resolutions, and plied them with information, ideas, admonitions, and exhortations. Never before nor since has our countryseen so extraordinary a union of the clever and indefatigableparty-manager, with the reflective and philosophic habits of thespeculative publicist. It is much easier to make either absolutism ordemocracy attractive than aristocracy; yet we see how consistent withhis deep moral conservatism was Burke's attachment to an aristocraticparty, when we read his exhortation to the Duke of Richmond toremember that persons in his high station in life ought to have longviews. "You people, " he writes to the Duke (November 17, 1772), "ofgreat families and hereditary trusts and fortunes are not like such asI am, who, whatever we may be by the rapidity of our growth, and evenby the fruit we bear, and flatter ourselves that, while we creep onthe ground, we belly into melons that are exquisite for size andflavour, yet still we are but annual plants that perish with ourseason, and leave no sort of traces behind us. You, if you are whatyou ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation. Theimmediate power of a Duke of Richmond, or a Marquis of Rockingham, is not so much of moment; but if their conduct and example hand downtheir principles to their successors, then their houses become thepublic repositories and office of record for the constitution. . . . I donot look upon your time or lives as lost, if in this sliding away fromthe genuine spirit of the country, certain parties, if possible--ifnot, the heads of certain families--should make it their business bythe whole course of their lives, principally by their example, to mould into the very vital stamina of their descendants thoseprinciples which ought to be transmitted pure and unmixed toposterity. "

Perhaps such a passage as this ought to be described less asreflection than as imagination--moral, historic, conservativeimagination--in which order, social continuity, and the endlessprojection of past into present, and of present into future, areclothed with the sanctity of an inner shrine. We may think that afox-hunting duke and a racing marquis were very poor centresround which to group these high emotions. But Burke had no punysentimentalism, and none of the mere literary or romantic conservatismof men like Chateaubriand. He lived in the real world, and not in afalse dream of some past world that had never been. He saw that thesporting squires of his party were as much the representatives ofancestral force and quality as in older days were long lines ofClaudii and Valerii. His conservative doctrine was a profoundinstinct, in part political, but in greater part moral. The accidentalroughness of the symbol did not touch him, for the symbol wasglorified by the sincerity of his faith and the compass of hisimagination. 

With these ideas strong within him, in 1773 Burke made a journey toFrance. It was almost as though the solemn hierophant of some mysticEgyptian temple should have found himself amid the brilliant chatterof a band of reckless, keen-tongued disputants of the garden orthe porch at Athens. His only son had just finished a successfulschool-course at Westminster, and was now entered a student at ChristChurch. He was still too young for the university, and Burke thoughtthat a year could not be more profitably spent than in forming histongue to foreign languages. The boy was placed at Auxerre, in thehouse of the business agent of the Bishop of Auxerre. From the Bishophe received many kindnesses, to be amply repaid in after years whenthe Bishop came in his old age, an exile and a beggar, to England. 

While in Paris, Burke did all that he could to instruct himself asto what was going on in French society. If he had not the dazzlingreception which had greeted Hume in 1764, at least he had ampleopportunities of acquainting himself with the prevailing ideas of thetime in more than one of the social camps into which Paris was thendivided. Madame du Deffand tells the Duchess of Choiseul that thoughhe speaks French extremely ill, everybody felt that he would beinfinitely agreeable if he could more easily make himself understood. He followed French well enough as a listener, and went every day tothe courts to hear the barristers and watch the procedure. Madame duDeffand showed him all possible attention, and her friends eagerlyseconded her. She invited him to supper parties, where he metthe Count de Broglie, the agent of the king's secret diplomacy;Caraccioli, successor of nimble-witted Galiani, the secretary fromNaples; and other notabilities of the high world. He supped with theDuchess of Luxembourg, and heard a reading of La Harpe's _Barmecides_. It was high treason in this circle to frequent the rival _salon_ ofMademoiselle Lespinasse, but either the law was relaxed in the caseof foreigners, or else Burke kept his own counsel. Here were for themoment the headquarters of the party of innovation, and here he sawsome of the men who were busily forging the thunderbolts. His eye wason the alert, now as always, for anything that might light up thesovereign problems of human government. A book by a member of thiscircle had appeared six months before, which was still the talk of thetown, and against which the Government had taken the usual impotentmeasures of repression. This was the _Treatise on Tactics_, by acertain M. De Guibert, a colonel of the Corsican legion. The importantpart of the work was the introduction, in which the writer examinedwith what was then thought extraordinary hardihood, the social andpolitical causes of the decline of the military art in France. Burkeread it with keen interest and energetic approval. He was present atthe reading of a tragedy by the same author, and gave some offence tothe rival coterie by preferring Guibert's tragedy to La Harpe's. Tous, however, of a later day, Guibert is known neither for his tragedynor his essay on tactics, nor for a memory so rapid that he could opena book, throw one glance like a flash of lightning on to a page, andthen instantly repeat from it half a dozen lines word for word. He lives in literature as the inspirer of that ardent passion ofMademoiselle Lespinasse's letters, so unique in their consumingintensity that, as has been said, they seem to burn the page on whichthey are written. It was perhaps at Mademoiselle Lespinasse's thatBurke met Diderot. The eleven volumes of the illustrative platesof the _Encyclopaeedia_ had been given to the public twelve monthsbefore, and its editor was just released from the giant's toil oftwenty years. Voltaire was in imperial exile at Ferney. Rousseau wascopying music in a garret in the street which is now called after hisname, but he had long ago cut himself off from society; and Burke wasnot likely to take much trouble to find out a man whom he had known inEngland seven years before, and against whom he had conceived astrong and lasting antipathy, as entertaining no principle either toinfluence his heart or to guide his understanding save a deranged andeccentric vanity. 

It was the fashion for English visitors to go to Versailles. They sawthe dauphin and his brothers dine in public, before a crowd of princesof the blood, nobles, abbés, and all the miscellaneous throng ofa court. They attended mass in the chapel, where the old king, surrounded by bishops, sat in a pew just above that of Madame duBarri. The royal mistress astonished foreigners by hair withoutpowder and cheeks without rouge, the simplest toilettes, and the mostunassuming manners. Vice itself, in Burke's famous words, seemed tolose half its evil by losing all its grossness. And there, too, Burkehad that vision to which we owe one of the most gorgeous pages in ourliterature--Marie Antoinette, the young dauphiness, "decorating andcheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glitteringlike the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy. " The shadowwas rapidly stealing on. The year after Burke's visit, the sceneunderwent a strange transformation. The king died; the mistress wasbanished in luxurious exile; and the dauphiness became the ill-starredQueen of France. Burke never forgot the emotions of the scene; theyawoke in his imagination sixteen years after, when all was changed, and the awful contrast shook him with a passion that his eloquence hasmade immortal. 

Madame du Deffand wrote to Horace Walpole that Burke had been so wellreceived, that he ought to leave France excellently pleased with thecountry. But it was not so. His spirit was perturbed by what he hadlistened to. He came away with small esteem for that busy fermentationof intellect in which his French friends most exulted, and for whichthey looked forward to the gratitude and admiration of posterity. Fromthe spot on which he stood there issued two mighty streams. It wasfrom the ideas of the Parisian Freethinkers, whom Burke so detested, that Jefferson, Franklin, and Henry drew those theories of humansociety which were so soon to find life in American Independence. Itwas from the same ideas that later on that revolutionary tide surgedforth, in which Burke saw no elements of a blessed fertility, butonly a horrid torrent of red and desolating lava. In 1773 there wasa moment of strange repose in Western Europe, the little break ofstillness that precedes the hurricane. It was indeed the eve of amomentous epoch. Before sixteen years were over, the American Republichad risen, like a new constellation into the firmament, and the Frenchmonarchy, of such antiquity and fame and high pre-eminence in Europeanhistory, had been shattered to the dust. We may not agree with Burke'sappreciation of the forces that were behind these vast convulsions. But at least he saw, and saw with eyes of passionate alarm, thatstrong speculative forces were at work, which must violently provethe very bases of the great social superstructure, and might notimprobably break them up for ever. 

Almost immediately after his return from France, he sounded ashrill note of warning. Some Methodists from Chatham had petitionedParliament against a bill for the relief of Dissenters fromsubscription to the Articles. Burke denounced the intolerance of thepetitioners. It is not the Dissenters, he cried, whom you have tofear, but the men who, "not contented with endeavouring to turnyour eyes from the blaze and effulgence of light, by which life andimmortality is so gloriously demonstrated by the Gospel, would evenextinguish that faint glimmering of Nature, that only comfort suppliedto ignorant man before this great illumination. . . . These are thepeople against whom you ought to aim the shaft of the law; these arethe men to whom, arrayed in all the terrors of government, I wouldsay, 'You shall not degrade us into brutes. ' . . . The most horrid andcruel blow that can be offered to civil society is through atheism. . . . The infidels are outlaws of the constitution, not of this country, butof the human race. They are never, never to be supported, never to betolerated. Under the systematic attacks of these people, I see some ofthe props of good government already begin to fail; I see propagatedprinciples which will not leave to religion even a toleration. Isee myself sinking every day under the attacks of these wretchedpeople. "[1] To this pitch he had been excited by the vehement band ofmen, who had inscribed on their standard, _Écraser l'Infâme_. 

[Footnote 1: "Speech on Relief of Protestant Dissenters, 1773. "]

 * * * * *

The second Parliament in which Burke had a seat was dissolved suddenlyand without warning (October 1774). The attitude of America wasthreatening, and it was believed the Ministers were anxious to havethe elections over before the state of things became worse. The wholekingdom was instantly in a ferment. Couriers, chaises, post-horses, hurried in every direction over the island, and it was noted, as ameasure of the agitation, that no fewer than sixty messengers passedthrough a single turnpike on one day. Sensible observers were glad tothink that, in consequence of the rapidity of the elections, less wineand money would be wasted than at any election for sixty years past. Burke had a houseful of company at Beaconsfield when the news arrived. Johnson was among them, and as the party was hastily breaking up, theold Tory took his Whig friend kindly by the hand: "Farewell, my dearsir, " he said, "and remember that I wish you all the success thatought to be wished to you, and can possibly be wished to you, by anhonest man. "

The words were of good omen. Burke was now rewarded by the discoverythat his labours had earned for him recognition and gratitude beyondthe narrow limits of a rather exclusive party. He had before thisattracted the attention of the mercantile public. The Company ofMerchants trading to Africa voted him their thanks for his share insupporting their establishments. The Committee of Trade at Manchesterformally returned him their grateful acknowledgments for the activepart that he had taken in the business of the Jamaica free ports. But then Manchester returned no representative to Parliament. In twoParliaments Burke had been elected for Wendover free of expense. LordVerney's circumstances were now so embarrassed, that he was obligedto part with the four seats at his disposal to men who could pay forthem. There had been some talk of proposing Burke for Westminster, and Wilkes, who was then omnipotent, promised him the support ofthe popular party. But the patriot's memory was treacherous, and hespeedily forgot, for reasons of his own, an idea that had originatedwith himself. Burke's constancy of spirit was momentarily overclouded. "Sometimes when I am alone, " he wrote to Lord Rockingham (September15, 1774), "in spite of all my efforts, I fall into a melancholy whichis inexpressible, and to which, if I give way, I should not continuelong under it, but must totally sink. Yet I do assure you that partly, and indeed principally, by the force of natural good spirits, andpartly by a strong sense of what I ought to do, I bear up so well thatno one who did not know them, could easily discover the state of mymind or my circumstances. I have those that are dear to me, for whom Imust live as long as God pleases, and in what way He pleases. WhetherI ought not totally to abandon this public station for which I am sounfit, and have of course been so unfortunate, I know not. " But hewas always saved from rash retirement from public business by tworeflections. He doubted whether a man has a right to retire after hehas once gone a certain length in these things. And he remembered thatthere are often obscure vexations in the most private life, which aseffectually destroy a man's peace as anything that can occur in publiccontentions. 

Lord Rockingham offered his influence on behalf of Burke at Malton, one of the family boroughs in Yorkshire, and thither Burke in no highspirits betook himself. On his way to the north he heard that hehad been nominated for Bristol, but the nomination had for certainelectioneering reasons not been approved by the party. As it happened, Burke was no sooner chosen at Malton than, owing to an unexpectedturn of affairs at Bristol, the idea of proposing him for a candidaterevived. Messengers were sent express to his house in London, and, not finding him there, they hastened down to Yorkshire. Burke quicklyresolved that the offer was too important to be rejected. Bristol wasthe capital of the west, and it was still in wealth, population, andmercantile activity the second city of the kingdom. To be invited tostand for so great a constituency, without any request of his own andfree of personal expense, was a distinction which no politician couldhold lightly. Burke rose from the table where he was dining with someof his supporters, stepped into a post-chaise at six on a Tuesdayevening, and travelled without a break until he reached Bristol on theThursday afternoon, having got over two hundred and seventy miles inforty-four hours. Not only did he execute the journey without a break, but, as he told the people of Bristol, with an exulting commemorationof his own zeal that recalls Cicero, he did not sleep for an instantin the interval. The poll was kept open for a month, and the contestwas the most tedious that had ever been known in the city. New freemenwere admitted down to the very last day of the election. At the end ofit, Burke was second on the poll, and was declared to be duly chosen(November 3, 1774). There was a petition against his return, but theelection was confirmed, and he continued to sit for Bristol for sixyears. 

The situation of a candidate is apt to find out a man's weaker places. Burke stood the test. He showed none of the petulant rage of thoseclamorous politicians whose flight, as he said, is winged in a lowerregion of the air. As the traveller stands on the noble bridgethat now spans the valley of the Avon, he may recall Burke's localcomparison of these busy, angry familiars of an election, to the gullsthat skim the mud of the river when it is exhausted of its tide. Hegave his new friends a more important lesson, when the time came forhim to thank them for the honour which they had just conferred uponhim. His colleague had opened the subject of the relations between amember of Parliament and his constituents; and had declared that, for his own part, he should regard the instructions of the people ofBristol as decisive and binding. Burke in a weighty passage upheld amanlier doctrine. 

 Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect, their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. 

 My worthy colleague says, his will ought to be subservient to yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If government were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior. But government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that in which the determination precedes the discussion, in which one set of men deliberate and another decide, and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?. . . _Authoritative_ instructions, _mandates_ issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest convictions of his judgment and conscience--these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our Constitution. [1]

[Footnote 1: "Speech at the conclusion of the Poll. "]

For six years the Bristol electors were content to be represented bya man of this independence. They never, however, really acquiescedin the principle that a member of Parliament owes as much to his ownconvictions as to the will of his constituents. In 1778 a bill wasbrought into Parliament, relaxing some of the restrictions imposedupon Ireland by the atrocious fiscal policy of Great Britain. Thegreat mercantile centres raised a furious outcry, and Bristol was asblind and as boisterous as Manchester and Glasgow. Burke not onlyspoke and voted in favour of the commercial propositions, but urgedthat the proposed removal of restrictions on Irish trade did not gonearly far enough. There was none of that too familiar casuistry, by which public men argue themselves out of their consciences in astrange syllogism, that they can best serve the country in Parliament;that to keep their seats they must follow their electors; and thattherefore, in the long run, they serve the country best by acquiescingin ignorance and prejudice. Anybody can denounce an abuse. It needsvalour and integrity to stand forth against a wrong to which our bestfriends are most ardently committed. It warms our hearts to thinkof the noble courage with which Burke faced the blind and vileselfishness of his own supporters. He reminded them that England onlyconsented to leave to the Irish in two or three instances the use ofthe natural faculties which God had given them. He asked them whetherIreland was united to Great Britain for no other purpose than that weshould counteract the bounty of Providence in her favour; and whether, in proportion as that bounty had been liberal, we were to regard it asan evil to be met with every possible corrective? In our day there isnobody of any school who doubts that Burke's view of our trade policytowards Ireland was accurately, absolutely, and magnificently right. I need not repeat the arguments. They made no mark on the Bristolmerchants. Burke boldly told them that he would rather run the risk ofdispleasing than of injuring them. They implored him to become theiradvocate. "I should only disgrace myself, " he said; "I should lose theonly thing which can make such abilities as mine of any use to theworld now or hereafter. I mean that authority which is derived fromthe opinion that a member speaks the language of truth and sincerity, and that he is not ready to take up or lay down a great politicalsystem for the convenience of the hour; that he is in Parliament tosupport his opinion of the public good, and does not form his opinionin order to get into Parliament or to continue in it. "[1]

[Footnote 1: _Two Letters to Gentlemen in Bristol_, 1778. ]

A small instalment of humanity to Ireland was not more distasteful tothe electors of Bristol than a small instalment of toleration to RomanCatholics in England. A measure was passed (1778) repealing certaininiquitous penalties created by an Act of William the Third. It isneedless to say that this rudimentary concession to justice and sensewas supported by Burke. His voters began to believe that those wereright who had said that he had been bred at Saint Omer's, was a Papistat heart, and a Jesuit in disguise. When the time came, _summa dies etineluctabile fatum_, Burke bore with dignity and temper his dismissalfrom the only independent constituency that he ever represented. Yearsbefore he had warned a young man entering public life to regard andwish well to the common people, whom his best instincts and hishighest duties lead him to love and to serve, but to put as littletrust in them as in princes. Burke somewhere describes an honestpublic life as carrying on a poor unequal conflict against thepassions and prejudices of our day, perhaps with no better weaponsthan passions and prejudices of our own. 

The six years during which Burke sat in Parliament for Bristol, sawthis conflict carried on under the most desperate circumstances. Theywere the years of the civil war between the English at home and theEnglish in the American colonies. George III. And Lord North have beenmade scapegoats for sins which were not exclusively, their own. Theywere only the organs and representatives of all the lurking ignoranceand arbitrary humours of the entire community. Burke discloses in manyplaces, that for once the king and Parliament did not act without thesympathies of the mass. In his famous speech at Bristol, in 1780, hewas rebuking the intolerance of those who bitterly taunted him for thesupport of the measure for the relaxation of the Penal Code. "It isbut too true, " he said in a passage worth remembering, "that the love, and even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely rare. It isbut too true that there are many whose whole scheme of freedom is madeup of pride, perverseness, and insolence. They feel themselves ina state of thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped andcabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependenton their mercy. The desire of having some one below them, descendsto those who are the very lowest of all; and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling Church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose footman's instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain froma gaol. This disposition is the true source of the passion whichmany men, in very humble life, have taken to the American war. _Our_subjects in America; _our_ colonies; _our_ dependents. This lust ofparty power is the liberty they hunger and thirst for; and this Sirensong of ambition has charmed ears that we would have thought werenever organised to that sort of music. "

This was the mental attitude of a majority of the nation, and it wasfortunate for them and for us that the yeomen and merchants on theother side of the Atlantic had a more just and energetic appreciationof the crisis. The insurgents, while achieving their own freedom, wereindirectly engaged in fighting the battle of the people of the mothercountry as well. Burke had a vehement correspondent who wrote tohim (1777) that if the utter ruin of this country were to be theconsequence of her persisting in the claim to tax America, then hewould be the first to say, _Let her perish!_ If England prevails, saidHorace Walpole, English and American liberty is at an end; if onefell, the other would fall with it. Burke, seeing this, "certainlynever could and never did wish, " as he says of himself, "the coloniststo be subdued by arms. He was fully persuaded that if such should bethe event, they must be held in that subdued state by a great body ofstanding forces, and perhaps of foreign forces. He was strongly ofopinion that such armies, first victorious over Englishmen, in aconflict for English constitutional rights and privileges, andafterwards habituated (though in America) to keep an English peoplein a state of abject subjection, would prove fatal in the end to theliberties of England itself. "[1] The way for this remote peril wasbeing sedulously prepared by a widespread deterioration among popularideas, and a fatal relaxation of the hold which they had previouslygained in the public mind. In order to prove that the Americans had noright to their liberties, we were every day endeavouring to subvertthe maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove thatthe Americans ought not to be free, we were obliged to depreciate thevalue of freedom itself. The material strength of the Government, andits moral strength alike, would have been reinforced by the defeat ofthe colonists, to such an extent as to have seriously delayed or evenjeopardised English progress, and therefore that of Europe too. Asevents actually fell out, the ferocious administration of the lawin the last five or six years of the eighteenth century was theretribution for the lethargy or approval with which the mass of theEnglish community had watched the measures of the Government againsttheir fellow-Englishmen in America. 

[Footnote 1: _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_. ]

It is not necessary here to follow Burke minutely through thesuccessive stages of parliamentary action in the American war. Healways defended the settlement of 1766; the Stamp Act was repealed, and the constitutional supremacy and sovereign authority of the mothercountry was preserved in a Declaratory Act. When the project of taxingthe colonies was revived, and relations with them were becomingstrained and dangerous, Burke came forward with a plan for leaving theGeneral Assemblies of the colonies to grant supplies and aids, insteadof giving and granting supplies in Parliament, to be raised and paidin the colonies. Needless to say that it was rejected, and perhaps itwas not feasible. Henceforth Burke could only watch in impotence theblunders of Government, and the disasters that befell the nationalarms. But his protests against the war will last as long as ourliterature. 

Of all Burke's writings none are so fit to secure unqualifiedand unanimous admiration as the three pieces on this momentousstruggle:--the Speech on American Taxation (April 19, 1774); theSpeech on Conciliation with America (March 22, 1775); and the Letterto the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777). Together they hardly exceed thecompass of the little volume which the reader now has in his hands. Itis no exaggeration to say that they compose the most perfect manual inour literature, or in any literature, for one who approaches the studyof public affairs, whether for knowledge or for practice. They are anexample without fault of all the qualities which the critic, whether atheorist or an actor, of great political situations should strive bynight and by day to possess. If the theme with which they deal wereless near than it is to our interests and affections as free citizens, these three performances would still abound in the lessons of anincomparable political method. If their subject were as remote as thequarrel between the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the war between Romeand the Allies, instead of a conflict to which the world owes theopportunity of the most important of political experiments, we shouldstill have everything to learn from the author's treatment; thevigorous grasp of masses of compressed detail, the wide illuminationfrom great principles of human experience, the strong and masculinefeeling for the two great political ends of Justice and Freedom, thelarge and generous interpretation of expediency, the morality, thevision, the noble temper. If ever, in the fulness of time, and surelythe fates of men and literature cannot have it otherwise, Burkebecomes one of the half-dozen names of established and universalcurrency in education and in common books, rising above thewaywardness of literary caprice or intellectual fashions, asShakespeare and Milton and Bacon rise above it, it will be themastery, the elevation, the wisdom, of these far-shining discourses inwhich the world will in an especial degree recognise the combinationof sovereign gifts with beneficent uses. 

The pamphlet on the _Present Discontents_ is partially obscured ormuffled to the modern reader by the space which is given to the cabalof the day. The _Reflections on the French Revolution_ over-abounds indeclamation, and--apart from its being passionately on one side, andthat perhaps the wrong one--the splendour of the eloquence is outof proportion to the reason and the judgment. In the pieces on theAmerican war, on the contrary, Burke was conscious that he could trustnothing to the sympathy or the prepossessions of his readers, andthis put him upon an unwonted persuasiveness. Here it is reason andjudgment, not declamation; lucidity, not passion; that producesthe effects of eloquence. No choler mars the page; no purple patchdistracts our minds from the penetrating force of argument; nocommonplace is dressed up into a vague sublimity. The cause of freedomis made to wear its own proper robe of equity, self-control, andreasonableness. 

Not one, but all those great idols of the political market-place whoseworship and service has cost the race so dear, are discovered andshown to be the foolish uncouth stocks and stones that they are. Foxonce urged members of Parliament to peruse the speech on Conciliationagain and again, to study it, to imprint it on their minds, to impressit on their hearts. But Fox only referred to the lesson which hethought to be contained in it, that representation is the sovereignremedy for every evil. This is by far the least important of itslessons. It is great in many ways. It is greatest as a remonstranceand an answer against the thriving sophisms of barbarous nationalpride, the eternal fallacies of war and conquest; and here it isgreat, as all the three pieces on the subject are so, because theyexpose with unanswerable force the deep-lying faults of heart andtemper, as well as of understanding, which move nations to haughty andviolent courses. 

The great argument with those of the war party who pretended to apolitical defence of their position, was the doctrine that the EnglishGovernment was sovereign in the colonies as at home; and in the notionof sovereignty they found inherent the notion of an indefeasibleright to impose and exact taxes. Having satisfied themselves of theexistence of this sovereignty, and of the right which they took to beits natural property, they saw no step between the existence of anabstract right and the propriety of enforcing it. We have seen aninstance of a similar mode of political thinking in our own lifetime. During the great civil war between the northern and southern states ofthe American Union, people in England convinced themselves--someafter careful examination of documents, others by cursory glances atsecond-hand authorities--that the south had a right to secede. Thecurrent of opinion was precisely similar in the struggle to which theUnited States owed their separate existence. Now the idea of a rightas a mysterious and reverend abstraction, to be worshipped in a stateof naked divorce from expediency and convenience, was one that Burke'spolitical judgment found preposterous and unendurable. He hatedthe arbitrary and despotic savour which clung about the Englishassumptions over the colonies. And his repulsion was heightened whenhe found that these assumptions were justified, not by some permanentadvantage which their victory would procure for the mother countryor for the colonies, or which would repay the cost of gaining such avictory; not by the assertion and demonstration of some positive duty, but by the futile and meaningless doctrine that we had a right to dosomething or other, if we liked. 

The alleged compromise of the national dignity implied in a withdrawalof the just claim of the Government, instead of convincing, onlyexasperated him. "Show the thing you contend for to be reason; show itto be common sense; show it to be the means of attaining some usefulend; and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please. "[1]The next year he took up the ground still more firmly, and explainedit still more impressively. As for the question of the rightof taxation, he exclaimed, "It is less than nothing in myconsideration. . . . My consideration is narrow, confined, and whollylimited to the policy of the question. I do not examine whether thegiving away a man's money be a power excepted and reserved out of thegeneral trust of Government. . . . _The question with me is not whetheryou have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it isnot your interest to make them happy. _ It is not what a lawyer tellsme I _may_ do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I_ought_ to do. I am not determining a point of law; I am restoringtranquillity, and the general character and situation of a people mustdetermine what sort of government is fitted for them. " "I am not heregoing into the distinctions of rights, " he cries, "not attemptingto mark their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysicaldistinctions. _I hate the very sound of them_. This is the truetouchstone of all theories which regard man and the affairs of man:does it suit his nature in general?--does it suit his nature asmodified by his habits?" He could not bear to think of havinglegislative or political arrangements shaped or vindicated by adelusive geometrical accuracy of deduction, instead of being entrustedto "the natural operation of things, which, left to themselves, generally fall into their proper order. "

[Footnote 1: "Speech on American Taxation. "]

Apart from his incessant assertion of the principle that man acts fromadequate motives relative to his interests, and not on metaphysicalspeculations, Burke sows, as he marches along in his stately argument, many a germ of the modern philosophy of civilisation. He was told thatAmerica was worth fighting for. "Certainly it is, " he answered, "iffighting a people be the best way of gaining them. " Every step thathas been taken in the direction of progress, not merely in empire, butin education, in punishment, in the treatment of the insane, has shownthe deep wisdom, so unfamiliar in that age of ferocious penalties andbrutal methods, of this truth--that "the natural effect of fidelity, clemency, kindness in governors, is peace, good-will, order, andesteem in the governed. " Is there a single instance to the contrary?Then there is that sure key to wise politics:--"_Nobody shall persuademe when a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are notmeans of conciliation_. " And that still more famous sentence, "_Ido not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a wholepeople_. "

Good and observant men will feel that no misty benevolence or vaguesympathy, but the positive reality of experience, inspired suchpassages as that where he says, --"Never expecting to find perfectionin men, and not looking for divine attributes in created beings, in mycommerce with my contemporaries I have found much human virtue. The age unquestionably produces daring profligates and insidioushypocrites? What then? Am I not to avail myself of whatever good isto be found in the world, because of the mixture of evil that is init?. . . Those who raise suspicions of the good, on account ofthe behaviour of evil men, are of the party of the latter. . . . Aconscientious person would rather doubt his own judgment than condemnhis species. He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought toremember that he is sure to convict only one. In truth, I should muchrather admit those whom at any time I have disrelished the most, to bepatterns of perfection, than seek a consolation to my own unworthinessin a general communion of depravity with all about me. " This is one ofthose pieces of rational constancy and mental wholeness in Burke whichfill up our admiration for him--one of the manifold illustrations ofan invincible fidelity to the natural order and operation of things, even when they seemed most hostile to all that was dear to his ownpersonality. 

CHAPTER V

ECONOMICAL REFORM--BURKE IN OFFICE--FALL OF HIS PARTY

Towards 1780 it began to be clear that the Ministers had broughtthe country into disaster and humiliation, from which their policycontained no way of escape. In the closing months of the American war, the Opposition pressed Ministers with a vigour that never abated. LordNorth bore their attacks with perfect good-humour. When Burke, inthe course of a great oration, parodied Burgoyne's invitation to theIndians to repair to the king's standard, the wit and satire ofit almost suffocated the Prime Minister, not with shame but withlaughter. His heart had long ceased to be in the matter, and everybodyknew that he only retained his post in obedience to the urgentimportunities of the king, whilst such colleagues as Rigby only clungto their place because the salaries were endeared by long familiarity. The general gloom was accidentally deepened by that hideous outbreakof fanaticism and violence, which is known as the Lord George GordonRiots (June 1780). The Whigs, as having favoured the relaxation ofthe laws against popery, were especially obnoxious to the mob. TheGovernment sent a guard of soldiers to protect Burke's house inCharles Street, St. James's; but after he had removed the moreimportant of his papers, he insisted on the guard being despatched forthe protection of more important places, and he took shelter under theroof of General Burgoyne. His excellent wife, according to a letter ofhis brother, had "the firmness and sweetness of an angel; but why doI say of an angel?--of a woman. " Burke himself courageously walkedto and fro amid the raging crowds with firm composure, though theexperiment was full of peril. He describes the mob as being made up, as London mobs generally are, rather of the unruly and dissolute thanof fanatical malignants, and he vehemently opposed any concessions byParliament to the spirit of intolerance which had first kindled theblaze. All the letters of the time show that the outrages and alarmsof those days and nights, in which the capital seemed to be at themercy of a furious rabble, made a deeper impression on the minds ofcontemporaries than they ought to have done. Burke was not likely tobe less excited than others by the sight of such insensate disorder;and it is no idle fancy that he had the mobs of 1780 still in hismemory, when ten years later he poured out the vials of his wrath onthe bloodier mob which carried the King and Queen of France in wildtriumph from Versailles to Paris. 

In the previous February (1780) Burke had achieved one of the greatestof all his parliamentary and oratorical successes. Though the matterof this particular enterprise is no longer alive, yet it illustrateshis many strong qualities in so remarkable a way that it is right togive some account of it. We have already seen that Burke steadily sethis face against parliamentary reform; he habitually declared thatthe machine was well enough to answer any good purpose, provided thematerials were sound. The statesman who resists all projects for thereform of the constitution, and yet eagerly proclaims how deplorablyimperfect are the practical results of its working, binds himself tovigorous exertions for the amendment of administration. Burke devotedhimself to this duty with a fervid assiduity that has not often beenexampled, and has never been surpassed. He went to work with the zealof a religious enthusiast, intent on purging his Church and his faithof the corruptions which lowered it in the eyes of men. There was nopart or order of government so obscure, so remote, or so complex, asto escape his acute and persevering observation. 

Burke's object, in his schemes for Economical Reform, was less tohusband the public resources and relieve the tax-payer--though thisaim could not have been absent from his mind, overburdened as Englandthen was with the charges of the American war--than to cut off thechannels which supplied the corruption of the House of Commons. Thefull title of the first project which he presented to the legislature(February 1780), was, A Plan for the Better Security of theIndependence of Parliament, and the Economical Reformation of theCivil and other Establishments. It was to the former that hedeemed the latter to be the most direct road. The strength of theadministration in the House was due to the gifts which the Ministerhad in his hands to dispense. Men voted with the side which couldreward their fidelity. It was the number of sinecure places andunpublished pensions, which along with the controllable influence ofpeers and nabobs, furnished the Minister with an irresistible lever:the avarice and the degraded public spirit of the recipients suppliedthe required fulcrum. Burke knew that in sweeping away thesefactitious places and secret pensions, he would be robbing theCourt of its chief implements of corruption, and protecting therepresentative against his chief motive in selling his country. Heconceived that he would thus be promoting a far more infallible meansthan any scheme of electoral reform could have provided, for revivingthe integrity and independence of the House of Commons. In hiseyes, the evil resided not in the constituencies, but in theirrepresentatives; not in the small number of the one, but in thesmaller integrity of the other. The evil did not stop where it began. It was not merely that the sinister motive, thus engendered inthe minds of too lax and facile men, induced them to betray theirlegislative trust, and barter their own uprightness and the interestsof the State. The acquisition of one of these nefarious bribes meantmuch more than a sinister vote. It called into existence a champion ofevery inveterate abuse that weighed on the resources of the country. There is a well-known passage in the speech on Economical Reform, inwhich the speaker shows what an insurmountable obstacle Lord Talbothad found in his attempt to carry out certain reforms in the royalhousehold, in the fact that the turnspit of the king's kitchen was amember of Parliament. "On that rock his whole adventure split, --hiswhole scheme of economy was dashed to pieces; his departmentbecame more expensive than ever; the Civil List debt accumulated. "Interference with the expenses of the household meant interferencewith the perquisites or fees of this legislative turnspit, and therights of sinecures were too sacred to be touched. In comparison withthem, it counted for nothing that the king's tradesmen went unpaid, and became bankrupt; that the judges were unpaid; that the justice ofthe kingdom bent and gave way; the foreign ministers remained inactiveand unprovided; the system of Europe was dissolved; the chain of ouralliances was broken; all the wheels of Government at home and abroadwere stopped. _The king's turnspit was a member of Parliament_. [1]This office and numbers of others exactly like it, existed solelybecause the House of Commons was crowded with venal men. The post ofroyal scullion meant a vote that could be relied upon under everycircumstance and in all emergencies. And each incumbent of such anoffice felt his honour and interests concerned in the defence of allother offices of the same scandalous description. There was thusmaintained a strong standing army of expensive, lax, and corruptingofficials. 

[Footnote 1: The Civil List at this time comprehended a great numberof charges, such as those of which Burke speaks, that had nothingto do with the sovereign personally. They were slowly removed, thejudicial and diplomatic charges being transferred on the accession ofWilliam IV. ] The royal household was a gigantic nest of costly jobberyand purposeless profusion. It retained all "the cumbrous charge ofa Gothic establishment, " though all its usage and accommodation had"shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance. " The outlaywas enormous. The expenditure on the court tables only was a thingunfathomable. Waste was the rule in every branch of it. There was anoffice for the Great Wardrobe, another office of the Robes, a thirdof the Groom of the Stole. For these three useless offices therewere three useless treasurers. They all laid a heavy burden on thetaxpayer, in order to supply a bribe to the member of Parliament. The plain remedy was to annihilate the subordinate treasuries. "Takeaway, " was Burke's demand, "the whole establishment of detail inthe household: the Treasurer, the Comptroller, the Cofferer of theHousehold, the Treasurer of the Chamber, the Master of the Household, the whole Board of Green Cloth; a vast number of subordinate officesin the department of the Steward of the Household; the wholeestablishment of the Great Wardrobe; the Removing Wardrobe; the JewelOffice; the Robes; the Board of Works. " The abolition of this confusedand costly system would not only diminish expense and promoteefficiency; it would do still more excellent service in destroying theroots of parliamentary corruption. "Under other governments a questionof expense is only a question of economy, and it is nothing more;with us, in every question of expense, there is always a mixture ofconstitutional considerations. "

Places and pensions, though the worst, were not by any means the onlystumbling-block in the way of pure and well-ordered government. Theadministration of the estates of the Crown, --the Principality, theDuchy of Cornwall, the Duchy of Lancaster, the County Palatineof Chester, --was an elaborate system of obscure and unprofitableexpenditure. Wales had to herself eight judges, while no more thantwelve sufficed to perform the whole business of justice in England, acountry ten times as large and a hundred times as opulent. Wales, and each of the duchies, had its own exchequer. Every one of theseprincipalities, said Burke, has the apparatus of a kingdom, for thejurisdiction over a few private estates; it has the formality andcharge of the Exchequer of Great Britain, for collecting the rents ofa country squire. They were the field, in his expressive phrase, of mock jurisdictions and mimic revenues, of difficult trifles andlaborious fooleries. "It was but the other day that that pert factiousfellow, the Duke of Lancaster, presumed to fly in the face of hisliege lord, our gracious sovereign--presumed to go to law with theking. The object is neither your business nor mine. Which of theparties got the better I really forget. The material point is that thesuit cost about £15, 000. But as the Duke of Lancaster is but agent ofDuke Humphrey, and not worth a groat, our sovereign was obliged to paythe costs of both. " The system which involved these costly absurditiesBurke proposed entirely to abolish. In the same spirit he wished todispose of the Crown lands and the forest lands, which it was for thegood of the community, not less than of the Crown itself, to throwinto the hands of private owners. 

One of the most important of these projected reforms, and one whichits author did not flinch from carrying out two years later to hisown loss, related to the office of Paymaster. This functionary wasaccustomed to hold large balances of the public money in his own handsand for his own profit, for long periods, owing to a complex system ofaccounts which was so rigorous as entirely to defeat its own object. The paymaster could not, through the multiplicity of forms and theexaction of impossible conditions, get a prompt acquittance. Theaudit sometimes did not take place for years after the accounts werevirtually closed. Meanwhile the money accumulated in his hands, andits profits were his legitimate perquisite. Lord Holland, or hisrepresentatives, held the balances of his office from 1765, when heretired, until 1778, when they were audited. During this time herealised, as the interest on the use of these balances, nearly twohundred and fifty thousand pounds. Burke diverted these enormous gainsinto the coffers of the State. He fixed the paymaster's salary at fourthousand pounds a year, and was himself the first person who acceptedthe curtailed income. 

Not the most fervid or brilliant of Burke's pieces, yet the speech onEconomical Reform is certainly not the least instructive or impressiveof them. It gives a suggestive view of the relations existing at thattime between the House of Commons and the Court. It reveals the narrowand unpatriotic spirit of the king and the ministers, who could resistproposals so reasonable in themselves, and so remedial in theireffects, at a time when the nation was suffering the heavy anddistressing burdens of the most disastrous war that our country hasever carried on. It is especially interesting as an illustration ofits author's political capacity. At a moment when committees andpetitions and great county meetings showed how thoroughly the nationalanger was roused against the existing system, Burke came to the frontof affairs with a scheme, of which the most striking characteristicproved to be that it was profoundly temperate. Bent on the extirpationof the system, he had no ill-will towards the men who had happenedto flourish in it. "I never will suffer, " he said, "any man ordescription of men to suffer from errors that naturally have grownout of the abusive constitution of those offices which I propose toregulate. If I cannot reform with equity, I will not reform at all. "Exasperated as he was by the fruitlessness of his opposition to apolicy which he detested from the bottom of his soul, it would havebeen little wonderful if he had resorted to every weapon of hisunrivalled rhetorical armoury, in order to discredit and overthrow thewhole scheme of government. Yet nothing could have been further fromhis mind than any violent or extreme idea of this sort. Many yearsafterwards, he took credit to himself less for what he did on thisoccasion than for what he prevented from being done. People were readyfor a new modelling of the two Houses of Parliament, as well as forgrave modifications of the Prerogative. Burke resisted this temperunflinchingly. "I had, " he says, "a state to preserve, as well as astate to reform. I had a people to gratify, but not to inflame or tomislead. " He then recounts without exaggeration the pains and cautionwith which he sought reform, while steering clear of innovation. Heheaved the lead every inch of way he made. It is grievous to thinkthat a man who could assume such an attitude at such a time, who couldgive this kind of proof of his skill in the great, the difficult artof governing, only held a fifth-rate office for some time less than atwelvemonth. 

The year of the project of Economic Reform (1780) is usually taken asthe date when Burke's influence and repute were at their height. Hehad not been tried in the fire of official responsibility, and hisimpetuosity was still under a degree of control which not longafterwards was fatally weakened by an over-mastering irritability ofconstitution. High as his character was now in the ascendant, it wasin the same year that Burke suffered the sharp mortification of losinghis seat at Bristol. His speech before the election is one of the bestknown of all his performances; and it well deserves to be so, for itis surpassed by none in gravity, elevation, and moral dignity. Wecan only wonder that a constituency which could suffer itself tobe addressed on this high level, should have allowed the smallselfishness of local interest to weigh against such wisdom andnobility. But Burke soon found in the course of his canvas that he hadno chance, and he declined to go to the poll. On the previous day oneof his competitors had fallen down dead. "_What shadows we are_" saidBurke, "_and what shadows we pursue!_"

In 1782 Lord North's government came to an end, and the king "waspleased, " as Lord North quoted with jesting irony from the _Gazette_, to send for Lord Rockingham, Charles Fox, and Lord Shelburne. Memberscould hardly believe their own eyes, as they saw Lord North and themembers of a government which had been in place for twelve years, nowlounging on the opposition benches in their greatcoats, frocks, andboots, while Fox and Burke shone in the full dress that was thenworn by ministers, and cut unwonted figures with swords, lace, andhair-powder. Sheridan was made an under-secretary of state, and to theyounger Pitt was offered his choice of various minor posts, which hehaughtily refused. Burke, to whom on their own admission the partyowed everything, was appointed Paymaster of the Forces, with a salaryof four thousand pounds a year. His brother, Richard Burke, wasmade Secretary of the Treasury. His son Richard was named to be hisfather's deputy at the Pay-Office, with a salary of five hundredpounds. 

This singular exclusion from cabinet office of the most powerfulgenius of the party has naturally given rise to abundant criticismever since. It will be convenient to say what there is to be said onthis subject, in connection with the events of 1788 (below, p. 200), because there happens to exist some useful information about theministerial crisis of that year, which sheds a clearer light upon thearrangements of six years before. Meanwhile it is enough to say thatBurke himself had most reasonably looked to some higher post. Thereis the distinct note of the humility of mortified pride in a letterwritten in reply to some one who had applied to him for a place. "Youhave been misinformed, " he says; "I make no part of the ministerialarrangement. Something in the official line may possibly be thoughtfit for my measure. " Burke knew that his position in the countryentitled him to something above the official line. In a later year, when he felt himself called upon to defend his pension, he describedwhat his position was in the momentous crisis from 1780 to 1782, andBurke's habitual veraciousness forbids us to treat the description asin any way exaggerated. "By what accident it matters not, " he says, "nor upon what desert, but just then, and in the midst of that hunt ofobloquy which has ever pursued me with a full cry through life, Ihad obtained a very full degree of public confidence. . . . Nothing toprevent disorder was omitted; when it appeared, nothing to subdue itwas left uncounselled nor unexecuted, as far as I could prevail. Atthe time I speak of, and having a momentary lead, so aided and soencouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand--I do not sayI saved my country--I am sure I did my country important service. There were few indeed that did not at that time acknowledge it--andthat time was thirteen years ago. It was but one view, that no man inthe kingdom better deserved an honourable provision should be made forhim. "[1]

[Footnote 1: _Letter to a Noble Lord. _]

We have seen that Burke had fixed the paymaster's salary at fourthousand pounds, and had destroyed the extravagant perquisites. Theother economical reforms which were actually effected fell short bya long way of those which Burke had so industriously devised and soforcibly recommended. In 1782, while Burke declined to spare his ownoffice, the chief of the cabinet conferred upon Barré a pension ofover three thousand a year; above ten times the amount, as has beensaid, which, in Lord Rockingham's own judgment, as expressed in thenew Bill, ought henceforth to be granted to any one person whatever. This shortcoming, however, does not detract from Burke's merit. He wasnot responsible for it. The eloquence, ingenuity, diligence, aboveall, the sagacity and the justice of this great effort of 1780, arenone the less worthy of our admiration and regard because, in 1782, his chiefs, partly perhaps out of a new-born deference for thefeelings of their royal master, showed that the possession of officehad sensibly cooled the ardent aspirations proper to Opposition. 

The events of the twenty months between the resignation of Lord North(1782) and the accession of Pitt to the office of Prime Minister(December 1783) mark an important crisis in political history, andthey mark an important crisis in Burke's career and hopes. LordRockingham had just been three months in office, when he died (July1782). This dissolved the bond that held the two sections of theministry together, and let loose a flood of rival ambitions and sharpanimosities. Lord Shelburne believed himself to have an irresistibleclaim to the chief post in the administration; among other reasons, because he might have had it before Lord Rockingham three monthsearlier, if he had so chosen. The king supported him, not from anypartiality to his person, but because he dreaded and hated CharlesFox. The character of Shelburne is one of the perplexities of thetime. His views on peace and free trade make him one of the precursorsof the Manchester School. No minister was so well informed as to thethreads of policy in foreign countries. He was the intimate or thepatron of men who now stand out as among the first lights of thattime--of Morellet, of Priestley, of Bentham. Yet a few months of powerseem to have disclosed faults of character, which left him without asingle political friend, and blighted him with irreparable discredit. Fox, who was now the head of the Rockingham section of the Whigs, had, before the death of the late premier, been on the point of refusing toserve any longer with Lord Shelburne, and he now very promptly refusedto serve under him. When Parliament met after Rockingham's death, gossips noticed that Fox and Burke continued, long after the Speakerhad taken the chair, to walk backwards and forwards in the Court ofBequests, engaged in earnest conversation. According to one story, Burke was very reluctant to abandon an office whose emoluments wereas convenient to him as to his spendthrift colleague. Accordingto another and more probable legend, it was Burke who hurried therupture, and stimulated Fox's jealousy of Shelburne. The Duke ofRichmond disapproved of the secession, and remained in the Government. Sheridan also disapproved, but he sacrificed his personal convictionto loyalty to Fox. 

If Burke was responsible for the break-up of the Government, thenhe was the instigator of a blunder that must be pronounced not onlydisastrous but culpable. It lowered the legitimate spirit of partyto the nameless spirit of faction. The dangers from which the oldliberties of the realm had just emerged have been described by no oneso forcibly as by Burke himself. No one was so convinced as Burke thatthe only way of withstanding the arbitrary and corrupting policy ofthe Court was to form a strong Whig party. No one knew better than hethe sovereign importance and the immense difficulty of repairing theruin of the last twelve years by a good peace. The Rockingham orFoxite section were obviously unable to form an effective party withserious expectation of power, unless they had allies. They might, nodoubt, from personal dislike to Lord Shelburne, refuse to workunder him; but personal dislike could be no excuse for formally andviolently working against him, when his policy was their own, and whenits success was recognised by them no less than by him as of urgentmoment. Instead of either working with the other section of theirparty, or of supporting from below the gangway that which was thepolicy of both sections, they sought to return to power by coalescingwith the very man whose criminal subservience to the king's will hadbrought about the catastrophe that Shelburne was repairing. Burke mustshare the blame of this famous transaction. He was one of the mostfurious assailants of the new ministry. He poured out a freshinvective against Lord Shelburne every day Cynical contemporarieslaughed as they saw him in search of more and more humiliatingparallels, ransacking all literature from the Bible and the Romanhistory down to Mother Goose's tales. His passion carried him so faras to breed a reaction in those who listened to him. "I think, "wrote Mason from Yorkshire, where Burke had been on a visit to LordFitzwilliam in the autumn of 1782, "that Burke's mad obloquy againstLord Shelburne, and these insolent pamphlets in which he must havehad a hand, will do more to fix him (Shelburne) in his office thananything else. "

This result would have actually followed, for the nation was illpleased at the immoral alliance between the Foxites and the man whom, if they had been true to their opinions a thousand times repeated, they ought at that moment to have been impeaching. The Dissenters, whohad hitherto been his enthusiastic admirers, but who are rigid aboveother men in their demand of political consistency, lamented Burke'sfall in joining the Coalition, as Priestley told him many years after, as the fall of a friend and a brother. But Shelburne threw awaythe game. "His falsehoods, " says Horace Walpole, "his flatteries, duplicity, insincerity, arrogance, contradictions, neglect of hisfriends, with all the kindred of all these faults, were the dailytopics of contempt and ridicule; and his folly shut his eyes, nor didhe perceive that so very rapid a fall must have been owing to his ownincapacity. " This is the testimony of a hostile witness. It is borneout, however, by a circumstance of striking significance. When theking recovered the reins at the end of 1783, not only did he sendfor Pitt instead of for Shelburne, but Pitt himself neither invitedShelburne to join him, nor in any way ever consulted him then orafterwards, though he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer inShelburne's own administration. 

Whatever the causes may have been, the administration fell in thespring of 1783. It was succeeded by the memorable ministry of theCoalition, in which Fox and Lord North divided the real power underthe nominal lead of the Duke of Portland. Members saw Lord Northsqueezed up on the Treasury bench between two men who had a yearbefore been daily menacing him with the axe and the block; and it wasnot North whom they blamed, but Burke and Fox. Burke had returned tothe Pay-Office. His first act there was unfortunate. He restored totheir position two clerks who had been suspended for malversation, andagainst whom proceedings were then pending. When attacked for this inthe House, he showed an irritation which would have carried him togross lengths, if Fox and Sheridan had not by main force pulled himdown into his seat by the tails of his coat. The restoration of theclerks was an indefensible error of judgment, and its indiscretion washeightened by the kind of defence which Burke tried to set up. Whenwe wonder at Burke's exclusion from great offices, this case of Powelland Bembridge should not be forgotten. 

The decisive event in the history of the Coalition Government was theIndia Bill. The Reports of the various select committees upon Indianaffairs--the most important of them all, the ninth and eleventh, having been drawn up by Burke himself--had shown conclusively that theexisting system of government was thoroughly corrupt and thoroughlyinadequate. It is ascertained pretty conclusively that the Bill forreplacing that system was conceived and drawn by Burke, and that tohim belongs whatever merit or demerit it might possess. It was Burkewho infected Fox with his own ardour, and then, as Moore justly says, the self-kindling power of Fox's eloquence threw such fire into hisdefence of the measure, that he forgot, and his hearers never foundout, that his views were not originally and spontaneously his own. Thenovelty on which the great stress of discussion was laid was thatthe Bill withdrew power from the Board of Directors, and vested theGovernment for four years in a commission of seven persons named inthe Bill, and not removable by the House. 

Burke was so convinced of the incurable iniquity of the Company, sopersuaded that it was not only full of abuses, but, as he said, one ofthe most corrupt and destructive tyrannies that probably ever existedin the world, as to be content with nothing short of the absolutedeprivation of its power. He avowed himself no lover of names, andthat he only contended for good government, from whatever quarter itmight come. But the idea of good government coming from the Company hedeclared to be desperate and untenable. This intense animosity, which, considering his long and close familiarity with the infamies of therule of the Company's servants, was not unnatural, must be allowed, however, to have blinded him to the grave objections which reallyexisted to his scheme. In the first place, the Bill was indisputablyinconsistent with the spirit of his revered Constitution. For thelegislature to assume the power of naming the members of an executivebody was an extraordinary and mischievous innovation. Then, to putpatronage, which has been estimated by a sober authority at aboutthree hundred thousand pounds a year, into the hands of the House ofCommons, was still more mischievous and still less justifiable. Worstof all, from the point of view of the projectors themselves, after acertain time the nomination of the Commissioners would fall to theCrown, and this might in certain contingencies increase to a mostdangerous extent the ascendancy of the royal authority. If Burke'smeasure had been carried, moreover, the patronage would have beentransferred to a body much less competent than the Directors tojudge of the qualities required in the fulfilment of this orthat administrative charge. Indian promotion would have followedparliamentary and party interest. In the hands of the Directors therewas at least a partial security, in their professional knowledge, and their personal interest in the success of their government, thatplaces would not be given away on irrelevant considerations. Theirsystem, with all its faults, insured the acquisition of a certainconsiderable competency in administration before a servant reached anelevation at which he could do much harm. 

Burke defended the Bill (December 1, 1783) in one of the speecheswhich rank only below his greatest, and it contains two or threepassages of unsurpassed energy and impressiveness. Everybody knows thefine page about Fox as the descendant of Henry IV. Of France, and thehappy quotation from Silius Italicus. Every book of British eloquencecontains the magnificent description of the young magistrates whoundertake the government and the spoliation of India; how, "animatedwith all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, theyroll in one after another, wave after wave; and there is nothingbefore the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospectof new flights of birds of prey and of passage, with appetitescontinually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. " How theyreturn home laden with spoil: "their prey is lodged in England; andthe cries of India are given to seas and winds, to be blown about, inevery breaking up of the monsoon, over a remote and unhearing ocean. "How in India all the vices operate by which sudden fortune isacquired; while in England are often displayed by the same personthe virtues which dispense hereditary wealth, so that "here themanufacturer and the husbandman will bless the just and punctual handthat in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested the scantyportion of rice and salt from the peasant of Bengal, or wrung from himthe very opium in which he forgot his oppression and his oppressors. "

No degree of eloquence, however, could avail to repair faults alikein structure and in tactics. The whole design was a masterpiece ofhardihood, miscalculation, and mismanagement. The combination ofinterests against the Bill was instant, and it was indeed formidable. The great army of returned nabobs, of directors, of proprietors ofEast India stock, rose up in all its immense force. Every member ofevery corporation that enjoyed privilege by charter, felt the attackon the Company as if it had been a blow directed against himself. The general public had no particular passion for purity or goodgovernment, and the best portion of the public was disgusted with theCoalition. The king saw his chance. With politic audacity he put sostrong a personal pressure on the peers, that they threw out the Bill(December 1783). It was to no purpose that Fox compared the lords tothe Janissaries of a Turkish Sultan, and the king's letter to Temple, to the rescript in which Tiberius ordered the upright Sejanus to bedestroyed. Ministers were dismissed, the young Pitt was installed intheir place, and the Whigs were ruined. As a party, they had a fewmonths of office after Pitt's death, but they were excluded from powerfor half a century. 

CHAPTER VI

BURKE AND HIS FRIENDS

Though Burke had, at a critical period of his life, definitelyabandoned the career of letters, he never withdrew from close intimacywith the groups who still live for us in the pages of Boswell, as noother literary group in our history lives. Goldsmith's famous lines in_Retaliation_ show how they all deplored that he should to party giveup what was meant for mankind. They often told one another that EdmundBurke was the man whose genius pointed him out as the triumphantchampion of faith and sound philosophy against deism, atheism, andDavid Hume. They loved to see him, as Goldsmith said, wind into hissubject like a serpent. Everybody felt at the Literary Club that hehad no superior in knowledge, and in colloquial dialectics only oneequal. Garrick was there, and of all the names of the time he is theman whom one would perhaps most willingly have seen, because the giftswhich threw not only Englishmen, but Frenchmen like Diderot, andGermans like Lichtenberg, into amazement and ecstasy, are exactlythose gifts which literary description can do least to reproduce. Burke was one of his strongest admirers, and there was no more zealousattendant at the closing series of performances in which the greatmonarch of the stage abdicated his throne. In the last pages thathe wrote, Burke refers to his ever dear friend Garrick, dead nearlytwenty years before, as the first of actors because he was the acutestobserver of nature that he had ever known. Then among men who passfor being more serious than players, Robertson was often in Londonsociety, and he attracted Burke by his largeness and breadth. He senta copy of his _History of America_, and Burke thanked him with manystately compliments for having employed philosophy to judge ofmanners, and from manners having drawn new resources of philosophy. Gibbon was there, but the bystanders felt what was too crudelyexpressed by Mackintosh, that Gibbon might have been taken from acorner of Burke's mind without ever being missed. Though Burke andGibbon constantly met, it is not likely that, until the Revolution, there was much intimacy between them, in spite of the respect whicheach of them might well have had for the vast knowledge of the other. When the _Decline and Fall_ was published, Burke read it as everybodyelse did; but he told Reynolds that he disliked the style, as veryaffected, mere frippery and tinsel. Sir Joshua himself was neithera man of letters nor a keen politician; but he was full of literaryideas and interests, and he was among Burke's warmest and mostconstant friends, following him with an admiration and reverence thateven Johnson sometimes thought excessive. The reader of Reynolds'sfamous Discourses will probably share the wonder of hiscontemporaries, that a man whose time was so absorbed in the practiceof his art, should have proved himself so excellent a master in theexpression of some of its principles. Burke was commonly credited witha large share in their composition, but the evidence goes no furtherthan that Reynolds used to talk them over with him. The friendshipbetween the pair was full and unalloyed. What Burke admired in thegreat artist was his sense and his morals, no less than his genius;and to a man of his fervid and excitable temper there was the mostattractive of all charms in Sir Joshua's placidity, gentleness, evenness, and the habit, as one of his friends described it, of beingthe same all the year round. When Reynolds died in 1792, he appointedBurke one of his executors, and left him a legacy of two thousandpounds, besides cancelling a bond of the same amount. 

Johnson, however, is the only member of that illustrious company whocan profitably be compared with Burke in strength and impressivenessof personality, in a large sensibility at once serious and genial, inbrooding care for all the fulness of human life. This striking pairwere the two complements of a single noble and solid type, holdingtenaciously, in a century of dissolvent speculation, to the best ideasof a society that was slowly passing. They were powerless to hinderthe inevitable transformation. One of them did not even dimlyforesee it. But both of them help us to understand how manliness andreverence, strength and tenderness, love of truth and pity for man, all flourished under old institutions and old ways of thinking, intowhich the forces of the time were even then silently breathing a newspirit. The friendship between Burke and Johnson lasted as long asthey lived; and if we remember that Johnson was a strong Tory, anddeclared that the first Whig was the devil, and habitually talkedabout cursed Whigs and bottomless Whigs, it is an extraordinary factthat his relations with the greatest Whig writer and politician of hisday were marked by a cordiality, respect, and admiration that nevervaried nor wavered. "Burke, " he said in a well-known passage, "is sucha man that if you met him for the first time in the street, where youwere stopped by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to takeshelter but for five minutes, he'd talk to you in such a manner that, when you parted, you would say, This is an extraordinary man. He isnever what we would call humdrum; never unwilling to begin to talk, nor in haste to leave off. " That Burke was as good a listener as hewas a talker, Johnson never would allow. "So desirous is he to talk, "he said, "that if one is talking at this end of the table, he'll talkto somebody at the other end. " Johnson was far too good a critic, andtoo honest a man, to assent to a remark of Robertson's, that Burke hadwit. "No, sir, " said the sage, most truly, "he never succeeds there. 'Tis low, 'tis conceit. " Wit apart, he described Burke as the onlyman whose common conversation corresponded to his general fame in theworld; take up whatever topic you might please, he was ready to meetyou. When Burke found a seat in Parliament, Johnson said, "Now we whoknow Burke, know that he will be one of the first men in the country. "He did not grudge that Burke should be the first man in the House ofCommons, for Burke, he said, was always the first man everywhere. Oncewhen he was ill, somebody mentioned Burke's name. Johnson cried out, "That fellow calls forth all my powers; were I to see Burke now itwould kill me. "

Burke heartily returned this high appreciation. When some flattererhinted that Johnson had taken more than his right share of theevening's talk, Burke said, "Nay, it is enough for me to have rungthe bell for him. " Some one else spoke of a successful imitationof Johnson's style. Burke with vehemence denied the success: theperformance, he said, had the pomp, but not the force of the original;the nodosities of the oak, but not its strength; the contortions ofthe sibyl, but none of the inspiration. When Burke showed the oldsage of Bolt Court over his fine house and pleasant gardens atBeaconsfield, _Non invideo equidem_, Johnson said, with placidgood-will, _miror magis_. They always parted in the deep and pregnantphrase of a sage of our own day, _except in opinion not disagreeing_. In truth, the explanation of the sympathy between them is not farto seek. We may well believe that Johnson was tacitly alive to theessentially conservative spirit of Burke even in his most Whiggishdays. And Burke penetrated the liberality of mind in a Tory, whocalled out with loud indignation that the Irish were in a mostunnatural state, for there the minority prevailed over the majority, and the severity of the persecution exercised by the Protestantsof Ireland against the Catholics exceeded that of the ten historicpersecutions of the Christian Church. 

The parties at Beaconsfield, and the evenings at the "Turk's Head" inGerard Street, were contemporary with the famous days at Holbach'scountry house at Grandval. When we think of the reckless themes thatwere so recklessly discussed by Holbach, Diderot, and the rest of thatindefatigable band, we feel that, as against the French philosophicparty, an English Tory like Johnson and an English Whig like Burkewould have found their own differences too minute to be worthconsidering. If the group from the "Turk's Head" could have beentransported for an afternoon to Grandval, perhaps Johnson would havebeen the less impatient and disgusted of the two. He had the capacityof the more genial sort of casuist for playing with subjects, evenmoral subjects, with the freedom, versatility, and ease that areproper to literature. Burke, on the contrary, would not have failedto see, as indeed we know that he did not fail to see, that a socialpandemonium was being prepared in this intellectual paradise of openquestions, where God and a future life, marriage and the family, everydogma of religion, every prescription of morality, and all thosemysteries and pieties of human life which have been sanctified by thereverence of ages, were being busily pulled to pieces as if they hadbeen toys in the hands of a company of sportive children. Even the_Beggar's Opera_ Burke could not endure to hear praised for its witor its music, because his mind was filled by thought of its misplacedlevity, and he only saw the mischief which such a performance tendedto do to society. It would be hard to defend his judgment in thisparticular case, but it serves to show how Burke was never contentwith the literary point of view, and how ready and vigilant he was foreffects more profound than those of formal criticism. It is true thatJohnson was sometimes not less austere in condemning a great work ofart for its bad morality. The only time when he was really angry withHannah More was on his finding that she had read _Tom Jones_--thatvicious book, he called it; he hardly knew a more corrupt work. Burke's tendency towards severity of moral judgment, however, neverimpaired the geniality and tenderness of his relations with those whomhe loved. Bennet Langton gave Boswell an affecting account of Burke'slast interview with Johnson. A few days before the old man's death, Burke and four or five other friends were sitting round his bedside. "Mr. Burke said to him, 'I am afraid, sir, such a number of us may beoppressive to you. ' 'No, sir, ' said Johnson, 'it is not so; and I mustbe in a wretched state indeed when your company is not a delightto me. ' Mr. Burke, in a tremulous voice, expressive of being verytenderly affected, replied, 'My dear sir, you have always been toogood to me. ' Immediately afterwards he went away. This was the lastcircumstance in the acquaintance of these two eminent men. "

One of Burke's strongest political intimacies was only lessinteresting and significant than his friendship with Johnson. William Dowdeswell had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in the shortRockingham administration of 1765. He had no brilliant gifts, but hehad what was then thought a profound knowledge both of the principlesand details of the administration of the national revenue. He wasindustrious, steadfast, clearheaded, inexorably upright. "Immersed inthe greatest affairs, " as Burke said in his epitaph, "he neverlost the ancient, native, genuine English character of a countrygentleman. " And this was the character in which Burke now and alwayssaw not only the true political barrier against despotism on the onehand and the rabble on the other, but the best moral type of civicvirtue. Those who admire Burke, but cannot share his admiration forthe country gentleman, will perhaps justify him by the assumption thathe clothed his favourite with ideal qualities which ought, even ifthey did not, to have belonged to that position. 

In his own modest imitation and on his own humble scale he was apattern of the activity in public duty, the hospitality towardsfriends, the assiduous protection of neglected worth, which ought tobe among the chief virtues of high station. It would perhaps be doublyunsafe to take for granted that many of our readers have both turnedover the pages of Crabbe's _Borough_, and carried away in their mindsfrom that moderately affecting poem, the description of Eusebius--

 That pious moralist, that reasoning saint! Can I of worth like thine, Eusebius, speak? The man is willing, but the muse is weak. 

Eusebius is intended for Burke, and the portrait is a literary tributefor more substantial services. When Crabbe came up from his nativeAldborough, with three pounds and a case of surgical instruments inhis trunk, he fondly believed that a great patron would be found towatch over his transformation from an unsuccessful apothecary into apopular poet. He wrote to Lord North and Lord Shelburne, but they didnot answer his letters; booksellers returned his copious manuscripts;the three pounds gradually disappeared; the surgical instruments wentto the pawnbroker's; and the poet found himself an outcast on theworld, without a friend, without employment, and without bread. Heowed money for his lodging, and was on the very eve of being sent toprison, when it occurred to him to write to Burke. It was the moment(1781) when the final struggle with Lord North was at its fiercest, and Burke might have been absolved if, in the stress of conflict, he had neglected a begging-letter. As it was, the manliness andsimplicity of Crabbe's application touched him. He immediately made anappointment with the young poet, and convinced himself of his worth. He not only relieved Crabbe's immediate distress with a sum of moneythat, as we know, came from no affluence of his own, but carried himoff to Beaconsfield, installed him there as a member of the family, and took as much pains to find a printer for _The Library_ and _TheVillage_, as if they had been poems of his own. In time he persuadedthe Bishop of Norwich to admit Crabbe, in spite of his want of aregular qualification, to holy orders. He then commended him tothe notice of Lord Chancellor Thurlow. Crabbe found the Tiger lessformidable than his terrifying reputation, for Thurlow at their firstinterview presented him with a hundred-pound note, and afterwards gavehim a living. The living was of no great value, it is true; and it wasBurke who, with untiring friendship, succeeded in procuring somethinglike a substantial position for him, by inducing the Duke of Rutlandto make the young parson his chaplain. Henceforth Crabbe's career wasassured, and he never forgot to revere and bless the man to whosegenerous hand he owed his deliverance. 

Another of Burke's clients, of whom we hardly know whether to say thathe is more or less known to our age than Crabbe, is Barry, a painterof disputable eminence. The son of a seafarer at Cork, he had beenintroduced to Burke in Dublin in 1762, was brought over to England byhim, introduced to some kind of employment, and finally sent, withfunds provided by the Burkes, to study art on the continent. It wascharacteristic of Burke's willingness not only to supply money, butwhat is a far rarer form of kindness, to take active trouble, that heshould have followed the raw student with long and careful letters ofadvice upon the proper direction of his studies. For five years Barrywas maintained abroad by the Burkes. Most unhappily for himself he wascursed with an irritable and perverse temper, and he lacked even theelementary arts of conduct. Burke was generous to the end, with thatdifficult and uncommon kind of generosity which moves independently ofgratitude or ingratitude in the receiver. 

From his earliest days Burke had been the eager friend of people indistress. While he was still a student at the Temple, or a writer forthe booksellers, he picked up a curious creature in the park, in suchunpromising circumstances that he could not forbear to take him underhis instant protection. This was Joseph Emin, the Armenian, who hadcome to Europe from India with strange heroic ideas in his head as tothe deliverance of his countrymen. Burke instantly urged him to acceptthe few shillings that he happened to have in his purse, and seemsto have found employment for him as a copyist, until fortune broughtother openings to the singular adventurer. For foreign visitors Burkehad always a singular considerateness. Two Brahmins came to Englandas agents of Ragonaut Rao, and at first underwent intolerable thingsrather from the ignorance than the unkindness of our countrymen. Burkeno sooner found out what was passing than he carried them down toBeaconsfield, and as it was summer-time, he gave them for theirseparate use a spacious garden-house, where they were free to preparetheir food and perform such rites as their religion prescribed. Nothing was so certain to command his fervid sympathy as strictadherence to the rules and ceremonies of an ancient and sacredordering. 

If he never failed to perform the offices to which we are bound bythe common sympathy of men, it is satisfactory to think that Burke inreturn received a measure of these friendly services. Among those wholoved him best was Dr. Brocklesby, the tender physician who watchedand soothed the last hours of Johnson. When we remember how Burke'ssoul was harassed by private cares, chagrined by the untoward courseof public events, and mortified by neglect from friends no less thanby virulent reproach from foes, it makes us feel very kindly towardsBrocklesby, to read what he wrote to Burke in 1788:--

 MY VERY DEAR FRIEND--My veneration of your public conduct for many years past, and my real affection for your private virtues and transcendent worth, made me yesterday take a liberty with you in a moment's conversation at my house, to make you an instant present of £1000, which for years past I had by will destined as a testimony of my regard on my decease. This you modestly desired me not to think of; but I told you what I now repeat, that unfavoured as I have lived for a long life, unnoticed professionally by any party of men, and though unknown at court, I am rich enough to spare to virtue (what others waste in vice) the above sum, and still reserve an annual income greater than I spend. I shall receive at the India House a bill I have discounted for £1000 on the 4th of next month, and then shall be happy that you will accept this proof of my sincere love and esteem, and let me add, _Si res ampla domi similisque affectibus esset_, I should be happy to repeat the like every year. 

The mere transcription of the friendly man's good letter has somethingof the effect of an exercise of religion. And it was only one of aseries of kind acts on the part of the same generous giver. 

It is always interesting in the case of a great man to know how heaffected the women of his acquaintance. Women do not usually judgecharacter either so kindly or so soundly as men do, for they lack thatknowledge of the ordeals of practical life, which gives both justiceand charity to such verdicts. But they are more susceptible than mostmen are to devotion and nobility in character. The little group of theblue-stockings of the day regarded the great master of knowledgeand eloquence with mixed feelings. They felt for Burke the adoringreverence which women offer, with too indiscriminate a trust, to menof commanding power. In his case it was the moral loftiness of hischaracter that inspired them, as much as the splendour of his ability. Of Sheridan or of Fox they could not bear to hear; of Burke they couldnot hear enough. Hannah More, and Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, the learnedtranslator of Epictetus, and Fanny Burney, the author of _Evelina_ and_Cecilia_, were all proud of his notice, even while they glowed withanger at his sympathy with American rebels, his unkind words about theking, and his cruel persecution of poor Mr. Hastings. It was at Mrs. Vesey's evening parties, given on the Tuesdays on which the Club dinedat the "Turk's Head, " that he often had long chats with Hannah More. She had to forget what she called his political malefactions, beforeshe could allow herself to admire his high spirits and good humour. This was after the events of the Coalition, and her _Memoirs_, likethe change in the mind of the Dissenters towards Burke, show what afall that act of faction was believed to mark in his character. Whenhe was rejected for Bristol, she moralised on the catastrophe by thequaint reflection, that Providence has wisely contrived to render allits dispensations equal, by making those talents which set one manso much above another, of no esteem in the opinion of those who arewithout them. 

Miss Burney has described her flutter of spirits when she first foundherself in company with Burke (1782). It was at Sir Joshua's house onthe top of Richmond Hill, and she tells, with her usual effusion, howshe was impressed by Burke's noble figure and commanding air, hispenetrating and sonorous voice, his eloquent and copious language, theinfinite variety and rapidity of his discourse. Burke had something tosay on every subject, from bits of personal gossip, up to the sweetand melting landscape that lay in all its beauty before their windowson the terrace. He was playful, serious, fantastic, wise. When theynext met, the great man completed his conquest by expressing hisadmiration of _Evelina_. Gibbon assured her that he had read the wholefive volumes in a day; but Burke declared the feat was impossible, forhe had himself read it through without interruption, and it had costhim three days. He showed his regard for the authoress in a moresubstantial way than by compliments and criticism. His last act, before going out of office, in 1783, was to procure for Dr. Burney theappointment of organist at the chapel of Chelsea. 

We have spoken of the dislike of these excellent women for Sheridanand Fox. In Sheridan's case Burke did not much disagree with them. Their characters were as unlike and as antipathetic as those of twomen could be; and to antipathy of temperament was probably added akind of rivalry, which may justly have affected one of them with anirritated humiliation. Sheridan was twenty years younger than Burke, and did not come into Parliament until Burke had fought the prolongedbattle of the American war, and had achieved the victory of EconomicReform. Yet Sheridan was immediately taken up by the party, and becamethe intimate and counsellor of Charles Fox, its leader, and of thePrince of Wales, its patron. That Burke never failed to do fulljustice to Sheridan's brilliant genius, or to bestow generous andunaffected praise on his oratorical successes, there is ampleevidence. He was of far too high and veracious a nature to be capableof the disparaging tricks of a poor jealousy. The humiliation lay inthe fact that circumstances had placed Sheridan in a position, whichmade it natural for the world to measure them with one another. Burkecould no more like Sheridan than he could like the _Beggar's Opera_. Sheridan had a levity, a want of depth, a laxity and dispersion offeeling, to which no degree of intellectual brilliancy could reconcilea man of such profound moral energy and social conviction as Burke. 

The thought will perhaps occur to the reader that Fox was not lesslax than Sheridan, and yet for Fox Burke long had the sincerestfriendship. He was dissolute, indolent, irregular, and the mostinsensate gambler that ever squandered fortune after fortune over thefaro-table. It was his vices as much as his politics that made GeorgeIII. Hate Fox as an English Catiline. How came Burke to accept a manof this character, first for his disciple, then for his friend, andnext for his leader? The answer is a simple one. In spite of thedisorders of his life, Fox, from the time when his acquaintance withBurke began, down to the time when it came to such disastrous end, and for long years afterwards, was to the bottom of his heart aspassionate for freedom, justice, and beneficence as Burke ever was. These great ends were as real, as constant, as overmastering in Foxas they were in Burke. No man was ever more deeply imbued with thegenerous impulses of great statesmanship, with chivalrous courage, with the magnificent spirit of devotion to high imposing causes. Thesequalities we may be sure, and not his power as a debater and as adeclaimer, won for him in Burke's heart the admiration which foundsuch splendid expression in a passage that will remain as a stockpiece of declamation for long generations after it was first pouredout as a sincere tribute of reverence and affection. Precisians, likeLafayette, might choose to see their patriotic hopes ruined ratherthan have them saved by Mirabeau, because Mirabeau was a debauchee. Burke's public morality was of stouter stuff, and he loved Fox becausehe knew that under the stains and blemishes that had been left by adeplorable education, was that sterling, inexhaustible ore in whichnoble sympathies are subtly compounded with resplendent powers. 

If he was warmly attached to his political friends, Burke, at leastbefore the Revolution, was usually on fair terms in private life withhis political opponents. There were few men whose policy he dislikedmore than he disliked the policy of George Grenville. And we have seenthat he criticised Grenville in a pamphlet which did not spare him. Yet Grenville and he did not refuse one another's hospitality, andwere on the best terms to the very end. Wilberforce, again, was oneof the staunchest friends of Pitt, and fought one of the greatestelectioneering battles on Pitt's side in the struggle of 1784; but itmade no difference in Burke's relations with him. In 1787 a coldnessarose between them. Burke had delivered a strong invective againstthe French Treaty. Wilberforce said, "We can make allowance for thehonourable gentleman, because we remember him in better days. " Theretort greatly nettled Burke, but the feeling soon passed away, and they both found a special satisfaction in the dinner to whichWilberforce invited Burke every session. "He was a great man, " saysWilberforce. "I could never understand how at one time he grew to beso entirely neglected. "

Outside of both political and literary circles, among Burke'scorrespondents was that wise and honest traveller whose name is asinseparably bound up with the preparation of the French Revolution, asBurke's is bound up with its sanguinary climax and fulfilment. ArthurYoung, by his Farmer's Letters, and Farmer's Calendar, and his accountof his travels in the southern counties of England and elsewhere--thestory of the more famous travels in France was not published until1792--had won a reputation as the best informed agriculturist of hisday. Within a year of his settlement at Beaconsfield, we find Burkewriting to consult Young on the mysteries of his new occupation. Thereader may smile as he recognises the ardour, the earnestness, thefervid gravity of the political speeches, in letters which discussthe merits of carrots in fattening porkers, and the precise degree towhich they should be boiled. Burke throws himself just as eagerly intowhite peas and Indian corn, into cabbages that grow into head andcabbages that shoot into leaves, into experiments with pumpkin seedand wild parsnip, as if they had been details of the Stamp Act, orjustice to Ireland. When he complains that it is scarcely possiblefor him, with his numerous avocations, to get his servants to enterfully into his views as to the right treatment of his crops, we caneasily understand that his farming did not help him to make money. Itis impossible that he should have had time or attention to spare forthe effectual direction of even a small farm. 

Yet if the farm brought scantier profit than it ought to have brought, it was probably no weak solace in the background of a life ofharassing interests and perpetual disappointments. Burke was happierat Beaconsfield than anywhere else, and he was happiest there when hishouse was full of guests. Nothing pleased him better than to drive avisitor over to Windsor, where he would expatiate with enthusiasm "onthe proud Keep, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with thedouble belt of its kindred and coeval towers, overseeing and guardingthe subjected land. " He delighted to point out the house atUxbridge where Charles I. Had carried on the negotiations with theParliamentary Commissioners; the beautiful grounds of Bulstrode, whereJudge Jefferies had once lived; and the churchyard of Beaconsfield, where lay the remains of Edmund Waller, the poet. He was fond oftalking of great statesmen--of Walpole, of Pulteney, and of Chatham. Some one had said that Chatham knew nothing whatever except Spenser's_Faery Queen_. "No matter how that was said, " Burke replied to one ofhis visitors, "whoever relishes and reads Spenser as he ought to beread, will have a strong hold of the English language. " The delight ofthe host must have been at least equalled by the delight of the guestin conversation which was thus ever taking new turns, branching intotopical surprises, and at all turns and on every topic was luminous, high, edifying, full. 

No guest was more welcome than the friend of his boyhood, and RichardShackleton has told how the friendship, cordiality, and openness withwhich Burke embraced him was even more than might be expected fromlong love. The simple Quaker was confused by the sight of what seemedto him so sumptuous and worldly a life, and he went to rest uneasily, doubting whether God's blessing could go with it. But when he awoke onthe morrow of his first visit, he told his wife, in the languageof his sect, how glad he was "to find no condemnation; but on thecontrary, ability to put up fervent petitions with much tenderness onbehalf of this great luminary. " It is at his country home that we likebest to think of Burke. It is still a touching picture to the historicimagination to follow him from the heat and violence of the House, where tipsy squires derided the greatest genius of his time, down tothe calm shades of Beaconsfield, where he would with his own handsgive food to a starving beggar, or medicine to a peasant sick of theague; where he would talk of the weather, the turnips, and the haywith the team-men and the farm-bailiff; and where, in the eveningstillness, he would pace the walk under the trees, and reflect on thestate of Europe and the distractions of his country. 

CHAPTER VII

THE NEW MINISTRY--WARREN HASTINGS--BURKE'S PUBLIC POSITION

The six years which followed the destruction of the Coalition were, insome respects, the most mortifying portion of Burke's troubled career. Pitt was more firmly seated in power than Lord North had ever been, and he used his power to carry out a policy against which it wasimpossible for the Whigs, on their own principles, to offer aneffective resistance. For this is the peculiarity of the king's firstvictory over the enemies who had done obstinate battle with him fornearly a quarter of a century. He had driven them out of the field, but with the aid of an ally who was as strongly hostile to the royalsystem as they had ever been. The king had vindicated his rightagainst the Whigs to choose his own ministers; but the new ministerwas himself a Whig by descent, and a reformer by his education andpersonal disposition. 

Ireland was the subject of the first great battle between the ministryand their opponents. Here, if anywhere, we might have expected fromBurke at least his usual wisdom and patience. We saw in a previouschapter (p. 33) what the political condition of Ireland was when Burkewent there with Hamilton in 1763. The American war had brought about agreat change. The king had shrewdly predicted that if America becamefree Ireland would soon follow the same plan and be a separate state. In fact, along with the American war we had to encounter an Irish waralso; but the latter was, as an Irish politician called it at thetime, a smothered war. Like the Americans, the Anglo-Irish enteredinto non-importation compacts, and they interdicted commerce. TheIrish volunteers, first forty, then sixty, and at last a hundredthousand strong, were virtually an army enrolled to overawe theEnglish ministry and Parliament. Following the spirit, if not theactual path, of the Americans, they raised a cry for commercial andlegislative independence. They were too strong to be resisted, and in1782 the Irish Parliament acquired the privilege of initiating andconducting its own business, without the sanction or control either ofthe Privy Council or of the English Parliament. Dazzled by the chanceof acquiring legislative independence, they had been content with thecomparatively small commercial boons obtained by Lord Nugent and Burkein 1778, and with the removal of further restrictions by the alarmedminister in the following year. After the concession of theirindependence in 1782, they found that to procure the abolition of theremaining restrictions on their commerce--the right of trade, forinstance, with America and Africa--the consent of the Englishlegislature was as necessary as it had ever been. Pitt, fresh from theteaching of Adam Smith and of Shelburne, brought forward in 1785 hisfamous commercial propositions. The theory of his scheme was thatIrish trade should be free, and that Ireland should be admitted to apermanent participation in commercial advantages. In return for thisgain, after her hereditary revenue passed a certain point, she was todevote the surplus to purposes, such as the maintenance of the navy, in which the two nations had a common interest. Pitt was to bebelieved when he declared that of all the objects of his politicallife this was, in his opinion, the most important that he had everengaged in, and he never expected to meet another that should rouseevery emotion in so strong a degree as this. 

A furious battle took place in the Irish Parliament. There, whilenobody could deny that the eleven propositions would benefit themercantile interests of the country, it was passionately urged thatthe last of the propositions, that which concerned the apportionmentof Irish revenue to imperial purposes, meant the enslavement of theirunhappy island. Their fetters, they went on, were clenched, if theEnglish Government was to be allowed thus to take the initiativein Irish legislation. The factious course pursued by the EnglishOpposition was much less excusable than the line of the Anglo-Irishleaders. Fox, who was ostentatiously ignorant of political economy, led the charge. He insisted that Pitt's measures would annihilateEnglish trade, would destroy the Navigation Laws, and with them wouldbring our maritime strength to the ground. Having thus won the favourof the English manufacturers, he turned round to the Irish Opposition, and conciliated them by declaring with equal vehemence that thepropositions were an insult to Ireland, and a nefarious attempt totamper with her new-born liberties. Burke followed his leader. We mayalmost say that for once he allowed his political integrity to bebewildered. In 1778 and 1779 he had firmly resisted the pressure whichhis mercantile constituents in Bristol had endeavoured to put uponhim; he had warmly supported the Irish claims, and had lost his seatin consequence. The precise ground which he took up in 1785 was this. He appears to have discerned in Pitt's proposals the germ of anattempt to extract revenue from Ireland, identical in purpose, principle, and probable effect with the ever-memorable attempt toextract revenue from the American colonies. Whatever stress may belaid upon this, we find it hard to vindicate Burke from the chargeof factiousness. Nothing can have been more unworthy of him thanthe sneer at Pitt in the great speech on the Nabob of Arcot's debts(1785), for stopping to pick up chaff and straws from the Irishrevenue instead of checking profligate expenditure in India. 

Pitt's alternative was irresistible. Situated as Ireland was, she musteither be the subservient instrument of English prosperity, or elseshe must be allowed to enjoy the benefits of English trade, taking atthe same time a proportionate share of the common burdens. Adam Smithhad shown that there was nothing incompatible with justice in acontribution by Ireland to the public debt of Great Britain. Thatdebt, he argued, had been contracted in support of the governmentestablished by the Revolution; a government to which the Protestantsof Ireland owed not only the whole authority which they enjoyed intheir own country, but every security which they possessed for theirliberty, property, and religion. The neighbourhood of Ireland to theshores of the mother country introduced an element into the problem, which must have taught every unimpassioned observer that the Americansolution would be inadequate for a dependency that lay at our verydoor. Burke could not, in his calmer moments, have failed to recogniseall this. Yet he lent himself to the party cry that Pitt was takinghis first measures for the re-enslavement of Ireland. Had it not beenfor what he himself called the delirium of the preceding session, andwhich had still not subsided, he would have seen that Pitt was intruth taking his first measures for the effective deliverance ofIreland from an unjust and oppressive subordination. The same deliriumcommitted him to another equally deplorable perversity, whenhe opposed, with as many excesses in temper as fallacies instatesmanship, the wise treaty with France, in which Pitt partiallyanticipated the commercial policy of an ampler treaty three-quartersof a century afterwards. 

A great episode in Burke's career now opened. It was in 1785 thatWarren Hastings returned from India, after a series of exploits asmomentous and far-reaching, for good or evil, as have ever beenachieved by any English ruler. For years Burke had been watchingIndia. With rising wonder, amazement, and indignation he had steadilyfollowed that long train of intrigue and crime which had ended in theconsolidation of a new empire. With the return of Hastings he feltthat the time had come for striking a severe blow, and making a signalexample. He gave notice (June 1785) that he would, at a future day, make a motion respecting the conduct of a gentleman just returned fromIndia. 

Among minor considerations, we have to remember that Indian affairsentered materially into the great battle of parties. It was uponan Indian bill that the late ministry had made shipwreck. It wasnotoriously by the aid of potent Indian interests that the newministry had acquired a portion of its majority. To expose themisdeeds of our agents in India was at once to strike the minister whohad dexterously secured their support, and to attack one of the greatstrongholds of parliamentary corruption. The proceedings againstHastings were, in the first instance, regarded as a sequel to thestruggle over Fox's East India Bill. That these considerations werepresent in Burke's thought there is no doubt, but they were purelysecondary. It was India itself that stood above all else in hisimagination. It had filled his mind and absorbed his time while Pittwas still an undergraduate at Cambridge, and Burke was looking forwardto match his plan of economic reform with a greater plan of Indianreform. In the Ninth Report, the Eleventh Report, and in his speechon the India Bill of 1783, he had shown both how thoroughly he hadmastered the facts, and how profoundly they had stirred his sense ofwrong. The masterpiece known as the speech on the Nabob of Arcot'sdebts, delivered in Parliament on a motion for papers (1785), handlesmatters of account, of interest turned into principal, and principalsuperadded to principal; it deals with a hundred minute technicalitiesof teeps and tuncaws, of gomastahs and soucaring; all with such asuffusion of interest and colour, with such nobility of idea andexpression, as could only have come from the addition to genius of adeep morality of nature, and an overwhelming force of conviction. Aspace less than one of these pages contains such a picture of thedevastation of the Carnatic by Hyder Ali, as may fill the young oratoror the young writer with the same emotions of enthusiasm, emulation, and despair that torment the artist who first gazes on the Madonnaat Dresden, or the figures of Night and Dawn and the Penseroso atFlorence. The despair is only too well founded. No conscious studycould pierce the secret of that just and pathetic transition from thehavoc of Hyder Ali to the healing duties of a virtuous government, tothe consolatory celebration of the mysteries of justice and humanity, to the warning to the unlawful creditors to silence their inauspicioustongues in presence of the holy work of restoration, to the generousproclamation against them that in every country the first creditor isthe plough. The emotions which make the hidden force of such picturescome not by observation. They grow from the sedulous meditation oflong years, directed by a powerful intellect and inspired by aninterest in human well-being, which of its own virtue bore the oratorinto the sustaining air of the upper gods. Concentrated passionand exhaustive knowledge have never entered into a more formidablecombination. Yet when Burke made his speech on the Nabob of Arcot'sdebts, Pitt and Grenville consulted together whether it was worthanswering, and came to the conclusion that they need not take thetrouble. 

Neither the scornful neglect of his opponents nor the dissensions ofsome who sat on his own side, could check the ardour with which Burkepressed on, as he said, to the relief of afflicted nations. Thefact is, that Burke was not at all a philanthropist as Clarkson andWilberforce were philanthropists. His sympathy was too strongly underthe control of true political reason. In 1780, for instance, theslave-trade had attracted his attention, and he had even proceededto sketch out a code of regulations which provided for its immediatemitigation and ultimate suppression. After mature consideration heabandoned the attempt, from the conviction that the strength of theWest India interest would defeat the utmost efforts of his party. Andhe was quite right in refusing to hope from any political action whatcould only be effected after the moral preparation of the bulk of thenation. And _direct_ moral or philanthropic apostleship was not hisfunction. 

Macaulay, in a famous passage of dazzling lustre and fine historiccolour, describes Burke's holy rage against the misdeeds of Hastingsas due to his sensibility. But sensibility to what? Not merely tothose common impressions of human suffering which kindle the flame ofordinary philanthropy, always attractive, often so beneficent, butoften so capricious and so laden with secret detriment. This was nopart of Burke's type. For is it enough to say that Burke had what isthe distinctive mark of the true statesman, a passion for good, wise, and orderly government. He had that in the strongest degree. All thatwore the look of confusion he held in abhorrence, and he detected theseeds of confusion with a penetration that made other men marvel. He was far too wise a man to have any sympathy with the energeticexercise of power for power's sake. He knew well that triumphsof violence are for the most part little better than temporarymakeshifts, which leave all the work of government to be encounteredafterwards by men of essentially greater capacity than the hero offorce without scruple. But he regarded those whom he called the greatbad men of the old stamp, Cromwell, Richelieu, the Guises, the Condés, with a certain tolerance, because "though the virtues of such men werenot to be taken as a balance to their crimes, yet they had long views, and sanctified their ambition by aiming at the orderly rule, and notthe destruction of their country. " What he valued was the deep-seatedorder of systems that worked by the accepted uses, opinions, beliefs, prejudices of a community. 

This love of right and stable order was not all. That was itselfthe growth from a deeper root, partly of conviction and partly ofsympathy; the conviction of the rare and difficult conjunctures ofcircumstance which are needed for the formation of even the rudestforms of social union among mankind; and then the sympathy that thebest men must always find it hard to withhold from any hoary fabric ofbelief, and any venerated system of government that has cherisheda certain order and shed even a ray of the faintest dawn among theviolences and the darkness of the race. It was reverence ratherthan sensibility, a noble and philosophic conservatism rather thanphilanthropy, which raised the storm in Burke's breast against therapacity of English adventurers in India and the imperial crimes ofHastings. Exactly the same tide of emotion which afterwards filled tothe brim the cup of prophetic anger against the desecrators of theChurch and the monarchy of France, now poured itself out against thosewho in India had "tossed about, subverted, and tore to pieces, as ifit were in the gambols of boyish unluckiness and malice, the mostestablished rights and the most ancient and most revered institutionsof ages and nations. " From beginning to end of the fourteen years inwhich Burke pursued his campaign against Hastings, we see in everypage that the India which ever glowed before his vision was not thehome of picturesque usages and melodramatic costume, but rather, inhis own words, the land of princes once of great dignity, authority, and opulence; of an ancient and venerable priesthood, the guides ofthe people while living, and their consolation in death; of a nobilityof antiquity and renown; of millions of ingenious mechanics, andmillions of diligent tillers of the earth; and finally, the landwhere might be found almost all the religions professed by men--theBrahminical, the Mussulman, the Eastern and the Western Christian. When he published his speech on the Nabob of Arcot, Burke prefixedto it an admirable quotation from one of the letters of the EmperorJulian. And Julian too, as we all know, had a strong feeling for thepast. But what in that remarkable figure was only the sentimentalismof reaction, in Burke was a reasoned and philosophic veneration forall old and settled order, whether in the free Parliament of GreatBritain, in the ancient absolutism of Versailles, or in the secularpomp of Oude and the inviolable sanctity of Benares, the holy city andthe garden of God. 

It would be out of place here to attempt to follow the details of theimpeachment. Every reader has heard that great tale in our history, and everybody knows that it was Burke's tenacity and power whichcaused that tale to be told. The House of Commons would not, it istrue, have directed that Hastings should be impeached, unless Pitt hadgiven his sanction and approval, and how it was that Pitt did givehis sanction and approval so suddenly and on grounds ostensibly soslender, remains one of the secrets of history. In no case would theimpeachment have been pressed upon Parliament by the Opposition, and assented to by ministers, if Burke had not been there with hisprodigious industry, his commanding comprehensive vision, his burningzeal, and his power of kindling in men so different from him and fromone another as Fox, Sheridan, Windham, Grey, a zeal only less intensethan his own. 

It was in the spring of 1786 that the articles of charge of Hastings'shigh crimes and misdemeanours, as Burke had drawn them, were presentedto the House of Commons. It was in February 1788 that Burke opened thevast cause in the old historic hall at Westminster, in an orationin which at points he was wound up to such a pitch of eloquence andpassion that every listener, including the great criminal, held hisbreath in an agony of horror; that women were carried out fainting;that the speaker himself became incapable of saying another word, andthe spectators of the scene began to wonder whether he would not, likethe mighty Chatham, actually die in the exertion of his overwhelmingpowers. Among the illustrious crowd who thronged Westminster Hall inthe opening days of the impeachment was Fanny Burney. She was then inher odious bondage at Court, and was animated by that admiration andpity for Hastings which at Court was the fashion. Windham used tocome up from the box of the managers of the impeachment to talk overwith her the incidents of the day, and she gave him her impressionsof Burke's speech, which were probably those of the majority of hishearers, for the majority were favourable to Hastings. "I told him, "says Miss Burney, "that Mr. Burke's opening had struck me with thehighest admiration of his powers, from the eloquence, the imagination, the fire, the diversity of expression, and the ready flow of languagewith which he seemed gifted, in a most superior manner, for any andevery purpose to which rhetoric could lead. " "And when he came to histwo narratives, " I continued, "when he related the particularsof those dreadful murders, he interested, he engaged, he at lastoverpowered me; I felt my cause lost. I could hardly keep on my seat. My eyes dreaded a single glance towards a man so accused as Mr. Hastings; I wanted to sink on the floor, that they might be saved sopainful a sight. I had no hope he could clear himself; not anotherwish in his favour remained. But when from this narration Mr. Burkeproceeded to his own comments and declamation--when the charges ofrapacity, cruelty, tyranny, were general, and made with all theviolence of personal detestation, and continued and aggravated withoutany further fact or illustration; then there appeared more of studythan of truth, more of invective than of justice; and, in short, solittle of proof to so much of passion, that in a very short time Ibegan to lift up my head, my seat was no longer uneasy, my eyes wereindifferent which way they looked, or what object caught them, andbefore I was myself aware of the declension of Mr. Burke's powers overmy feelings, I found myself a mere spectator in a public place, andlooking all around it, with my opera-glass in my hand!"

In 1795, six years after Burke's opening, the Lords were ready withtheir verdict. It had long been anticipated. Hastings was acquitted. This was the close of the fourteen years of labour, from the date ofthe Select Committee of 1781. "If I were to call for a reward, " Burkesaid, "it would be for the services in which for fourteen years, without intermission, I showed the most industry and had the leastsuccess. I mean the affairs of India; they are those on which I valuemyself the most; most for the importance; most for the labour; mostfor the judgment; most for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit. "

The side that is defeated on a particular issue, is often victoriouson the wide and general outcome. Looking back across the ninety yearsthat divide us from that memorable scene in Westminster Hall, we maysee that Burke had more success than at first appeared. If he did notconvict the man, he overthrew a system, and stamped its principleswith lasting censure and shame. Burke had perhaps a silent convictionthat it would have been better for us and for India if Clive hadsucceeded in his attempt to blow out his own brains in the Madrascounting-house, or if the battle of Plassy had been a decisive defeatinstead of a decisive victory. "All these circumstances, " he oncesaid, in reference to the results of the investigation of the SelectCommittee, "are not, I confess, very favourable to the idea of ourattempting to govern India at all. But there we are: there we areplaced by the Sovereign Disposer, and we must do the best we can inour situation. The situation of man is the preceptor of his duty. " Ifthat situation is better understood now than it was a century ago, andthat duty more loftily conceived, the result is due, so far as suchresults can ever be due to one man's action apart from the confluenceof the deep impersonal elements of time, to the seeds of justice andhumanity which were sown by Burke and his associates. Nobody nowbelieves that Clive was justified in tricking Omichund by forginganother man's name; that Impey was justified in hanging Nuncomar forcommitting the very offence for which Clive was excused or applauded, although forgery is no grave crime according to Hindoo usage, and itis the gravest according to English usage; that Hastings did wellin selling English troops to assist in the extermination of a bravepeople with whom he was at peace; that Benfield did well in connivingwith an Eastern prince in a project of extortion against his subjects. The whole drift of opinion has changed, and it is since the trial ofHastings that the change has taken place. The question in Burke'stime was whether oppression and corruption were to continue to be theguiding maxims of English policy. The personal disinterestedness ofthe ruler who had been the chief founder of this policy, and had mostopenly set aside all pretence of righteous principle, was dust in thebalance. It was impossible to suppress the policy without striking adeadly blow at its most eminent and powerful instrument. That Hastingswas acquitted, was immaterial. The lesson of his impeachment had beentaught with sufficiently impressive force--the great lesson thatAsiatics have rights, and that Europeans have obligations; that asuperior race is bound to observe the highest current morality of thetime in all its dealings with the subject race. Burke is entitledto our lasting reverence as the first apostle and great upholder ofintegrity, mercy, and honour in the relation between his countrymenand their humble dependents. 

He shared the common fate of those who dare to strike a blow for humanjustice against the prejudices of national egotism. But he was nolonger able to bear obloquy and neglect, as he had borne it throughthe war with the colonies. When he opened the impeachment of Hastingsat Westminster, Burke was very near to his sixtieth year. Hannah Morenoted in 1786 that his vivacity had diminished, and that business andpolitics had impaired his agreeableness. The simpletons in the House, now that they had at last found in Pitt a political chief who couldbeat the Whig leaders on their own ground of eloquence, knowledge, and dexterity in debate, took heart as they had never done under LordNorth. They now made deliberate attempts to silence the veteran byunmannerly and brutal interruptions, of which a mob of lower classmight have been ashamed. Then suddenly came a moment of suchexcitement as has not often been seen in the annals of party. Itbecame known one day in the autumn of 1788 that the king had gone outof his mind. 

The news naturally caused the liveliest agitation among the Whigs. When the severity of the attack forced the ministry to makepreparations for a Regency, the friends of the Prince of Wales assumedthat they would speedily return to power, and hastened to form theirplans accordingly. Fox was travelling in Italy with Mrs. Armstead, andhe had been two months away without hearing a word from England. The Duke of Portland sent a messenger in search of him, and after ajourney of ten days the messenger found him at Bologna. Fox instantlyset off in all haste for London, which he reached in nine days. Thethree months that followed were a time of unsurpassed activity andbitterness, and Burke was at least as active and as bitter as the restof them. He was the writer of the Prince of Wales's letter to Pitt, sometimes set down to Sheridan, and sometimes to Gilbert Elliot. Itmakes us feel how naturally the style of ideal kingship, its dignity, calm, and high self-consciousness all came to Burke. Although we readof his thus drawing up manifestoes and protests, and deciding minorquestions for Fox, which Fox was too irresolute to decide for himself, yet we have it on Burke's own authority that some time elapsedafter the return to England before he even saw Fox; that he was notconsulted as to the course to be pursued in the grave and difficultquestions connected with the Regency; and that he knew as little ofthe inside of Carlton House, where the Prince of Wales lived, as ofBuckingham House, where the king lived. "I mean to continue here, "he says to Charles Fox, "until you call upon me; and I find myselfperfectly easy, from the implicit confidence that I have in you andthe Duke, and the certainty that I am in that you two will do the bestfor the general advantage of the cause. In that state of mind I feelno desire whatsoever of interfering. " Yet the letter itself, andothers which follow, testify to the vehemence of Burke's interest inthe matter, and to the persistency with which he would have had themfollow his judgment, if they would have listened. It is as clear thatthey did not listen. 

Apart from the fierce struggle against Pitt's Regency Bill, Burke'sfriends were intently occupied with the reconstruction of the Portlandcabinet, which the king had so unexpectedly dismissed five yearsbefore. This was a sphere in which Burke's gifts were neither requirednor sought. We are rather in distress, Sir Gilbert Elliot writes, fora proper man for the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. "Lord J. Cavendish is very unwilling to engage again in public affairs. Fox isto be Secretary of State. Burke, it is thought, would not be approvedof, Sheridan has not the public confidence, and so it comes downtherefore to Grey, Pelham, myself, and perhaps Windham. " Elliotwas one of Burke's most faithful and attached friends, and he wasintimately concerned in all that was going on in the inner circle ofthe party. It is worth while, therefore, to reproduce his account froma confidential letter to Lady Elliot, of the way in which Burke'sclaim to recognition was at this time regarded and dealt with. 

 Although I can tell you nothing positive about my own situation, I was made very happy indeed yesterday by co-operating in the settlement of Burke's, in a manner which gives us great joy as well as comfort. The Duke of Portland has felt distressed how to arrange Burke and his family in a manner equal to Burke's merits, and to the Duke's own wishes, and at the same time so as to be exempt from the many difficulties which seem to be in the way. He sent for Pelham and me, as Burke's friends and his own, to advise with us about it; and we dined yesterday with him and the Duchess, that we might have time to talk the thing over at leisure and without interruption after dinner. We stayed accordingly, engaged in that subject till almost twelve at night, and our conference ended most happily and excessively to the satisfaction of us all. The Duke of Portland has the veneration for Burke that Windham, Pelham, myself and a few more have, and he thinks it impossible to do too much for him. He considers the reward to be given to Burke as a credit and honour to the nation, and he considers the neglect of him and his embarrassed situation as having been long a reproach to the country. The unjust prejudice and clamour which has prevailed against him and his family only determine the Duke the more to do him justice. The question was how? First, his brother Richard, who was Secretary to the Treasury before, will have the same office now; but the Duke intends to give him one of the first offices which falls vacant, of about £1000 a year for life in the customs, and he will then resign the Secretary to the Treasury, which, however, in the meanwhile is worth £3000 a year. Edmund Burke is to have the Pay-Office, £4000 a year; but as that is precarious and he can leave no provision for his son, it would, in fact, be doing little or nothing of any real or substantial value unless some _permanent_ provision is added to it. In this view the Duke is to grant him on the Irish establishment a pension of £2000 a year _clear_ for his own life, and the other half to Mrs. Burke for her life. This will make Burke completely happy, by leaving his wife and son safe from want after his death, if they should survive him. The Duke's affectionate anxiety to accomplish this object, and his determination to set all clamour at defiance on this point of justice, was truly affecting, and increases my attachment for the Duke. . . . The Duke said the only objection to this plan was that he thought it was due from this country, and that he grudged the honour of it to Ireland; but as nothing in England was ready, this plan was settled. You may think it strange that to this moment Burke does not know a word of all this, and his family are indeed, I believe, suffering a little under the apprehension that he may be neglected in the general scramble. I believe there never were three cabinet counsellors more in harmony on any subject than we were, nor three people happier in their day's work. [1]

[Footnote 1: _Life and Letters of Sir G. Elliot_, i. 261-263. ]

This leaves the apparent puzzle where it was. Why should Burke notbe approved of for Chancellor of the Exchequer? What were the manydifficulties described as seeming to be in the way of arranging forBurke in a manner equal to Burke's merits and the Duke of Portland'swishes? His personal relations with the chiefs of his party were atthis time extremely cordial and intimate. He was constantly a guest atthe Duke of Portland's most private dinner-parties. Fox had gone downto Beaconsfield to recruit himself from the fatigues of his rapidjourney from Bologna, and to spend some days in quiet with Windham andthe master of the house. Elliot and Windham, who were talked aboutfor a post for which one of them says that Burke would not have beenapproved, vied with one another in adoring Burke. Finally, Elliotand the Duke think themselves happy in a day's work, which ended inconsigning the man who not only was, but was admitted to be, the mostpowerful genius of their party, to a third-rate post, and that mostequivocal distinction, a pension on the Irish establishment. Thecommon explanation that it illustrates Whig exclusiveness, cannot beseriously received as adequate. It is probable, for one thing, thatthe feelings of the Prince of Wales had more to do with it than thefeelings of men like the Duke of Portland or Fox. We can easilyimagine how little that most worthless of human creatures wouldappreciate the great qualities of such a man as Burke. The painfulfact which we are unable to conceal from ourselves is, that the commonopinion of better men than the Prince of Wales leaned in the samedirection. His violence in the course of the Regency debates hadproduced strong disapproval in the public, and downright consternationin his own party. On one occasion he is described by a respectableobserver as having "been wilder than ever, and laid himself and hisparty more open than ever speaker did. He is folly personified, butshaking his cap and bells under the laurel of genius. He finished hiswild speech in a manner next to madness. " Moore believes that Burke'sindiscretions in these trying and prolonged transactions sowed theseeds of the alienation between him and Fox two years afterwards. Burke's excited state of mind showed itself in small things as well asgreat. Going with Windham to Carlton House, Burke attacked him in thecoach for a difference of opinion about the affairs of a friend, andbehaved with such unreasonable passion and such furious rudenessof manner, that his magnanimous admirer had some difficulty inobliterating the impression. The public were less tolerant. Windhamhas told us that at this time Burke was a man decried, persecuted, andproscribed, not being much valued even by his own party, and by halfthe nation considered as little better than an ingenious madman. [1]This is evidence beyond impeachment, for Windham loved and honouredBurke with the affection and reverence of a son; and he puts thepopular sentiment on record with grief and amazement. There is othertestimony to the same effect. The late Lord Lansdowne, who musthave heard the subject abundantly discussed by those who were mostconcerned in it, was once asked by a very eminent man of our own time, why the Whigs kept Burke out of their cabinets. "Burke!" he cried; "hewas so violent, so overbearing, so arrogant, so intractable, thatto have got on with him in a cabinet would have been utterly andabsolutely impossible. "

[Footnote 1: Windham's _Diary_, p. 213. ]

On the whole, it seems to be tolerably clear that the difficultiesin the way of Burke's promotion to high office were his notoriouslystraitened circumstances; his ungoverned excesses of party zeal andpolitical passion; finally, what Sir Gilbert Elliot calls the unjustprejudice and clamour against him and his family, and what Burkehimself once called the hunt of obloquy that pursued him all hislife. The first two of these causes can scarcely have operated inthe arrangements that were made in the Rockingham and Coalitionministries. But the third, we may be sure, was incessantly at work. Itwould have needed social courage alike in 1782, 1783, and 1788 togive cabinet rank to a man round whose name there floated so manydisparaging associations. Social courage is exactly the virtue inwhich the constructors of a government will always think themselvesleast able to indulge. Burke, we have to remember, did not standalone before the world. Elliot describes a dinner-party at LordFitzwilliam's, at which four of these half-discredited Irishmen werepresent. "Burke has now got such a train after him as would sinkanybody but himself:--his son, who is quite _nauseated_ by allmankind; his brother, who is liked better than his son, but is ratheroffensive with animal spirits and with brogue; and his cousin, WillBurke, who is just returned unexpectedly from India, as much ruinedas when he went many years ago, and who is a fresh charge on anyprospects of power that Burke may ever have. " It was this train, andthe ideas of adventurership that clung to them, the inextinguishablestories about papistry and Saint Omer's, the tenacious calumny aboutthe letters of Junius, the notorious circumstances of embarrassmentand neediness--it was all these things which combined with Burke's owndefects of temper and discretion, to give the Whig grandees as decenta reason as they could have desired for keeping all the great posts ofstate in their own hands. 

It seems difficult to deny that the questions of the Regency hadcaused the germs of a sort of dissatisfaction and strain in therelations between Fox and Burke. Their feelings to one another havebeen well compared to the mutual discontent between partners inunsuccessful play, where each suspects that it is the mistakes of theother that lost the game. Whether Burke felt conscious of the failuresin discretion and temper, which were the real or pretended excuse forneglect, we cannot tell. There is one passage that reveals a chagrinof this kind. A few days after the meeting between the Duke ofPortland and Elliot, for the purpose of settling his place in the newministry, Burke went down to Beaconsfield. In writing (January 24, 1789) to invite Windham and Pelham to come to stay a night, withpromise of a leg of mutton cooked by a dairymaid who was not a badhand at a pinch, he goes on to say that his health has received somesmall benefit from his journey to the country. "But this view tohealth, though far from unnecessary to me, was not the chief causeof my present retreat. I began to find that I was grown rathertoo anxious; and had begun to discover to myself and to others asolicitude relative to the present state of affairs, which, thoughtheir strange condition might well warrant it in others, is certainlyless suitable to my time of life, in which all emotions are lessallowed; and to which, most certainly, all human concerns ought inreason to become more indifferent than to those who have work to do, and a good deal of day and of inexhausted strength to do it in. "[1]

[Footnote 1: _Correspondence_, iii. 89. ]

The king's unexpected restoration to health two or three weekslater brought to nought all the hope and ambition of the Whigs, andconfirmed Pitt in power for the rest of Burke's lifetime. But an eventnow came to pass in the world's history, which transformed Burke in aninstant from a man decried, persecuted, proscribed, into an object ofexultant adoration all over Europe. 

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

We have now come to the second of the two momentous changes in theworld's affairs, in which Burke played an imposing and historicpart. His attitude in the first of them, the struggle for Americanindependence, commands almost without alloy the admiration andreverence of posterity. His attitude in the second of them, the greatrevolution in France, has raised controversies which can only becompared in heat and duration to the master controversies of theology. If the history of society were written as learned men write thehistory of the Christian faith and its churches, Burke would figure inthe same strong prominence, whether deplorable or glorious, as Ariusand Athanasius, Augustine and Sabellius, Luther and Ignatius. If weask how it is that now, nearly a century after the event, men arestill discussing Burke's pamphlet on the Revolution as they are stilldiscussing Bishop Butler's _Analogy_, the answer is that in one caseas in the other the questions at issue are still unsettled, and thatBurke offers in their highest and most comprehensive form all theconsiderations that belong to one side of the dispute. He was not ofthose, of whom Coleridge said that they proceeded with much solemnityto solve the riddle of the French Revolution by anecdotes. Hesuspended it in the same light of great social ideas and wideprinciples, in which its authors and champions professed to representit. Unhappily he advanced from criticism to practical exhortation, inour opinion the most mischievous and indefensible that has ever beenpressed by any statesman on any nation. But the force of the criticismremains, its foresight remains, its commemoration of valuable elementsof life which men were forgetting, its discernment of the limitationsof things, its sense of the awful emergencies of the problem. When ourgrandchildren have made up their minds, once for all, as to the meritsof the social transformation which dawned on Europe in 1789, thenBurke's _Reflections_ will become a mere literary antiquity, and notbefore. 

From the very beginning Burke looked upon the proceedings in Francewith distrust. He had not a moment of enthusiasm or sympathy of whichto repent. When the news reached England that the insurgents of Parishad stormed the Bastille, Fox exclaimed with exultation, how much itwas the greatest event that had ever happened in the world, how muchthe best. Is it an infirmity to wish for an instant that some suchphrase of generous hope had escaped from Burke; that he had for a dayor an hour undergone that fine illusion which was lighted up in thespirits of men like Wordsworth and Coleridge? Those great poets, who were destined one day to preach even a wiser and a loftierconservatism than his own, have told us what they felt--

 When France in wrath her giant limbs upreared, And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea, Stamped her strong foot, and said she would be free. 

Burke from the first espied the looming shadow of a catastrophe. InAugust he wrote to Lord Charlemont that the events in France hadsomething paradoxical and mysterious about them; that the outbreak ofthe old Parisian ferocity might be no more than a sudden explosion, but if it should happen to be _character_ rather than accident, thenthe people would need a strong hand like that of their former mastersto coerce them; that all depended upon the French having wise headsamong them, and upon these wise heads, if such there were, acquiringan authority to match their wisdom. There is nothing here but a calmand sagacious suspense of judgment. It soon appeared that the oldParisian ferocity was still alive. In the events of October 1789, whenthe mob of Paris marched out to Versailles and marched back again withthe king and queen in triumphal procession, Burke felt in his heartthat the beginning of the end had come, and that the catastrophe wasalready at hand. In October he wrote a long letter to the Frenchgentleman to whom he afterwards addressed the _Reflections_. "Youhope, sir, " he said, "that I think the French deserving of liberty. Icertainly do. I certainly think that all men who desire it deserve it. We cannot forfeit our right to it, but by what forfeits our title tothe privileges of our kind. The liberty I mean is _social_ freedom. It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by equalityof restraint. This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name forjustice. _Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is in my opinion safe_. " The weightiest and most important ofall political truths, and worth half the fine things that poetshave sung about freedom--if it could only have been respected, howdifferent the course of the Revolution! But the engineer who attemptsto deal with the abysmal rush of the falls of Niagara, must put asidethe tools that constructed the Bridgewater Canal and the ChelseaWaterworks. Nobody recognised so early as Burke that France had reallyembarked among cataracts and boiling gulfs, and the pith of all hisfirst criticisms, including the _Reflections_, was the propositionthat to separate freedom from justice was nothing else than to steerthe ship of state direct into the Maelstrom. It is impossible todeny that this was true. Unfortunately it was a truth which the wildspirits that were then abroad in the storm made of no avail. 

Destiny aimed an evil stroke when Burke, whose whole soul was bound upin order, peace, and gently enlarged precedent, found himself face toface with the portentous man-devouring Sphinx. He who could not endurethat a few clergymen should be allowed to subscribe to the Bibleinstead of to the Articles, saw the ancient Church of Christendomprostrated, its possessions confiscated, its priests proscribed, andChristianity itself officially superseded. The economical reformer, who when his zeal was hottest declined to discharge a tide-waiter or ascullion in the royal kitchen who should have acquired the shadow of avested interest in his post, beheld two great orders stripped oftheir privileges and deprived of much of their lands, though theirpossession had been sanctified by the express voice of the laws andthe prescription of many centuries. He who was full of apprehensionand anger at the proposal to take away a member of Parliament from St. Michael's or Old Sarum, had to look on while the most august monarchyin Europe was overturned. The man who dreaded fanatics, hatedatheists, despised political theorisers, and was driven wild at thenotion of applying metaphysical rights and abstract doctrines topublic affairs, suddenly beheld a whole kingdom given finally up tofanatics, atheists, and theorisers, who talked of nothing but therights of man, and deliberately set as wide a gulf as ruin andbloodshed could make between themselves and every incident orinstitution in the history of their land. The statesman who had oncedeclared, and habitually proved, his preference for peace over eventruth, who had all his life surrounded himself with a mental paradiseof order and equilibrium, in a moment found himself confronted by thestupendous and awful spectre which a century of disorder had raised inits supreme hour. It could not have been difficult for any one who hadstudied Burke's character and career, to foretell all that now came topass with him. 

It was from an English, and not from a French point of view, thatBurke was first drawn to write upon the Revolution. The 4th ofNovember was the anniversary of the landing of the Prince of Orange, and the first act in the Revolution of 1688. The members of anassociation which called itself the Revolution Society, chieflycomposed of Dissenters, but not without a mixture of Churchmen, including a few peers and a good many members of the House of Commons, met as usual to hear a sermon in commemoration of the glorious day. Dr. Price was the preacher, and both in the morning sermon, and inthe speeches which followed in the festivities of the afternoon, theFrench were held up to the loudest admiration, as having carried theprinciples of our own Revolution to a loftier height, and havingopened boundless hopes to mankind. By these harmless proceedingsBurke's anger and scorn were aroused to a pitch which must seem to us, as it seemed to not a few of his contemporaries, singularly out of allproportion to its cause. Deeper things were doubtless in silent motionwithin him. He set to work upon a denunciation of Price's doctrines, with a velocity that reminds us of Aristotle's comparison of angerto the over-hasty servant, who runs off with all speed before hehas listened to half the message. This was the origin of the_Reflections_. The design grew as the writer went on. His imaginationtook fire; his memory quickened a throng of impressive associations;his excited vision revealed to him a band of vain, petulant upstartspersecuting the ministers of a sacred religion, insulting a virtuousand innocent sovereign, and covering with humiliation the augustdaughter of the Caesars; his mind teemed with the sage maxims of thephilosophy of things established, and the precepts of the gospel oforder. Every courier that crossed the Channel supplied new material tohis contempt and his alarm. He condemned the whole method and courseof the French reforms. His judgment was in suspense no more. He nolonger distrusted; he hated, despised, and began to dread. 

Men soon began to whisper abroad that Burke thought ill of what wasgoing on over the water. When it transpired that he was writinga pamphlet, the world of letters was stirred with the liveliestexpectation. The name of the author, the importance of the subject, and the singularity of his opinions, so Mackintosh informs us, allinflamed the public curiosity. Soon after Parliament met for thesession (1790), the army estimates were brought up. Fox criticised theincrease of our forces, and incidentally hinted something in praise ofthe French army, which had shown that a man could be a soldier withoutceasing to be a citizen. Some days afterwards the subject was revived, and Pitt, as well as Fox, avowed himself hopeful of the good effect ofthe Revolution upon the order and government of France. Burke followedin a very different vein, openly proclaiming that dislike and fear ofthe Revolution which was to be the one ceaseless refrain of all thathe spoke or wrote for the rest of his life. He deplored Fox's praiseof the army for breaking their lawful allegiance, and then heproceeded with ominous words to the effect that, if any friend of hisshould concur in any measures which should tend to introduce such ademocracy as that of France, he would abandon his best friends andjoin with his worst enemies to oppose either the means or the end. This has unanimously been pronounced one of the most brilliant andeffective speeches that Burke ever made. Fox rose with distress onevery feature, and made the often-quoted declaration of his debt toBurke:--"If all the political information I have learned from books, all which I have gained from science, and all which my knowledge ofthe world and its affairs has taught me, were put into one scale, andthe improvement which I have derived from my right honourable friend'sinstruction and conversation were placed in the other, I should be ata loss to decide to which to give the preference. I have learnt morefrom my right honourable friend than from all the men with whom I everconversed. " All seemed likely to end in a spirit of conciliation untilSheridan rose, and in the plainest terms that he could find, expressedhis dissent from everything that Burke had said. Burke immediatelyrenounced his friendship. For the first time in his life he found thesympathy of the House vehemently on his side. 

In the following month (March 1790) this unpromising incident wassucceeded by an aberration which no rational man will now undertake todefend. Fox brought forward a motion for the repeal of the Test andCorporation Acts. He did this in accordance with a recent suggestionof Burke's own, that he should strengthen his political positionby winning the support of the Dissenters. Burke himself had alwaysdenounced the Test Act as bad, and as an abuse of sacred things. Tothe amazement of everybody, and to the infinite scandal of his party, he now pronounced the Dissenters to be disaffected citizens, andrefused to relieve them. Well might Fox say that Burke's words hadfilled him with grief and shame. 

Meanwhile the great rhetorical fabric gradually arose. Burke revised, erased, moderated, strengthened, emphasised, wrote and re-wrote withindefatigable industry. With the manuscript constantly under hiseyes, he lingered busily, pen in hand, over paragraphs and phrases, antitheses and apophthegms. The _Reflections_ was no superbimprovisation. Its composition recalls Palma Giovine's account of themighty Titian's way of working; how the master made his preparationswith resolute strokes of a heavily-laden brush, and then turned hispicture to the wall, and by and by resumed again, and then again andagain, redressing, adjusting, modelling the light with a rub of hisfinger, or dabbing a spot of dark colour into some corner with atouch of his thumb, and finally working all his smirches, contrasts, abruptnesses, into the glorious harmony that we know. Burke was sounwearied in this insatiable correction and alteration that theprinter found it necessary, instead of making the changes marked uponthe proof-sheets, to set up the whole in type afresh. The work wasupon the easel for exactly a year. It was November (1790) before theresult came into the hands of the public. It was a small octavo ofthree hundred and fifty-six pages, in contents rather less than twicethe present volume, bound in an unlettered wrapper of gray paper, andsold for five shillings. In less than twelve months it reached itseleventh edition, and it has been computed that not many short ofthirty thousand copies were sold within the next six years. 

The first curiosity had languished in the course of the long delay, but it was revived in its strongest force when the book itselfappeared. A remarkable effect instantly followed. Before the_Reflections_ was published the predominant sentiment in England hadbeen one of mixed astonishment and sympathy. Pitt had expressed thiscommon mood both in the House of Commons and in private. It wasimpossible for England not to be amazed at the uprising of a nationwhom they had been accustomed to think of as willing slaves, andit was impossible for her, when the scene did not happen to be theAmerican colonies or Ireland, not to profess good wishes for the causeof emancipation all over the world. Apart from the natural admirationof a free people for a neighbour struggling to be free, England sawno reason to lament a blow to a sovereign and a government who hadinterfered on the side of her insurgent colonies. To this easy stateof mind Burke's book put an immediate end. At once, as contemporariesassure us, it divided the nation into two parties. On both sides itprecipitated opinion. With a long-resounding blast on his goldentrumpet Burke had unfurled a new flag, and half the nation hurried torally to it--that half which had scouted his views on America, whichhad bitterly disliked his plan of Economic Reform, which had mockedhis ideas on religious toleration, and which a moment before had hatedand reviled him beyond all men living for his fierce tenacity in theimpeachment of Warren Hastings. The king said to everybody who camenear him that the book was a good book, a very good book, and everygentleman ought to read it. The universities began to think ofoffering the scarlet gown of their most honourable degree to theassailant of Price and the Dissenters. The great army of the indolentgood, the people who lead excellent lives and never use their reason, took violent alarm. The timorous, the weak-minded, the bigoted, weresuddenly awakened to a sense of what they owed to themselves. Burkegave them the key which enabled them to interpret the Revolution inharmony with their usual ideas and their temperament. 

Reaction quickly rose to a high pitch. One preacher in a parish churchin the neighbourhood of London celebrated the anniversary of therestoration of King Charles II. By a sermon, in which the pains ofeternal damnation were confidently promised to political disaffection. Romilly, mentioning to a friend that the _Reflections_ had got into afourteenth edition, wondered whether Burke was not rather ashamed ofhis success. It is when we come to the rank and file of reaction, thatwe find it hard to forgive the man of genius who made himself theorgan of their selfishness, their timidity, and their blindness. Weknow, alas, that the parts of his writings on French affairs to whichthey would fly, were not likely to be the parts which calm men nowread with sympathy, but the scoldings, the screamings, the unworthyvituperation with which, especially in the latest of them, he attackedeverybody who took part in the Revolution, from Condorcet andLafayette down to Marat and Couthon. It was the feet of clay that theyadored in their image, and not the head of fine gold and the breastsand the arms of silver. 

On the continent of Europe the excitement was as great among theruling classes as it was at home. Mirabeau, who had made Burke'sacquaintance some years before in England, and even been his guest atBeaconsfield, now made the _Reflections_ the text of more than onetremendous philippic. Louis XVI. Is said to have translated the bookinto French with his own hand. Catherine of Russia, Voltaire's adoredSemiramis of the North, the benefactress of Diderot, the ready helperof the philosophic party, pressed her congratulations on the greatpontiff of the old order, who now thundered anathema against thephilosophers and all their works. 

It is important to remember the stage which the Revolution hadreached, when Burke was composing his attack upon it. The year 1790was precisely the time when the hopes of the best men in France shonemost brightly, and seemed most reasonable. There had been disorders, and Paris still had ferocity in her mien. But Robespierre was anobscure figure on the back benches of the Assembly. Nobody had everheard of Danton. The name of Republic had never been so much aswhispered. The king still believed that constitutional monarchy wouldleave him as much power as he desired. He had voluntarily gone to theNational Assembly, and in simple language had exhorted them all toimitate his example by professing the single opinion, the singleinterest, the single wish--attachment to the new constitution, andardent desire for the peace and happiness of France. The clergy, it istrue, were violently irritated by the spoliation of their goods, andthe nobles had crossed the Rhine, to brood impotently in the safetyof Coblenz over projects of a bloody revenge upon their country. ButFrance, meanwhile, paid little heed either to the anger of the clergyor the menaces of the emigrant nobles, and at the very moment whenBurke was writing his most sombre pages, Paris and the provinces werecelebrating with transports of joy and enthusiasm the civic oath, the federation, the restoration of concord to the land, the finalestablishment of freedom and justice in a regenerated France. This wasthe happy scene over which Burke suddenly stretched out the right armof an inspired prophet, pointing to the cloud of thunder and darknessthat was gathering on the hills, and proclaiming to them the doom thathad been written upon the wall by the fingers of an inexorable hand. It is no wonder that when the cloud burst and the doom was fulfilled, men turned to Burke, as they went of old to Ahithophel, whose counselwas as if a man had inquired of the oracle of God. 

It is not to our purpose to discuss all the propositions advanced inthe _Reflections_, much less to reply to them. The book is likesome temple, by whose structure and design we allow ourselves to beimpressed, without being careful to measure the precise truth orfitness of the worship to which it was consecrated by its firstfounders. Just as the student of the _Politics_ of Aristotle may wellaccept all the wisdom of it, without caring to protest at every turnagainst slavery as the basis of a society, so we may well cherish allthe wisdom of the _Reflections_, at this distance of time, withoutmarking as a rubric on every page that half of these impressiveformulae and inspiring declamations were irrelevant to the occasionwhich called them forth, and exercised for the hour an influence thatwas purely mischievous. Time permits to us this profitable lenity. Inreading this, the first of his invectives, it is important, for thesake of clearness of judgment, to put from our minds the practicalpolicy which Burke afterwards so untiringly urged upon his countrymen. As yet there is no exhortation to England to interfere. We stilllisten to the voice of the statesman, and are not deafened by thepassionate cries of the preacher of a crusade. When Burke wrote the_Reflections_ he was justified in criticising the Revolution asan extraordinary movement, but still a movement professing to beconducted on the principles of rational and practicable politics. Theywere the principles to which competent onlookers like Jefferson andMorris had expected the Assembly to conform, but to which the Assemblynever conformed for an instant. It was on the principles of rationalpolitics that Fox and Sheridan admired it. On these principlesBurke condemned it. He declared that the methods of the ConstituentAssembly, up to the summer of 1790, were unjust, precipitate, destructive, and without stability. Men had chosen to build theirhouse on the sands, and the winds and the seas would speedily beatagainst it and overthrow it. 

His prophecy was fulfilled to the letter. What is still more importantfor the credit of his foresight is, that not only did his prophecycome true, but it came true for the reasons that he had fixed upon. Itwas, for instance, the constitution of the Church, in which Burkesaw the worst of the many bad mistakes of the Assembly. History, nowslowly shaking herself free from the passions of a century, agreesthat the civil constitution of the clergy was the measure which, morethan any other, decisively put an end to whatever hopes there mighthave been of a peaceful transition from the old order to the new. A still more striking piece of foresight is the prediction of thedespotism of the Napoleonic Empire. Burke had compared the levellingpolicy of the Assembly in their geometrical division of thedepartments, and their isolation from one another of the bodies ofthe state, to the treatment which a conquered country receives at thehands of its conquerors. Like Romans in Greece or Macedon, the Frenchinnovators had destroyed the bonds of union, under colour of providingfor the independence of each of their cities. "If the present projectof a Republic should fail, " Burke said, with a prescience reallyprofound, "all securities to a moderate freedom fail with it. All theindirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed; insomuchthat, if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ascendancy inFrance under this or any other dynasty, it will probably be, if notvoluntarily tempered at setting out by the wise and virtuous counselsof the prince, the most completely arbitrary power that ever appearedon earth. " Almost at the same moment Mirabeau was secretly writing tothe king that their plan of reducing all citizens to a singleclass would have delighted Richelieu. This equal surface, he said, facilitates the exercise of power, and many reigns in an absolutegovernment would not have done as much as this single year ofrevolution, for the royal authority. Time showed that Burke andMirabeau were right. 

History ratifies nearly all Burke's strictures on the levity andprecipitancy of the first set of actors in the revolutionary drama. Nopart of the _Reflections_ is more energetic than the denunciation ofgeometric and literary methods; and these are just what the modernexplorer hits upon, as one of the fatal secrets of the catastrophe. De Tocqueville's chapter on the causes which made literary men theprincipal persons in France, and the effect which this had upon theRevolution (Bk. III. Ch. I. ), is only a little too cold to be ableto pass for Burke's own. Quinet's work on the Revolution is onelong sermon, full of eloquence and cogency, upon the incapacity andblindness of the men who undertook the conduct of a tremendous crisisupon mere literary methods, without the moral courage to obey thelogic of their beliefs, with the student's ignorance of the eagerpassion and rapid imagination of multitudes of men, with the pedant'smisappreciation of a people, of whom it has been said by one ofthemselves, that there never was a nation more led by its sensationsand less by its principles. Comte, again, points impressively tothe Revolution as the period which illustrates more decisivelythan another the peril of confounding the two great functions ofspeculation and political action: and he speaks with just reprobationof the preposterous idea in the philosophic politicians of theepoch, that society was at their disposal, independent of its pastdevelopment, devoid of inherent impulses, and easily capable of beingmorally regenerated by the mere modification of legislative rules. 

What then was it that, in the midst of so much perspicacity as todetail, blinded Burke at the time when he wrote the _Reflections_ tothe true nature of the movement? Is it not this, that he judges theRevolution as the solution of a merely political question? If theRevolution had been merely political, his judgment would have beenadequate. The question was much deeper. It was a social question thatburned under the surface of what seemed no more than a modification ofexternal arrangements. That Burke was alive to the existence of socialproblems, and that he was even tormented by them, we know from anincidental passage in the _Reflections_. There he tells us how oftenhe had reflected, and never reflected without feeling, upon theinnumerable servile and degrading occupations to which by the socialeconomy so many wretches are inevitably doomed. He had ponderedwhether there could be any means of rescuing these unhappy people fromtheir miserable industry without disturbing the natural course ofthings, and impeding the great wheel of circulation which is turned bytheir labour. This is the vein of that striking passage in his firstcomposition which I have already quoted (p. 22). Burke did notyet see, and probably never saw, that one key to the events whichastonished and exasperated him was simply that the persons mosturgently concerned had taken the riddle which perplexed him into theirown hands, and had in fiery earnest set about their own deliverance. The pith of the Revolution up to 1790 was less the politicalconstitution, of which Burke says so much, and so much that is true, than the social and economic transformation, of which he says solittle. It was not a question of the power of the king, or the measureof an electoral circumscription, that made the Revolution; it wasthe iniquitous distribution of the taxes, the scourge of the militiaservice, the scourge of the road service, the destructive tyrannyexercised in the vast preserves of wild game, the vexatious rights andimposts of the lords of manors, and all the other odious burdens andheavy impediments on the prosperity of the thrifty and industriouspart of the nation. If he had seen ever so clearly that one of themost important sides of the Revolution in progress was the rescue ofthe tiller of the soil, Burke would still doubtless have viewed eventswith bitter suspicion. For the process could not be executed withoutdisturbing the natural course of things, and without violating hisprinciple that all changes should find us with our minds tenacious ofjustice and tender of property. A closer examination than he chose togive of the current administration alike of justice and of propertyunder the old system, would have explained to him that an hour hadcome in which the spirit of property and of justice compelled asupersession of the letter. 

If Burke had insisted on rigidly keeping sensibility to the wrongs ofthe French people out of the discussion, on the ground that the wholesubject was one for positive knowledge and logical inference, hisposition would have been intelligible and defensible. He followed nosuch course. His pleading turns constantly to arguments from feeling;but it is always to feeling on one side, and to a sensibility that isonly alive to the consecrated force of historic associations. How muchpure and uncontrolled emotion had to do with what ought to havebeen the reasoned judgments of his understanding we know on his ownevidence. He had sent the proof-sheets of a part of his book to SirPhilip Francis. They contained the famous passage describing theFrench queen as he had seen her seventeen years before at Versailles. Francis bluntly wrote to him that, in his opinion, all Burke'seloquence about Marie Antoinette was no better than pure foppery, andhe referred to the queen herself as no better than Messalina. Burkewas so excited by this that his son, in a rather officious letter, begged Francis not to repeat such stimulating remonstrance. What isinteresting in the incident is Burke's own reply. He knew nothing, he said, of the story of Messalina, and declined the obligation ofproving judicially the virtues of all those whom he saw sufferingwrong and contumely, before he endeavoured to interest others in theirsufferings, and before endeavouring to kindle horror against midnightassassins at backstairs and their more wicked abettors in pulpits. Andthen he went on, "I tell you again that the recollection of the mannerin which I saw the Queen of France in the year 1774 [1773], and thecontrast between that brilliancy, splendour, and beauty, with theprostrate homage of a nation to her, and the abominable scene of 1789which I was describing, _did_ draw tears from me and wetted my paper. These tears came again into my eyes almost as often as I looked at thedescription--they may again. "

The answer was obvious. It was well to pity the unmerited agonies ofMarie Antoinette, though as yet, we must remember, she had sufferednothing beyond the indignities of the days of October at Versailles. But did not the protracted agonies of a nation deserve the tribute ofa tear? As Paine asked, were men to weep over the plumage, and forgetthe dying bird? The bulk of the people must labour, Burke told them, "to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as theycommonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavour, they mustbe taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternaljustice. " When we learn that a Lyons silk weaver, working as hard ashe could for over seventeen hours a day, could not earn money enoughto procure the most bare and urgent necessaries of subsistence, we mayknow with what benignity of brow eternal justice must have presentedherself in the garret of that hapless wretch. It was no idleabstraction, no metaphysical right of man for which the Trench cried, but only the practical right of being permitted, by their own toil, tosave themselves and the little ones about their knees from hunger andcruel death. The _mainmortable_ serfs of ecclesiastics are variouslysaid to have been a million and a million and a half at the time ofthe Revolution. Burke's horror, as he thought of the priests andprelates who left palaces and dignities to earn a scanty living by thedrudgery of teaching their language in strange lands, should have beenalleviated by the thought that a million or more of men were rescuedfrom ghastly material misery. Are we to be so overwhelmed with sorrowover the pitiful destiny of the men of exalted rank and sacredfunction, as to have no tears for the forty thousand serfs in thegorges of the Jura, who were held in dead-hand by the Bishop ofSaint-Claude?

The simple truth is that Burke did not know enough of the subjectabout which he was writing. When he said, for instance, that theFrench before 1789 possessed all the elements of a constitution thatmight be made nearly as good as could be wished, he said what many ofhis contemporaries knew, and what all subsequent investigation andmeditation have proved, to be recklessly ill-considered and untrue. Asto the social state of France, his information was still worse. He sawthe dangers and disorders of the new system, but he saw a very littleway indeed into the more cruel dangers and disorders of the old. Mackintosh replied to the _Reflections_ with manliness and temperancein the _Vindicicae Gallicae_. Thomas Paine replied to them with anenergy, courage, and eloquence worthy of his cause, in the _Rights ofMan_. But the substantial and decisive reply to Burke came from hisformer correspondent, the farmer at Bradfield in Suffolk. Arthur Youngpublished his _Travels in France_ some eighteen months after the_Reflections_ (1792), and the pages of the twenty-first chapter inwhich he closes his performance, as a luminous criticism of the mostimportant side of the Revolution, are worth a hundred times more thanBurke, Mackintosh, and Paine all put together. Young afterwards becamepanic-stricken, but his book remained. There the writer plainlyenumerates without trope or invective the intolerable burdens underwhich the great mass of the French people had for long years beengroaning. It was the removal of these burdens that made the veryheart's core of the Revolution, and gave to France that new life whichso soon astonished and terrified Europe. Yet Burke seems profoundlyunconscious of the whole of them. He even boldly asserts that, whenthe several orders met in their bailliages in 1789, to choose theirrepresentatives and draw up their grievances and instructions, in noone of these instructions did they charge, or even hint at, anyof those things which had drawn upon the usurping Assembly thedetestation of the rational part of mankind. He could not have made amore enormous blunder. There was not a single great change made by theAssembly, which had not been demanded in the lists of grievances thathad been sent up by the nation to Versailles. The division of thekingdom into districts, and the proportioning of the representationto taxes and population; the suppression of the intendants; thesuppression of all monks and the sale of their goods and estates; theabolition of feudal rights, duties, and services; the alienation ofthe king's domains; the demolition of the Bastille; these and all elsewere in the prayers of half the petitions that the country had laid atthe feet of the king. 

If this were merely an incidental blunder in a fact, it might be of noimportance. But it was a blunder which went to the very root of thediscussion. The fact that France was now at the back of the Assembly, inspiring its counsels and ratifying its decrees, was the cardinalelement, and that is the fact which at this stage Burke systematicallyignored. That he should have so ignored it, left him in a curiousposition, for it left him without any rational explanation of thesources of the policy which kindled his indignation and contempt. Apublicist can never be sure of his position until he can explain tohimself even what he does not wish to justify to others. Burke thoughtit enough to dwell upon the immense number of lawyers in the Assembly, and to show that lawyers are naturally bad statesmen. He did not lookthe state of things steadily in the face. It was no easy thing to do, but Burke was a man who ought to have done it. He set all down to theignorance, folly, and wickedness of the French leaders. This was asshallow as the way in which his enemies, the philosophers, used to setdown the superstition of eighteen centuries to the craft of priests, and all defects in the government of Europe to the cruelty of tyrants. How it came about that priests and tyrants acquired their irresistiblepower over men's minds, they never inquired. And Burke never inquiredinto the enthusiastic acquiescence of the nation, and, what wasmost remarkable of all, the acquiescence of the army, in the strongmeasures of the Assembly. Burke was in truth so appalled by themagnitude of the enterprise on which France had embarked, thathe utterly forgot for once the necessity in political affairs ofseriously understanding the originating conditions of things. He wasstrangely content with the explanations that came from the malignantsat Coblenz, and he actually told Francis that he charged the disordersnot on the mob, but on the Duke of Orleans and Mirabeau, on Barnaveand Bailly, on Lameth and Lafayette, who had spent immense sums ofmoney, and used innumerable arts, to stir up the populace throughoutFrance to the commission of the enormities that were shocking theconscience of Europe. His imagination broke loose. His practicalreason was mastered by something that was deeper in him than reason. 

This brings me to remark a really singular trait. In spite of thepredominance of practical sagacity, of the habits and spirit of publicbusiness, of vigorous actuality in Burke's character, yet at thebottom of all his thoughts about communities and governments therelay a certain mysticism. It was no irony, no literary trope, whenhe talked of our having taught the American husbandman "piously tobelieve in the mysterious virtue of wax and parchment. " He was usingno idle epithet, when he described the disposition of a stupendouswisdom, "moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of thehuman race. " To him there actually was an element of mystery in thecohesion of men in societies, in political obedience, in the sanctityof contract; in all that fabric of law and charter and obligation, whether written or unwritten, which is the sheltering bulwark betweencivilisation and barbarism. When reason and history had contributedall that they could to the explanation, it seemed to him as if thevital force, the secret of organisation, the binding framework, muststill come from the impenetrable regions beyond reasoning and beyondhistory. There was another great conservative writer of that age, whose genius was aroused into a protest against the revolutionaryspirit as vehement as Burke's. This was Joseph de Maistre, one of themost learned, witty, and acute of all reactionary philosophers. De Maistre wrote a book on the Generative Principle of PoliticalConstitutions. He could only find this principle in the operation ofoccult and supernatural forces, producing the half-divine legislatorswho figure mysteriously in the early history of nations. Hence heheld, and with astonishing ingenuity enforced, the doctrine thatnothing else could deliver Europe from the Satanic forces ofrevolution--he used the word Satanic in all literal seriousness--savethe divinely inspired supremacy of the Pope. No natural operationsseemed at all adequate either to produce or to maintain the marvelof a coherent society. We are reminded of a professor who, in thefantastic days of geology, explained the Pyramids of Egypt to be theremains of a volcanic eruption, which had forced its way upwards by aslow and stately motion; the hieroglyphs were crystalline formations;and the shaft of the great Pyramid was the air-hole of a volcano. DeMaistre preferred a similar explanation of the monstrous structuresof modern society. The hand of man could never have reared, and couldnever uphold them. If we cannot say that Burke laboured in constanttravail with the same perplexity, it is at least true that he waskeenly alive to it, and that one of the reasons why he dreaded to seea finger laid upon a single stone of a single political edifice, washis consciousness that he saw no answer to the perpetual enigma howany of these edifices had ever been built, and how the passion, violence, and waywardness of the natural man had ever been persuadedto bow their necks to the strong yoke of a common social discipline. Never was mysticism more unseasonable; never was an hour when menneeded more carefully to remember Burke's own wise practical precept, when he was talking about the British rule in India, that we mustthrow a sacred veil over the beginnings of government. Many woes mightperhaps have been saved to Europe, if Burke had applied this maxim tothe government of the new France. 

Much has always been said about the inconsistency between Burke'senmity to the Revolution and his enmity to Lord North in one set ofcircumstances, and to Warren Hastings in another. The pamphleteers ofthe day made selections from the speeches and tracts of his happiertime, and the seeming contrast had its effect. More candid opponentsadmitted then, as all competent persons admit now, that theinconsistency was merely verbal and superficial. Watson, the Bishop ofLlandaff, was only one of many who observed very early that this wasthe unmistakable temper of Burke's mind. "I admired, as everybodydid, " he said, "the talents, but not the principles of Mr. Burke; hisopposition to the Clerical Petition [for relaxation of subscription, 1772], first excited my suspicion of his being a High Churchman inreligion, and a Tory, perhaps an aristocratic Tory, in the state. "Burke had indeed never been anything else than a conservative. He waslike Falkland, who had bitterly assailed Strafford and Finch on thesame principles on which, after the outbreak of the civil war, heconsented to be secretary of state to King Charles. Coleridge is borneout by a hundred passages, when he says that in Burke's writings atthe beginning of the American Revolution and in those at the beginningof the French Revolution, the principles are the same and thedeductions are the same; the practical inferences are almost oppositein the one case from those drawn in the other, yet in both equallylegitimate. It would be better to say that they would have beenequally legitimate, if Burke had been as right in his facts, and asample in his knowledge in the case of France, as he was in the case ofAmerica. We feel, indeed, that partly from want of this knowledge, hehas gone too far from some of the wise maxims of an earlier time. What has become of the doctrine that all great public collections ofmen--he was then speaking of the House of Commons--"possess a markedlove of virtue and an abhorrence of vice. "[1] Why was the FrenchAssembly not to have the benefit of this admirable generalisation?What has become of all those sayings about the presumption, in alldisputes between nations and rulers, "being at least upon a par infavour of the people;" and a populace never rebelling from passion forattack, but from impatience of suffering? And where is now that strongdictum, in the letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, that "generalrebellions and revolts of a whole people never were _encouraged_, nowor at any time; they are always _provoked_"?

[Footnote 1: _American Taxation_. ]

When all these things have been noted, to hold a man to his formulaewithout reference to their special application, is pure pedantry. Burke was the last man to lay down any political proposition notsubject to the ever varying interpretation of circumstances, andindependently of the particular use which was to be made of it. Nothing universal, he had always said, can be rationally affirmed onany moral or political subject. The lines of morality, again, arenever ideal lines of mathematics, but are broad and deep as well aslong, admitting of exceptions, and demanding modifications. "Theseexceptions and modifications are made, not by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rankof the virtues, political and moral, but she is the director, theregulator, the standard of them all. As no moral questions areever abstract questions, this, before I judge upon any abstractproposition, must be embodied in circumstances; for, since thingsare right and wrong, morally speaking, only by their relation andconnection with other things, this very question of what it ispolitically right to grant, depends upon its relation to its effects. ""Circumstances, " he says, never weary of laying down his great notionof political method, "give, in reality, to every political principleits distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstancesare what render every civil and political scheme beneficial orobnoxious to mankind. "

This is at once the weapon with which he would have defended his ownconsistency, and attacked the absolute proceedings in France. Hechanged his front, but he never changed his ground. He was not morepassionate against the proscription in France, than he had beenagainst the suspension of Habeas Corpus in the American war. "Iflatter myself, " he said in the _Reflections_, "that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty. " Ten years before he had said, "The liberty, the only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order. " The courttried to regulate liberty too severely. It found in him an inflexibleopponent. Demagogues tried to remove the regulations of liberty. They encountered in him the bitterest and most unceasing of allremonstrants. The arbitrary majority in the House of Commons forgotfor whose benefit they held power, from whom they derived theirauthority, and in what description of government it was that they hada place. Burke was the most valiant and strenuous champion in theranks of the independent minority. He withstood to the face the kingand the king's friends. He withstood to the face Charles Fox and theFriends of the People. He may have been wrong in both, or in either, but it is unreasonable to tell us that he turned back in his course;that he was a revolutionist in 1770, and a reactionist in 1790; thathe was in his sane mind when he opposed the supremacy of the Court, but that his reason was tottering when he opposed the supremacy of theFaubourg Saint Antoine. 

There is no part of Burke's career at which we may not find evidenceof his instinctive and undying repugnance to the critical orrevolutionary spirit and all its works. From the early days when hehad parodied Bolingbroke, down to the later time when he denouncedCondorcet as a fanatical atheist, with "every disposition to thelowest as well as the highest and most determined villainies, " heinvariably suspected or denounced everybody, virtuous or vicious, high-minded or ignoble, who inquired with too keen a scrutiny into thefoundations of morals, of religion, of social order. To examine with acurious or unfavourable eye the bases of established opinions, was toshow a leaning to anarchy, to atheism, or to unbridled libertinism. Already we have seen how, three years after the publication of his_Thoughts on the Present Discontents_, and seventeen years before thecomposition of the _Reflections_, he denounced the philosophers witha fervour and a vehemence which he never afterwards surpassed. Whena few of the clergy petitioned to be relieved from some of theseverities of subscription, he had resisted them on the bold groundthat the truth of a proposition deserves less attention than theeffect of adherence to it upon the established order of things. "Iwill not enter into the question, " he told the House of Commons, "howmuch truth is preferable to peace. Perhaps truth may be far better. But as we have scarcely ever the same certainty in the one that wehave in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, holdfast to peace. " In that intellectual restlessness, to which the worldis so deeply indebted, Burke could recognise but scanty merit. Himselfthe most industrious and active-minded of men, he was ever sober incutting the channels of his activity, and he would have had othersequally moderate. Perceiving that plain and righteous conduct is theend of life in this world, he prayed men not to be over-curious insearching for, and handling, and again handling, the theoretic baseon which the prerogatives of virtue repose. Provided that there waspeace, that is to say, so much of fair happiness and content as iscompatible with the conditions of the human lot, Burke felt that atoo great inquisitiveness as to its foundations was not only idle butcruel. 

If the world continues to read the _Reflections_, and reads it with anew admiration that is not diminished by the fact that on the specialissue its tendency is every day more clearly discerned to have beenmisleading, we may be sure that it is not for the sake of such thingsas the precise character of the Revolution of 1688, where, for thatmatter, constitutional writers have shown abundantly that Burke wasnearly as much in the wrong as Dr. Sacheverell. Nor has the book livedmerely by its gorgeous rhetoric and high emotions, though these havebeen contributing elements. It lives because it contains a sentiment, a method, a set of informal principles, which, awakened into new lifeafter the Revolution, rapidly transformed the current ways of thinkingand feeling about all the most serious objects of our attention, and have powerfully helped to give a richer substance to all modernliterature. In the _Reflections_ we have the first great sign thatthe ideas on government and philosophy which Locke had been the chiefagent in setting into European circulation, and which had carried alltriumphantly before them throughout the century, did not comprehendthe whole truth nor the deepest truth about human character--therelations of men and the union of men in society. It has often beensaid that the armoury from which the French philosophers of theeighteenth century borrowed their weapons was furnished from England, and it may be added as truly that the reaction against that wholescheme of thought came from England. In one sense we may call the_Reflections_ a political pamphlet, but it is much more than this, just as the movement against which it was levelled was much more thana political movement. The Revolution rested on a philosophy, andBurke confronted it with an antagonistic philosophy. Those are butsuperficial readers who fail to see at how many points Burke, whileseeming only to deal with the French monarchy and the Britishconstitution, with Dr. Price and Marie Antoinette, was in fact, andexactly because he dealt with them in the comprehensive spirit of truephilosophy, turning men's minds to an attitude from which not only thepolitical incidents of the hour, but the current ideas about religion, psychology, the very nature of human knowledge, would all be seen ina changed light and clothed in new colour. All really profoundspeculation about society comes in time to touch the heart of everyother object of speculation, not by directly contributing new truthsor directly corroborating old ones, but by setting men to consider theconsequences to life of different opinions on these abstract subjects, and their relations to the great paramount interests of society, however those interests may happen at the time to be conceived. Burke's book marks a turning-point in literary history, because it wasthe signal for that reaction over the whole field of thought, intowhich the Revolution drove many of the finest minds of thenext generation, by showing the supposed consequences of pureindividualistic rationalism. 

We need not attempt to work out the details of this extension of apolitical reaction into a universal reaction in philosophy and poetry. Any one may easily think out for himself what consequences in actand thought, as well as in government, would be likely to flow, forexample, from one of the most permanently admirable sides of Burke'steaching--his respect for the collective reason of men, and hissense of the impossibility in politics and morals of considering theindividual apart from the experience of the race. "We are afraid, " hesays, "to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock ofreason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of thegeneral bank and capital of nations and of ages. _Many of our men ofspeculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ theirsagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them_. Ifthey find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it morewise to continue the prejudice with the reason involved, than to castaway the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason:because prejudice with its reason has a motive to give action to thatreason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice isof ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mindin a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave theman hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, andunresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not aseries of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes apart of his nature. " Is not this to say, in other words, that in everyman the substantial foundations of action consist of the accumulatedlayers which various generations of ancestors have placed for him;that the greater part of our sentiments act most effectively when theyact most mechanically, and by the methods of an unquestioned system;that although no rule of conduct or spring of action ought to endure, which does not repose in sound reason, yet this naked reason is initself a less effective means of influencing action than when itexists as one part of a fabric of ancient and endeared association?Interpreted by a mobile genius, and expanded by a poetic imagination, all this became the foundation from which the philosophy of Coleridgestarted, and, as Mill has shown in a famous essay, Coleridge was thegreat apostle of the conservative spirit in England in its best form. 

Though Burke here, no doubt, found a true base for the philosophy oforder, yet perhaps Condorcet or Barnave might have justly asked himwhether, when we thus realise the strong and immovable foundationswhich are laid in our character before we are born, there could be anyoccasion, as a matter of fact, for that vehement alarm which movedBurke lest a few lawyers, by a score of parchment decrees, shouldoverthrow the venerated sentiments of Europe about justice and aboutproperty? Should he not have known better than most men the force ofthe self-protecting elements of society?

This is not a convenient place for discussing the issues between theschool of order and the school of progress. It is enough to havemarked Burke's position in one of them. The _Reflections_ places himamong the great Conservatives of history. Perhaps the only Englishmanwith whom in this respect he may be compared, is Sir ThomasMore, --that virtuous and eloquent reactionist of the sixteenthcentury. More abounded in light, in intellectual interests, insingle-minded care for the common weal. He was as anxious as any manof his time for the improved ordering of the Church, but he could notendure that reformation should be bought at the price of breaking upthe ancient spiritual unity of Europe. He was willing to slay and beslain rather than he would tolerate the destruction of the old faith, or assent to the violence of the new statecraft. He viewed ThomasCromwell's policy of reformation, just as Burke viewed Mirabeau'spolicy of revolution. Burke too, we may be very sure, would aswillingly have sent Mirabeau and Bailly to prison or the block as Moresent Phillips to the Tower and Bainham to the stake. For neither Morenor Burke was of the gentle contemplative spirit, which the firstdisorder of a new society just bursting into life merely overshadowswith saddening regrets and poetic gloom. The old harmony was to themso bound up with the purpose and meaning of life, that to wage activebattle for the gods of their reverence was the irresistible instinctof self-preservation. More had an excuse which Burke had not, forthe principle of persecution was accepted by the best minds of thesixteenth century, but by the best minds of the eighteenth it wasemphatically repudiated. 

Another illustrious name of Burke's own era rises to our lips, as weponder mentally the too scanty list of those who have essayed thegreat and hardy task of reconciling order with progress. Turgot iseven a more imposing figure than Burke himself. The impression madeupon us by the pair is indeed very different, for Turgot was austere, reserved, distant, a man of many silences and much suspense; whileBurke, as we know, was imaginative, exuberant, unrestrained, and, likesome of the greatest actors on the stage of human affairs, he hadassociated his own personality with the prevalence of right ideas andgood influences. In Turgot, on the other hand, we discern something ofthe isolation, the sternness, the disdainful melancholy of Tacitus. He even rises out of the eager, bustling, shrill-tongued crowd of theVoltairean age with some of that austere moral indignation and haughtyastonishment with which Dante had watched the stubborn ways of mencenturies before. On one side Turgot shared the conservatism ofBurke, though, perhaps, he would hardly have given it that name. Hehabitually corrected the headlong insistence of the revolutionaryphilosophers, his friends, by reminding them that neither pity, norbenevolence, nor hope can ever dispense with justice; and he couldnever endure to hear of great changes being wrought at the cost ofthis sovereign quality. Like Burke, he held fast to the doctrine thateverything must be done for the multitude, but nothing by them. LikeBurke, he realised how close are the links that bind the successivegenerations of men, and make up the long chain of human history. LikeBurke, he never believed that the human mind has any spontaneousinclination to welcome pure truth. Here, however, is visible betweenthem a hard line of division. It is not error, said Turgot, whichopposes the progress of truth; it is indolence, obstinacy, and thespirit of routine. But then Turgot enjoined upon us to make it the aimof life to do battle in ourselves and others with all this indolence, obstinacy, and spirit of routine in the world; while Burke, on thecontrary, gave to these bad things gentler names, he surrounded themwith the picturesque associations of the past, and in the greatworld-crisis of his time he threw all his passion and all his geniuson their side. Will any reader doubt which of these two types of theschool of order and justice, both of them noble, is the more valuablefor the race, and the worthier and more stimulating ideal for theindividual?

It is not certain that Burke was not sometimes for a moment startledby the suspicion that he might unawares be fighting against the truth. In the midst of flaming and bitter pages, we now and again feel a coolbreath from the distant region of a half-pensive tolerance. "I do notthink, " he says at the close of the _Reflections_, to the person towhom they were addressed, "that my sentiments are likely to alteryours. I do not know that they ought. You are young; you cannot guide, but must follow, the fortune of your country. But hereafter they maybe of some use to you, in some future form which your commonwealthmay take. In the present it can hardly remain; but before its finalsettlement, it may be obliged to pass, as one of our poets says, 'through great varieties of untried being, ' and in all itstransmigrations to be purified by fire and blood. "

He felt in the midst of his hate that what he took for seething chaos, might after all be the struggle upwards of the germs of order. Amongthe later words that he wrote on the Revolution were these:--"If agreat change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will befitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist inopposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather toresist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs ofmen. " We can only regret that these rays of the _mens divinior_ didnot shine with a more steadfast light; and that a spirit which, amidthe sharp press of manifold cares and distractions, had ever vibratedwith lofty sympathies, was not now more constant to its faith in thebeneficent powers and processes of the Unseen Time. 

CHAPTER IX

BURKE AND HIS PARTY--PROGRESS OF THE REVOLUTION--IRELAND--LAST YEARS

For some months after the publication of the _Reflections_, Burke keptup the relations of an armed peace with his old political friends. The impeachment went on, and in December (1790) there was a privatemeeting on the business connected with it, between Pitt, Burke, Fox, and Dundas, at the house of the Speaker. It was described by one whoknew, as most snug and amiable, and there seems to have been a generalimpression in the world at this moment that Fox might by some means beinduced to join Pitt. What troubled the slumbers of good Whigs likeGilbert Elliot, was the prospect of Fox committing himself toostrongly on French affairs. Burke himself was in the deepest dejectionat the prospect; for Fox did not cease to express the most unqualifieddisapproval of the _Reflections_; he thought that, even in point ofcomposition, it was the worst thing that Burke had ever published. Itwas already feared that his friendship for Sheridan was drawing himfarther away from Burke, with whom Sheridan had quarrelled, into acourse of politics that would both damage his own reputation and breakup the strong union of which the Duke of Portland was the nominalhead. 

New floods in France had not yet carried back the ship of state intoraging waters. Pitt was thinking so little of danger from that countrythat he had plunged into a policy of intervention in the affairs ofEastern Europe. When writers charge Burke with breaking violently inupon Pitt's system of peace abroad and reform at home, they overlookthe fact that before Burke had begun to preach his crusade againstthe Jacobins, Pitt had already prepared a war with Russia. The nationrefused to follow. They agreed with Fox that it was no concern oftheirs whether or not Russia took from Turkey the country between theBoug and Dniester; they felt that British interests would be moredamaged by the expenses of a war than by the acquisition by Russia ofOckzakow. Pitt was obliged to throw up the scheme, and to extricatehimself as well as he could from rash engagements with Prussia. It wason account of his services to the cause of peace on this occasion thatCatherine ordered the Russian ambassador to send her a bust of Fox inwhite marble, to be placed in her colonnade between Demosthenes andCicero. We may take it for granted that after the Revolution rose toits full height the bust of Fox accompanied that of Voltaire down tothe cellar of the Hermitage. 

While the affair of the Russian armament was still occupying theminister, an event of signal importance happened in the ranks of hispolitical adversaries. The alliance which had lasted between Burkeand Fox for five and twenty years came to a sudden end, and this riftgradually widened into a destructive breach throughout the party. There is no parallel in our parliamentary history to the fatal scene. In Ireland, indeed, only eight years before, Flood and Grattan, afterfighting side by side for many years, had all at once sprung upon oneanother in the Parliament House with the fury of vultures: Flood hadscreamed to Grattan that he was a mendicant patriot, and Grattan hadcalled Flood an ill-omened bird of night, with a sepulchral note, acadaverous aspect, and a broken beak. The Irish, like the French, have the art of making things dramatic, and Burke was the greatest ofIrishmen. On the opening of the session of 1791, the Government hadintroduced a bill for the better government of Canada. It introducedquestions about church establishments and hereditary legislators. Indiscussing these Fox made some references to France. It was impossibleto refer to France without touching the _Reflections on the FrenchRevolution_. Burke was not present, but he heard what Fox had said, and before long Fox again introduced French affairs in a debate on theRussian armament. Burke rose in violent heat of mind to reply, but theHouse would not hear him. He resolved to speak when the time came forthe Canada Bill to be recommitted. Meanwhile some of his friends didall that they could to dissuade him from pressing the matter farther. Even the Prince of Wales is said to have written him a letter. Therewere many signs of the rupture that was so soon to come in the Whigranks. Men so equally devoted to the common cause as Windhamand Elliot nearly came to a quarrel at a dinner-party at LordMalmesbury's, on the subject of Burke's design to speak; and Windham, who for the present sided with Fox, enters in his diary that he wasglad to escape from the room without speaking to the man whom, sincethe death of Dr. Johnson, he revered before all other men besides. 

On the day apointed for the Canada Bill, Fox called at Burke's house, and after some talk on Burke's intention to speak, and on othermatters, they walked down to Westminster and entered the Housetogether, as they had so many a time done before, but were never to doagain. They found that the debate had been adjourned, and it was notuntil May 6th that Burke had an opportunity of explaining himself onthe Revolution in France. He had no sooner risen than interruptionsbroke out from his own side, and a scene of great disorder followed. Burke was incensed beyond endurance by this treatment, for even Foxand Windham had taken part in the tumult against him. With muchbitterness he commented on Fox's previous eulogies of the Revolution, and finally there came the fatal words of severance. "It isindiscreet, " he said, "at any period, but especially at my time oflife, to provoke enemies, or give my friends occasion to desert me. Yet if my firm and steady adherence to the British Constitution placeme in such a dilemma, I am ready to risk it, and with, my last wordsto exclaim, 'Fly from the French Constitution. '" Fox at this pointeagerly called to him that there was no loss of friends. "Yes, yes, "cried Burke, "there is a loss of friends. I know the price of myconduct. I have done my duty at the price of my friend. Our friendshipis at an end. "

The members who sat on the same side were aghast at proceedings whichwent beyond their worst apprehensions. Even the ministerialists wereshocked. Pitt agreed much more with Fox than with Burke, but he wouldhave been more than human if he had not watched with complacency histwo most formidable adversaries turning their swords against oneanother. Wilberforce, who was more disinterested, lamented thespectacle as shameful. In the galleries there was hardly a dry eye. Fox, as might have been expected from his warm and generous nature, was deeply moved, and is described as weeping even to sobbing. Herepeated his former acknowledgment of his debt to Burke, and herepeated his former expression of faith in the blessings which theabolition of royal despotism would bring to France. With unabatedvehemence Burke again rose to denounce the French Constitution--"abuilding composed of untempered mortar--the work of Goths and Vandals, where everything was disjointed and inverted. " After a short rejoinderfrom Fox the scene came to a close, and the once friendly intercoursebetween the two heroes was at an end. When they met in the Managers'box in Westminster Hall on the business of Hastings's trial, they metwith the formalities of strangers. There is a story that when Burkeleft the House on the night of the quarrel it was raining, and Mr. Curwen, a member of the Opposition, took him home in his carriage. Burke at once began to declaim against the French. Curwen droppedsome remark on the other side. "What!" Burke cried out, grasping thecheck-string, "are you one of these people! Set me down!" It neededall Curwen's force to keep him where he was; and when they reached hishouse Burke stepped out without saying a single word. 

We may agree that all this did not indicate the perfect sobriety andself-control proper to a statesman, in what was a serious crisis bothto his party and to Europe. It was about this time that Burke said toAddington, who was then Speaker of the House of Commons, that he wasnot well. "I eat too much, Speaker, " he said, "I drink too much, and Isleep too little. " It is even said that he felt the final breach withFox as a relief from unendurable suspense; and he quoted the linesabout Aeneas, after he had finally resolved to quit Dido and theCarthaginian shore, at last being able to snatch slumber in his ship'stall stern. There can be no doubt how severe had been the tension. Yet the performance to which Burke now applied himself is one ofthe gravest and most reasonable of all his compositions. He felt itnecessary to vindicate the fundamental consistency between his presentand his past. We have no difficulty in imagining the abuse to whichhe was exposed from those whose abuse gave him pain. In a countrygoverned by party, a politician who quits the allies of a lifetimemust expect to pay the penalty. The Whig papers told him that he wasexpected to surrender his seat in Parliament. They imputed to himall sorts of sinister motives. His name was introduced into ironicaltoasts. For a whole year there was scarcely a member of his formerparty who did not stand aloof from him. Windham, when the feeling wasat its height, sent word to a host that he would rather not meet Burkeat dinner. Dr. Parr, though he thought Mr. Burke the greatest man uponearth, declared himself most indignantly and most fixedly on the sideof Mr. Sheridan and Mr. Fox. The Duke of Portland, though alwaysdescribed as strongly and fondly attached to him, and Gilbert Elliot, who thought that Burke was right in his views on the Revolution, and right in expressing them, still could not forgive the opencatastrophe, and for many months all the old habits of intimacy amongthem were entirely broken off. 

Burke did not bend to the storm. He went down to Margate, and therefinished the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_. Meanwhile hedespatched his son to Coblenz to give advice to the royalist exiles, who were then mainly in the hands of Calonne, one of the very worstof the ministers whom Louis XVI. Had tried between his dismissal ofTurgot in 1774, and the meeting of the States-General in 1789. Thismeasure was taken at the request of Calonne, who had visited Burke atMargate. The English Government did not disapprove of it, though theynaturally declined to invest either young Burke or any one else withauthority from themselves. As little came of the mission as might havebeen expected from the frivolous, unmanly, and enraged spirit of thoseto whom it was addressed. 

In August (1791), while Richard Burke was at Coblenz, the _Appeal_ waspublished. This was the last piece that Burke wrote on the Revolution, in which there is any pretence of measure, sobriety, and calm judgmentin face of a formidable and perplexing crisis. Henceforth it is notpolitical philosophy, but the minatory exhortation of a prophet. We deal no longer with principles and ideas, but with a partisandenunciation of particular acts, and a partisan incitement to a givenpractical policy. We may appreciate the policy as we choose, but ourappreciation of Burke as a thinker and a contributor to politicalwisdom is at an end. He is now only Demosthenes thundering againstPhilip, or Cicero shrieking against Mark Antony. 

The _Reflections_ had not been published many months before Burkewrote the _Letter to a Member of the National Assembly_ (January1791), in which strong disapproval had grown into furious hatred. Incontains the elaborate diatribe against Rousseau, the grave panegyricon Cromwell for choosing Hale to be Chief Justice, and a soundcriticism on the laxity and want of foresight in the manner in whichthe States-General had been convened. Here first Burke advanced to theposition that it might be the duty of other nations to interfereto restore the king to his rightful authority, just as England andPrussia had interfered to save Holland from confusion, as they hadinterfered to preserve the hereditary constitution in the AustrianNetherlands, and as Prussia had interfered to snatch even themalignant and the turban'd Turk from the pounce of the Russian eagle. Was not the King of France as much an object of policy and compassionas the Grand Seignior? As this was the first piece in which Burkehinted at a crusade, so it was the first in which he began to heapupon the heads, not of Hébert, Fouquier-Tinville, Billaud, nor even ofRobespierre or Danton--for none of these had yet been heard of--but ofable and conscientious men in the Constituent Assembly, language of avirulence which Fox once said seriously that Burke had picked, even tothe phrases of it, out of the writings of Salmasius against Milton, but which is really only to be paralleled by the much worse languageof Milton against Salmasius. It was in truth exactly the kind ofincensed speech which, at a later date, the factions in Paris levelledagainst one another, when Girondins screamed for the heads ofJacobins, and Robespierre denounced Danton, and Tallien cried for theblood of Robespierre. 

Burke declined most wisely to suggest any plan for the NationalAssembly. "Permit me to say, "--this is in the letter of January 1791, to a member of the Assembly, --"that if I were as confident as I oughtto be diffident in my own loose general ideas, I never should ventureto broach them, if but at twenty leagues' distance from the centre ofyour affairs. I must see with my own eyes; I must in a manner touchwith my own hands, not only the fixed, but momentary circumstances, before I could venture to suggest any political project whatsoever. I must know the power and disposition to accept, to execute, topersevere. I must see all the aids and all the obstacles. I must seethe means of correcting the plan, where correctives would be wanted. I must see the things: I must see the men. Without a concurrence andadaptation of these to the design, the very best speculative projectsmight become not only useless but mischievous. Plans must be made formen. People at a distance must judge ill of men. They do notalways answer to their reputation when you approach them. Nay, theperspective varies, and shows them quite other than you thought them. At a distance, if we judge uncertainly of men, we must judge worse of_opportunities_, which continually vary their shapes and colours, and pass away like clouds. " Our admiration at such words is quicklystifled when we recall the confident, unsparing, immoderate criticismwhich both preceded and followed this truly rational exposition of thedanger of advising, in cases where we know neither the men nor theopportunities. Why was savage and unfaltering denunciation any lessunbecoming than, as he admits, crude prescriptions would have beenunbecoming?

By the end of 1791, when he wrote the _Thoughts on French Affairs_, he had penetrated still farther into the essential character of theRevolution. Any notion of a reform to be effected after the decorouspattern of 1688, so conspicuous in the first great manifesto, hadwholly disappeared. The changes in France he allowed to bear littleresemblance or analogy to any of those which had been previouslybrought about in Europe. It is a revolution, he said, of doctrine andtheoretic dogma. The Reformation was the last revolution of this sortwhich had happened in Europe; and he immediately goes on to remarka point of striking resemblance between them. The effect of theReformation was "to introduce other interests into all countries thanthose which arose from their locality and natural circumstances. "In like manner other sources of faction were now opened, combiningparties among the inhabitants of different countries into a singleconnection. From these sources, effects were likely to arise fullyas important as those which had formerly arisen from the jarringinterests of the religious sects. It is a species of faction which"breaks the locality of public affections. "[1]

[Footnote 1: De Tocqueville has unconsciously imitated Burke's veryphrases. "Toutes les révolutions civiles et politiques ont eu unepatrie, et s'y sont enfermées. La Révolution. Française . . . On l'a vuerapprocher ou diviser les hommes en dépit des lois, des traditions, des caractères, de langue, rendant parfois ennemis des compatriotes, et frères des étrangers; _ou plutôt elle a formé audessus de toutesles nationalités particulières, une patrie intellectuelle commune dontles hommes de toutes les nations ont pu devenir citoyens_. "--AncienRégime, p. 15. ]

He was thus launched on the full tide of his policy. The FrenchRevolution must be hemmed in by a cordon of fire. Those whosympathised with it in England must be gagged, and if gagging did notsuffice, they must be taught respect for the constitution in dungeonsand on the gallows. His cry for war abroad and harsh coercion at homewaxed louder every day. As Fox said, it was lucky that Burke took theroyal side in the Revolution, for his violence would certainly havegot him hanged if he had happened to take the other side. 

It was in the early summer of 1792 that Miss Burney again met Burkeat Mrs. Crewe's villa at Hampstead. He entered into an animatedconversation on Lord Macartney and the Chinese expedition, revivingall the old enthusiasm of his companion by his allusions andanecdotes, his brilliant fancies and wide information. When politicswere introduced, he spoke with an eagerness and a vehemence thatinstantly banished the graces, though it redoubled the energies of hisdiscourse. "How I wish, " Miss Burney writes, "that you could meet thiswonderful man when he is easy, happy, and with people he cordiallylikes! But politics, even on his own side, must always be excluded;his irritability is so terrible on that theme, that it givesimmediately to his face _the expression of a man who is going todefend himself from murderers_. "

Burke still remained without a following, but the ranks of his oldallies gradually began to show signs of wavering. His panic about theJacobins within the gates slowly spread. His old faith, about which hehad once talked so much, in the ancient rustic, manly, home-bred senseof the English people, he dismissed as if it had been some idle dreamthat had come to him through the ivory gate. His fine comparison ofthe nation to a majestic herd, browsing in peace amid the importunatechirrupings of a thousand crickets, became so little appropriate, thathe was now beside himself with apprehension that the crickets wereabout to rend the oxen in pieces. Even then, the herd stood tranquillyin their pastures, only occasionally turning a dull eye, now toFrance, and now to Burke. In the autumn of 1791 Burke dined withPitt and Lord Grenville, and he found them resolute for an honestneutrality in the affairs of France, and "quite out of allapprehensions of any effect from the French Revolution in thiskingdom, either at present or any time to come. " Francis and Sheridan, it is true, spoke as if they almost wished for a domestic convulsion;and cool observers who saw him daily, even accused Sheridan of wishingto stir up the lower ranks of the people by the hope of plunderingtheir betters. But men who afterwards became alarmists, are found, so late as the spring of 1792, declaring in their most confidentialcorrespondence that the party of confusion made no way with thecountry, and produced no effect. Horne Tooke was its most conspicuouschief, and nobody pretended to fear the subversion of the realm byHorne Tooke. Yet Burke, in letters where he admits that the democraticparty is entirely discountenanced, and that the Jacobin faction inEngland is under a heavy cloud, was so possessed by the spectre ofpanic, as to declare that the Duke of Brunswick was as much fightingthe battle of the crown of England, as the Duke of Cumberland foughtthat battle at Culloden. 

Time and events, meanwhile, had been powerfully telling for Burke. While he was writing his _Appeal_, the French king and queen haddestroyed whatever confidence sanguine dreamers might have had intheir loyalty to the new order of things, by attempting to escape overthe frontier. They were brought back, and a manful attempt was madeto get the new constitution to work, in the winter of 1791-92. It wassoon found out that Mirabeau had been right when he said that for amonarchy it was too democratic, and for a republic there was a kingtoo much. This was Burke's _Reflections_ in a nutshell. But it wasforeign intervention that finally ruined the king, and destroyedthe hope of an orderly issue. Frederick the Great had set the firstexample of what some call iniquity and violence in Europe, and othersin milder terms call a readjustment of the equilibrium of nations. Hehad taken Silesia from the house of Austria, and he had shared inthe first partition of Poland. Catherine II. Had followed him at theexpense of Poland, Sweden, and Turkey. However we may view thesetransactions, and whether we describe them by the stern words of themoralist, or the more deprecatory words of the diplomatist, they arethe first sources of that storm of lawless rapine which sweptover every part of Europe for five and twenty years to come. Theintervention of Austria and Prussia in the affairs of France wasoriginally less a deliberate design for the benefit of the old order, than an interlude in the intrigues of Eastern Europe. But the firsteffect of intervention on behalf of the French monarchy was to bringit in a few weeks to the ground. 

In the spring of 1792 France replied to the preparations of Austriaand Prussia for invasion by a declaration of war. It was inevitablethat the French people should associate the court with the foreignenemy that was coming to its deliverance. Everybody knew as well thenas we know it now that the queen was as bitterly incensed against thenew order of things, and as resolutely unfaithful to it, as the mostfurious emigrant on the Rhine. Even Burke himself, writing to his sonat Coblenz, was constrained to talk about Marie Antoinette as that"most unfortunate woman, who was not to be cured of the spirit ofcourt intrigue even by a prison. " The king may have been loyallyresigned to his position, but resignation will not defend a countryfrom the invader; and the nation distrusted a chief who only a fewmonths before had been arrested in full flight to join the nationalenemy. Power naturally fell into the hands of the men of conviction, energy, passion, and resource. Patriotism and republicanism becamesynonymous, and the constitution against which Burke had prophesiedwas henceforth a dead letter. The spirit of insurrection that hadslumbered since the fall of the Bastille and the march to Versaillesin 1789, now awoke in formidable violence, and after the preliminaryrehearsal of what is known in the revolutionary calendar as the20th of June (1792), the people of Paris responded to the Duke ofBrunswick's insensate manifesto by the more memorable day of the 10thof August. Brunswick, accepting the hateful language which the Frenchemigrants put into his mouth, had declared that every member of thenational guard taken with arms in his hands would be immediately putto death; that every inhabitant who should dare to defend himselfwould be put to death and his house burnt to the ground; and that ifthe least insult was offered to the royal family, then their Austrianand Prussian majesties would deliver Paris to military execution andtotal destruction. This is the vindictive ferocity which only civilwar can kindle. To convince men that the manifesto was not an emptythreat, on the day of its publication a force of nearly 140, 000Austrians, Prussians, and Hessians entered France. The sections ofParis replied by marching to the Tuileries, and after a furiousconflict with the Swiss guards, they stormed the chateau. The king andhis family had fled to the National Assembly. The same evening theywere thrown into prison, whence the king and queen only came out ontheir way to the scaffold. 

It was the king's execution in January 1793 that finally raisedfeeling in England to the intense heat which Burke had for so longbeen craving. The evening on which the courier brought the newswas never forgotten by those who were in London at the time. Theplayhouses were instantly closed, and the audiences insisted onretiring with half the amusement for which they had paid. People ofthe lowest and the highest rank alike put on mourning. The French wereuniversally denounced as fiends upon earth. It was hardly safe for aFrenchman to appear in the streets of London. Placards were posted onevery wall, calling for war, and the crowds who gathered round themread them with loud hurrahs. 

 * * * * *

It would be a great mistake to say that Pitt ever lost his head, buthe lost his feet. The momentary passion of the nation forced him outof the pacific path in which he would have chosen to stay. Burkehad become the greatest power in the country, and was in closercommunication with the ministers than any one out of office. He wentonce about this time with Windham and Elliot to inform Pitt as to theuneasiness of the public about the slackness of our naval and militarypreparation. "Burke, " says one of the party, "gave Pitt a littlepolitical instruction in a very respectful and cordial way, but withthe authority of an old and most informed statesman; and althoughnobody ever takes the whole of Burke's advice, yet he often, or alwaysrather, furnishes very important and useful matter, some part of whichsticks and does good. Pitt took it all very patiently and cordially. "

It was in the December of 1792 that Burke had enacted that famous bitof melodrama out of place known as the Dagger Scene. The Governmenthad brought in an Alien Bill, imposing certain pains and restrictionson foreigners coming to this country. Fox denounced it as a concessionto foolish alarms, and was followed by Burke, who began to storm asusual against murderous atheists. Then without due preparation hebegan to fumble in his bosom, suddenly drew out a dagger, and with anextravagant gesture threw it on the floor of the House, crying thatthis was what they had to expect from their alliance with France. Thestroke missed its mark, and there was a general inclination to titter, until Burke, collecting himself for an effort, called upon them with avehemence to which his listeners could not choose but respond, to keepFrench principles from their heads, and French daggers from theirhearts; to preserve all their blandishments in life, and all theirconsolations in death; all the blessings of time, and all the hopes ofeternity. All this was not prepared long beforehand, for it seems thatthe dagger had only been shown to Burke on his way to the House as onethat had been sent to Birmingham to be a pattern for a large order. Whether prepared or unprepared, the scene was one from which we gladlyavert our eyes. 

Negotiations had been going on for some months, and they continued invarious stages for some months longer, for a coalition between the twogreat parties of the State. Burke was persistently anxious that Foxshould join Pitt's Government. Pitt always admitted the importanceof Fox's abilities in the difficult affairs which lay before theministry, and declared that he had no sort of personal animosity toFox, but rather a personal good-will and good-liking. Fox himself saidof a coalition, "It is so damned right, to be sure, that I cannot helpthinking it must be. " But the difficulties were insuperable. Themore rapidly the Government drifted in Burke's direction, the moreimpossible was it for a man of Fox's political sympathies andconvictions to have any dealings with a cabinet committed to a policyof irrational panic, to be carried out by a costly war abroad andcruel repression at home. "_What a very wretched man!_" was Burke'sangry exclamation one day, when it became certain that Fox meant tostand by the old flag of freedom and generous common sense. 

When the coalition at length took place (1794), the only man whocarried Burke's principles to their fullest extent into Pitt's cabinetwas Windham. It is impossible not to feel the attraction of Windham'scharacter, his amiability, his reverence for great and virtuous men, his passion for knowledge, the versatility of his interests. He is astriking example of the fact that literature was a common pursuitand occupation to the chief statesmen of that time (always exceptingPitt), to an extent that has been gradually tending to become rarer. Windham, in the midst of his devotion to public affairs, to thebusiness of his country, and, let us add, a zealous attendance onevery prize fight within reach, was never happy unless he was workingup points in literature and mathematics. There was a literary andclassical spirit abroad, and in spite of the furious preoccupations offaction, a certain ready disengagement of mind prevailed. If Windhamand Fox began to talk of horses, they seemed to fall naturally intowhat had been said about horses by the old writers. Fox held that longears were a merit, and Windham met him by the authority of Xenophonand Oppian in favour of short ones, and finally they went off intowhat it was that Virgil meant when he called a horse's head _argutumcaput_. Burke and Windham travelled in Scotland together in 1785, andtheir conversation fell as often on old books as on Hastings or onPitt. They discussed Virgil's similes; Johnson and L'Estrange, as theextremes of English style; what Stephens and A. Gellius had to sayabout Cicero's use of the word _gratiosus_. If they came to libraries, Windham ran into them with eagerness, and very strongly enjoyedall "the _feel_ that a library usually excites. " He is constantlyreproaching himself with a remissness, which was purely imaginary, inkeeping up his mathematics, his Greek tragedies, his Latin historians. There is no more curious example of the remorse of a book-man impededby affairs. "What progress might men make in the several parts ofknowledge, " he says very truly, in one of these moods, "if they couldonly pursue them with the same eagerness and assiduity as are exertedby lawyers in the conduct of a suit. " But this distraction between thetastes of the book-man and the pursuits of public business, unitedwith a certain quality of his constitution to produce one great defectin his character, and it was the worst defect that a statesman canhave. He became the most irresolute and vacillating of men. He wastesthe first half of a day in deciding which of two courses to take, andthe second half in blaming himself for not having taken the other. Heis constantly late at entertainments, because he cannot make up hismind in proper time whether to go or to stay at home; hesitationwhether he shall read in the red room or in the library, loses himthree of the best hours of a morning; the difficulty of early risinghe finds to consist less in rising early than in satisfying himselfthat the practice is wholesome; his mind is torn for a whole forenoonin an absurd contest with himself, whether he ought to indulge astrong wish to exercise his horse before dinner. Every page of hisdiary is a register of the symptoms of this unhappy disease. When theRevolution came, he was absolutely forced, by the iron necessity ofthe case, after certain perturbations, to go either with Fox or withBurke. Under this compulsion he took one headlong plunge into thepolicy of alarm. Everybody knows how desperately an habituallyirresolute man is capable of clinging to a policy or a conviction, towhich he has once been driven by dire stress of circumstance. Windhamhaving at last made up his mind to be frightened by the Revolution, was more violently and inconsolably frightened than anybody else. 

Pitt, after he had been forced into war, at least intended it to bea war on the good old-fashioned principles of seizing the enemy'scolonies and keeping them. He was taunted by the alarmists with caringonly for sugar islands, and making himself master of all the islandsin the world except Great Britain and Ireland. To Burke all this wasan abomination, and Windham followed Burke to the letter. He evendeclared the holy rage of the _Third Letter on a Regicide Peace_, published after Burke's death, to contain the purest wisdom and themost unanswerable policy. It was through Windham's eloquence andperseverance that the monstrous idea of a crusade, and all Burke'sother violent and excited precepts, gained an effective place andhearing in the cabinet, in the royal closet, and in the House ofCommons, long after Burke himself had left the scene. 

We have already seen how important an element Irish affairs became inthe war with America. The same spirit which had been stirred bythe American war was inevitably kindled in Ireland by the FrenchRevolution. The association of United Irishmen now came intoexistence, with aims avowedly revolutionary. They joined the partywhich was striving for the relief of the Catholics from certaindisabilities, and for their admission to the franchise. Burke hadwatched all movements in his native country, from the Whiteboyinsurrection of 1761 downwards, with steady vigilance, and he watchedthe new movement of 1792 with the keenest eyes. It made him profoundlyuneasy. He could not endure the thought of ever so momentary andindirect an association with a revolutionary party, either in Irelandor any other quarter of the globe, yet he was eager for a policy whichshould reconcile the Irish. He was so for two reasons. One of them washis political sense of the inexpediency of proscribing men by wholenations, and excluding from the franchise on the ground of religion apeople as numerous as the subjects of the King of Denmark or the Kingof Sardinia, equal to the population of the United Netherlands, andlarger than were to be found in all the states of Switzerland. Hissecond reason was his sense of the urgency of facing trouble abroadwith a nation united and contented at home; of abolishing in the heartof the country that "bank of discontent, every hour accumulating, uponwhich every description of seditious men may draw at pleasure. "

In the beginning of 1792 Burke's son went to Dublin as the agent andadviser of the Catholic Committee, who at first listened to him withthe respect due to one in whom they expected to meet the qualities ofhis father. They soon found out that he was utterly without eithertact or judgment; that he was arrogant, impertinent, vain, andempty. Wolfe Tone declared him to be by far the most impudent andopinionative fellow that he had ever known in his life. Nothing couldexceed the absurdity of his conduct, and on one occasion he had a verynarrow escape of being taken into custody by the Serjeant-at-arms, forrushing down from the gallery into the Irish House of Commons, andattempting to make a speech in defence of a petition which he haddrawn up, and which was being attacked by a member in his place. Richard Burke went home, it is said, with two thousand guineas inhis pocket, which the Catholics had cheerfully paid as the price ofgetting rid of him. He returned shortly after, but only helped toplunge the business into further confusion, and finally left the scenecovered with odium and discredit. His father's _Letter to Sir HerculesLangrishe_ (1792) remains an admirable monument of wise statesmanship, a singular interlude of calm and solid reasoning in the midst of afiery whirlwind of intense passion. Burke perhaps felt that the stateof Ireland was passing away from the sphere of calm and solid reason, when he knew that Dumouriez's victory over the allies at Valmy, whichfilled Beaconsfield with such gloom and dismay, was celebrated atDublin by an illumination. 

Burke, who was now in his sixty-fourth year, had for some timeannounced his intention of leaving the House of Commons as soon as hehad brought to an end the prosecution of Hastings. In 1794 the trialcame to a close; the thanks of the House were formally voted to themanagers of the impeachment; and when the scene was over Burke appliedfor the Chiltern Hundreds. Lord Fitzwilliam nominated Richard Burkefor the seat which his father had thus vacated at Malton. Pitt wasthen making arrangements for the accession of the Portland Whigsto his Government, and it was natural, in connection with thesearrangements, to confer some favour on the man who had done more thananybody else to promote the new alliance. It was proposed to makeBurke a peer under the style of Lord Beaconsfield, --a title in a laterage whimsically borrowed for himself by a man of genius with a delightin irony. To the title it was proposed to attach a yearly incomefor two or more lives. But the bolt of destiny was at this instantlaunched. Richard Burke, the adored centre of all his father's hopesand affections, was seized with illness and died (August 1794). Wecannot look without tragic emotion on the pathos of the scene, whichleft the remnant of the old man's days desolate and void. A Roman poethas described in touching words the woe of the aged Nestor, as hebeheld the funeral pile of his son, too untimely slain--

 Oro parumper Attendas quantum de legibus ipse queratur Fatorum et nimio de stamine, quum videt acris Antilochi barbam ardentem: quum quaerit ab omni Quisquis adest socius, cur haec in tempora duret, Quod facinus dignum tam longo admiserit aevo. 

Burke's grief finds a nobler expression. "The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane hasscattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up bythe roots and lie prostrate on the earth. . . . I am alone. I have noneto meet my enemies in the gate. . . . I live in an inverted order. Theywho ought to have succeeded me have gone before me. They who shouldhave been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors. "

Burke only lived three years after this desolating blow. Thearrangements for a peerage, as a matter of course, came to an end. ButPitt was well aware of the serious embarrassments by which Burke wasso pressed that he saw actual beggary very close at hand. The king, too, --who had once, by the way, granted a pension to Burke's detestedRousseau, though Rousseau was too proud to draw it--seems to havebeen honourably interested in making a provision for Burke. What Pittoffered was an immediate grant of £1200 a year from the Civil List forMrs. Burke's life, to be followed by a proposition to Parliament in amessage from the king, to confer an annuity of greater value upon astatesman who had served the country to his own loss for thirty years. As a matter of fact, the grant, £2500 a year in amount, much toBurke's chagrin, was never brought before Parliament, but wasconferred directly by the Crown, as a charge on the four and a halfper cent fund for two or more lives. It seems as if Pitt were afraidof challenging the opinion of Parliament; and the storm which thepension raised out of doors, was a measure of the trouble which thedefence of it would have inflicted on the Government inside the Houseof Commons. According to the rumour of the time, Burke sold two of hispensions upon lives for £27, 000, and there was left the third pensionof £1200. By and by, when the resentment of the Opposition was rousedto the highest pitch by the infamous Treason and Sedition Bills of1795, the Duke of Bedford and Lord Lauderdale, seeking to accumulateevery possible complaint against the Government, assailed the grantto Burke, as made without the consent of Parliament, and as a violentcontradiction to the whole policy of the plan for economic reform. Theattack, if not unjustifiable in itself, came from an unlucky quarter. A chief of the house of Bedford was the most unfit person in theworld to protest against grants by favour of the Crown, Burke was toopractised a rhetorician not to see the opening, and his _Letter to aNoble Lord_ is the most splendid repartee in the English language. 

It is not surprising that Burke's defence should have provokedrejoinder. A cloud of pamphlets followed the _Letter to a NobleLord_--some in doggerel verse, others in a magniloquent prose imitatedfrom his own, others mere poisonous scurrility. The nearest approachto a just stroke that I can find, after turning over a pile of thistrash, is an expression of wonder that he, who was inconsolable forthe loss of a beloved son, should not have reflected how many tenderparents had been made childless in the profusion of blood, of whichhe himself had been the most relentless champion. Our disgust at thepages of insult which were here levelled at a great man, is perhapsmoderated by the thought that Burke himself, who of all people oughtto have known better, had held up to public scorn and obloquy men ofsuch virtue, attainments, and real service to mankind as Richard Priceand Joseph Priestley. 

It was during these months that he composed the _Letters on a RegicidePeace_, though the third and fourth of them were not published untilafter his death. There have been those to whom these compositionsappeared to be Burke's masterpieces. In fact they are deplorable. They contain passages of fine philosophy and of skilful and plausiblereasoning, but such passages only make us wonder how they come to bewhere they are. The reader is in no humour for them. In splendourof rhetoric, in fine images, in sustention, in irony, they surpassanything that Burke ever wrote, but of the qualities and principlesthat, far more than his rhetoric, have made Burke so admirable and sogreat--of justice, of firm grasp of fact, of a reasonable sense of theprobabilities of things--there are only traces enough to light up thegulfs of empty words, reckless phrases, and senseless vituperations, that surge and boil around them. 

It is with the same emotion of "grief and shame" with which Fox heardBurke argue against relief to Dissenters, that we hear him abusing thecourts of law because they did not convict Hardy and Horne Tooke. Thepages against divorce and civil marriage, even granting that theypoint to the right judgment in these matters, express it with avehemence that is irrational, and in the dialect, not of a statesman, but of an enraged Capucin. The highly wrought passage in which Burkedescribes external aggrandisement as the original thought and theultimate aim of the earlier statesmen of the Revolution, is no betterthan ingenious nonsense. The whole performance rests on a grossand inexcusable anachronism. There is a contemptuous refusal todiscriminate between groups of men who were as different from oneanother as Oliver Cromwell was different from James Nayler, andbetween periods which were as unlike in all their conditions as theAthens of the Thirty Tyrants was unlike Athens after Thrasybulus haddriven the Tyrants out. He assumes that the men, the policy, themaxims of the French Government are the men, the policy, and themaxims of the handful of obscure miscreants who had hacked priests andnobles to pieces at the doors of the prisons four years before. Carnotis to him merely "that sanguinary tyrant, " and the heroic Hochebecomes "that old practised assassin, " while the Prince of Wales, bythe way, and the Duke of York are the hope and pride of nations. To heap up that incessant iteration about thieves, murderers, housebreakers, assassins, bandits, bravoes with their hands drippingwith blood and their maw gorged with property, desperate paramours, bombastical players, the refuse and rejected offal of strollingtheatres, bloody buffoons, bloody felons--all this was as unjust tohundreds of disinterested, honest, and patriotic men who were thenearnestly striving to restore a true order and solid citizenship inFrance, as the foul-mouthed scurrility of an Irish Orangeman is unjustto millions of devout Catholics. 

Burke was the man who might have been expected before all others toknow that in every system of government, whatever may have been thecrimes of its origin, there is sure, by the bare necessity of things, to rise up a party or an individual, whom their political instinctwill force into resistance to the fatalities of anarchy. Man is toostrongly a political animal for it to be otherwise. It was so at eachperiod and division in the Revolution. There was always a party oforder, and by 1795, when Burke penned these reckless philippics, orderwas only too easy in France. The Revolution had worn out the passionand moral enthusiasm of its first years, and all the best men of therevolutionary time had been consumed in a flame of fire. When Burketalked about this war being wholly unlike any war that ever was wagedin Europe before, about its being a war for justice on the one side, and a fanatical bloody propagandism on the other, he shut his eyes tothe plain fact that the Directory had after all really sunk to themoral level of Frederick and Catherine, or for that matter, of Louisthe Fourteenth himself. This war was only too like the other greatwars of European history. The French Government had become political, exactly in the same sense in which Thugut and Metternich and Herzbergwere political. The French Republic in 1797 was neither more norless aggressive, immoral, piratical, than the monarchies which hadpartitioned Poland, and had intended to redistribute the continent ofEurope to suit their own ambitions. The Coalition began the game, butFrance proved too strong for them, and they had the worst of theirgame. Jacobinism may have inspired the original fire which made herarmies irresistible, but Jacobinism of that stamp had now gone out offashion, and to denounce a peace with the Directory because the originof their government was regicidal, was as childish as it would havebeen in Mazarin to decline a treaty of regicide peace with the LordProtector. 

What makes the _Regicide Peace_ so repulsive is not that it recommendsenergetic prosecution of the war, and not that it abounds in glaringfallacies in detail, but that it is in direct contradiction with thatstrong, positive, rational, and sane method which had before uniformlymarked Burke's political philosophy. Here lay his inconsistency, notin abandoning democratic principles, for he had never held them, butin forgetting his own rules that nations act from adequate motivesrelative to their interests, and not from metaphysical speculation;that we cannot draw an indictment against a whole people; that thereis a species of hostile justice which no asperity of war whollyextinguishes in the minds of a civilised people. "Steady independentminds, " he had once said, "when they have an object of so serious aconcern to mankind as _government_ under their contemplation, willdisdain to assume the part of satirists and declaimers. " Show thething that you ask for, he cried during the American war, to bereason, show it to be common sense. We have a measure of the reasonand common sense of Burke's attitude in the _Regicide Peace_, inthe language which it inspired in Windham and others, who denouncedWilberforce for canting when he spoke of peace; who stigmatised Pittas weak and a pander to national avarice for thinking of the costof the war; and who actually charged the liverymen of London whopetitioned for peace with open sedition. 

It is a striking illustration of the versatility of Burke's moodsthat immediately before sitting down to write the _Fourth Letter on aRegicide Peace_ he had composed one of the most lucid and accuratelymeditated of all of his tracts, which, short as it is, contains ideason free trade which were only too far in advance of the opinion of histime. In 1772 a Corn Bill had been introduced--it was passed in thefollowing year--of which Adam Smith said that it was like the laws ofSolon, not the best in itself, but the best which the situation andtendency of the times would admit. In speaking upon this measure, Burke had laid down those sensible principles on the trade in corn, which he now in 1795 worked out in the _Thoughts and Details onScarcity_. Those who do not concern themselves with economics willperhaps be interested in the singular passage, vigorously objectedto by Dugald Stewart, in which Burke sets up a genial defence of theconsumption of ardent spirits. It is interesting as an argument, andit is most characteristic of the author. 

The curtain was now falling. All who saw him felt that Burke's lifewas quickly drawing to a close. His son's death had struck the finalblow. We could only wish that the years had brought to him what itought to be the fervent prayer of us all to find at the close of thelong struggle with ourselves and with circumstance, --a disposition tohappiness, a composed spirit to which time has made things clear, anunrebellious temper, and hopes undimmed for mankind. If this was notso, Burke at least busied himself to the end in great interests. Hischarity to the unfortunate emigrants from France was diligent andunwearied. Among other solid services he established a school nearBeaconsfield for sixty French boys, principally the orphans ofQuiberon, and the children of other emigrants who had suffered in thecause. Almost the last glimpse that we have of Burke is in a recordof a visit to Beaconsfield by the author of the _Vindiciae Gallicae_. Mackintosh had written to Burke to express his admiration for hischaracter and genius, and recanting his old defence of the Revolution. "Since that time, " he said, "a melancholy experience has undeceived meon many subjects, in which I was then the dupe of my enthusiasm. "When Mackintosh went to Beaconsfield (Christmas, 1796) he was as muchamazed as every one else with the exuberance of his host's mind inconversation. Even then Burke entered with cordial glee into thesports of children, rolling about with them on the carpet, and pouringout in his gambols the sublimest images, mixed with the most wretchedpuns. He said of Fox, with a deep sigh, "He is made to be loved. "There was the irresistible outbreak against "that putrid carcase, thatmother of all evil--the French Revolution. " It reminded him of theaccursed things that crawled in and out of the mouth of the vile hagin Spenser's Cave of Error; and he repeated the nauseous stanza. Mackintosh was to be the faithful knight of the romance, thebrightness of whose sword was to flash destruction on the filthyprogeny. 

It was on the 9th of July 1797 that, in the sixty-eighth year of hisage, preserving his faculties to the last moment, he expired. Withmagnanimous tenderness Fox proposed that he should be buried among thegreat dead in Westminster Abbey; but Burke had left strict injunctionsthat his funeral should be private, and he was laid in the littlechurch at Beaconsfield. It was a terrible moment in the history ofEngland and of Europe. An open mutiny had just been quelled in thefleet. There had been signs of disaffection in the army. In Irelandthe spirit of revolt was smouldering, and in a few months broke outin the fierce flames of a great rebellion. And it was the year of thepolitical crime of Campo Formio, that sinister pacification in whichviolence and fraud once more asserted their unveiled ascendancy inEurope. These sombre shadows were falling over the western world whena life went out which, notwithstanding some grave aberrations, hadmade great spaces in human destiny very luminous. 

CHAPTER X

BURKE'S LITERARY CHARACTER

A story is told that in the time when Burke was still at peace withthe Dissenters, he visited Priestley, and after seeing his libraryand his laboratory, and hearing how his host's hours were given toexperiment and meditation, he exclaimed that such a life must makehim the happiest and most to be envied of men. It must sometimes haveoccurred to Burke to wonder whether he had made the right choice whenhe locked away the fragments of his History, and plunged into thetorment of party and Parliament. But his interests and aptitudes weretoo strong and overmastering for him to have been right in doingotherwise. Contact with affairs was an indispensable condition forthe full use of his great faculties, in spite of their being lessfaculties of affairs than of speculation. Public life was the actualfield in which to test, and work out, and use with good effect themoral ideas which were Burke's most sincere and genuine interests. Andhe was able to bring these moral ideas into such effective use becausehe was so entirely unfettered by the narrowing spirit of formula. Noman, for instance, who thought in formulae would have written thecurious passage that I have already referred to, in which he eulogisesgin, because "under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of ourmortal condition, men have at all times and in all countries calledin some physical aid to their moral consolation. " He valued words attheir proper rate, that is to say, he knew that some of the greatestfacts in the life and character of man, and in the institutions ofsociety, can find no description and no measurement in words. Publiclife, as we can easily perceive, with its shibboleths, its exclusiveparties, its measurement by conventional standards, its attention tosmall expediencies before the larger ones, is not a field where suchcharacteristics are likely to make an instant effect. 

Though it is not wrong to say of Burke that as an orator he wastranscendent, yet in that immediate influence upon his hearers whichis commonly supposed to be the mark of oratorical success, all theevidence is that Burke generally failed. We have seen how his speechagainst Hastings affected Miss Burney, and how the speech on the Nabobof Arcot's debts was judged by Pitt not to be worth answering. Perhapsthe greatest that he ever made was that on conciliation with America;the wisest in its temper, the most closely logical in its reasoning, the amplest in appropriate topics, the most generous and conciliatoryin the substance of its appeals. Yet Erskine, who was in the Housewhen this was delivered, said that it drove everybody away, includingpeople who, when they came to read it, read it over and over again, and could hardly think of anything else. As Moore says rather toofloridly, but with truth, --"In vain did Burke's genius put forthits superb plumage, glittering all over with the hundred eyes offancy--the gait of the bird was heavy and awkward, and its voiceseemed rather to scare than attract. " Burke's gestures were clumsy; hehad sonorous but harsh tones; he never lost a strong Irish accent;and his utterance was often hurried and eager. Apart from thesedisadvantages of accident which have been overcome by men infinitelyinferior to Burke, it is easy to perceive, from the matter and textureof the speeches that have become English classics, that the veryqualities which are excellences in literature were drawbacks to thespoken discourses. A listener in Westminster Hall or the House ofCommons, unlike the reader by his fireside in the next century, isalways thinking of arguments and facts that bear directly on thespecial issue before him. What he wishes to hear is some particularityof event or inference which will either help him to make up his mind, or will justify him if his mind is already made up. Burke neverneglected these particularities, and he never went so wide as tofall for an instant into vagueness, but he went wide enough into thegeneralities that lent force and light to his view, to weary men whocared for nothing, and could not be expected to care for anything, butthe business actually in hand and the most expeditious way through it. The contentiousness is not close enough and rapid enough to hold theinterest of a practical assembly, which, though it was a hundred timesless busy than the House of Commons to-day, seems to have been eagerin the inverse proportion of what it had to do, to get that littlequickly done. 

Then we may doubt whether there is any instance of an orator throwinghis spell over a large audience, without frequent resort to the higherforms of commonplace. Two of the greatest speeches of Burke's time aresupposed to have been Grattan's on Tithes and Fox's on the WestminsterScrutiny, and these were evidently full of the splendid commonplacesof the firstrate rhetorician. Burke's mind was not readily set tothese tunes. The emotion to which he commonly appealed was thattoo rare one, the love of wisdom; and he combined his thoughts andknowledge in propositions of wisdom so weighty and strong, that theminds of ordinary hearers were not on the instant prepared for them. 

It is true that Burke's speeches were not without effect of anindirect kind, for there is good evidence that at the time when LordNorth's ministry was tottering, Burke had risen to a position of thefirst eminence in Parliament. When Boswell said to him that peoplewould wonder how he could bring himself to take so much pains with hisspeeches, knowing with certainty that not one vote would be gained bythem, Burke answered that it is very well worth while to take painsto speak well in Parliament; for if a man speaks well, he graduallyestablishes a certain reputation and consequence in the generalopinion; and though an Act that has been ably opposed becomes law, yetin its progress it is softened and modified to meet objections whoseforce has never been acknowledged directly. "Aye, sir, " Johnson brokein, "and there is a gratification of pride. Though we cannot outvotethem, we will out-argue them. "

Out-arguing is not perhaps the right word for most of Burke'sperformances. He is at heart thinking more of the subject itself thanof those on whom it was his apparent business to impress a particularview of it. He surrenders himself wholly to the matter, and followsup, though with a strong and close tread, all the excursions to whichit may give rise in an elastic intelligence--"motion, " as De Quinceysays, "propagating motion, and life throwing off life. " But then thisexuberant way of thinking, this willingness to let the subject lead, is less apt in public discourse than it is in literature, and fromthis comes the literary quality of Burke's speeches. 

With all his hatred for the book-man in politics, Burke owed much ofhis own distinction to that generous richness and breadth of judgmentwhich had been ripened in him by literature and his practice in it. Like some other men in our history, he showed that books are a betterpreparation for statesmanship than early training in the subordinateposts and among the permanent officials of a public department. There is no copiousness of literary reference in his works, suchas over-abounded in civil and ecclesiastical publicists of theseventeenth century. Nor can we truly say that there is much, thoughthere is certainly some, of that tact, which literature is alleged toconfer on those who approach it in a just spirit and with the truegift. The influence of literature on Burke lay partly in the directionof emancipation from the mechanical formulae of practical politics;partly in the association which it engendered, in a powerfulunderstanding like his, between politics and the moral forces of theworld, and between political maxims and the old and great sentences ofmorals; partly in drawing him, even when resting his case on prudenceand expediency, to appeal to the widest and highest sympathies;partly, and more than all, in opening his thoughts to the manyconditions, possibilities, and "varieties of untried being" in humancharacter and situation, and so giving an incomparable flexibility tohis methods of political approach. 

This flexibility is not to be found in his manner and composition. That derives its immense power from other sources; from passion, intensity, imagination, size, truth, cogency of logical reason. If anyone has imbued himself with that exacting love of delicacy, measure, and taste in expression, which was until our own day a sacredtradition of the French, then he will not like Burke. Those who insiston charm, on winningness in style, on subtle harmonies and exquisitesuggestion, are disappointed in Burke; they even find him stiff andover-coloured. And there are blemishes of this kind. His banter isnearly always ungainly, his wit blunt, as Johnson said of it, andvery often unseasonable. We feel that Johnson must have been right indeclaring that though Burke was always in search of pleasantries, henever made a good joke in his life. As is usual with a man who has nottrue humour, Burke is also without true pathos. The thought of wrongor misery moved him less to pity for the victim than to anger againstthe cause. Then, there are some gratuitous and unredeemed vulgarities;some images whose barbarity makes us shudder, of creeping ascaridesand inexpugnable tapeworms. But it is the mere foppery of literatureto suffer ourselves to be long detained by specks like these. 

The varieties of Burke's literary or rhetorical method are verystriking. It is almost incredible that the superb imaginativeamplification of the description of Hyder Ali's descent upon theCarnatic should be from the same pen as the grave, simple, unadorned_Address to the King_ (1777), where each sentence falls on the earwith the accent of some golden-tongued oracle of the wise gods. Hisstride is the stride of a giant, from the sentimental beauty of thepicture of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, or the red horror of thetale of Debi Sing in Rungpore, to the learning, positiveness, and cooljudicial mastery of the _Report on the Lords' Journals_ (1794), whichPhilip Francis, no mean judge, declared on the whole to be the "mosteminent and extraordinary" of all his productions. Even in the coolestand dryest of his pieces, there is the mark of greatness, of grasp, ofcomprehension. In all its varieties Burke's style is noble, earnest, deep-flowing, because his sentiment was lofty and fervid, and wentwith sincerity and ardent disciplined travail of judgment. Fox toldFrancis Horner that Dryden's prose was Burke's great favourite, andthat Burke imitated him more than any one else. We may well believethat he was attracted by Dryden's ease, his copiousness, his gaiety, his manliness of style, but there can hardly have been any consciousattempt at imitation. Their topics were too different. Burke hadthe style of his subjects, the amplitude, the weightiness, thelaboriousness, the sense, the high flight, the grandeur, proper to aman dealing with imperial themes, the freedom of nations, the justiceof rulers, the fortunes of great societies, the sacredness of law. Burke will always be read with delight and edification, because inthe midst of discussions on the local and the accidental, he scattersapophthegms that take us into the regions of lasting wisdom. Inthe midst of the torrent of his most strenuous and passionatedeliverances, he suddenly rises aloof from his immediate subject, andin all tranquillity reminds us of some permanent relation of things, some enduring truth of human life or society. We do not hear theorgan tones of Milton, for faith and freedom had other notes in theseventeenth century. There is none of the complacent and wise-browedsagacity of Bacon, for Burke's were days of eager personal strifeand party fire and civil division. We are not exhilarated by thecheerfulness, the polish, the fine manners of Bolingbroke, for Burkehad an anxious conscience, and was earnest and intent that the goodshould triumph. And yet Burke is among the greatest of those who havewrought marvels in the prose of our English tongue. 

The influence of Burke on the publicists of the generation after theRevolution was much less considerable than might have been expected. In Germany, where there has been so much excellent writing about_Staatswissenschaft_, with such poverty and darkness in the wisdom ofpractical politics, there is a long list of writers who have drawntheir inspiration from Burke. In France, publicists of the sentimentalschool, like Chateaubriand, and the politico-ecclesiastical school, like De Maistre, fashioned a track of their own. In England Burke madea deep mark on contemporary opinion during the last years of his life, and then his influence underwent a certain eclipse. The official Whigsconsidered him a renegade and a heresiarch, who had committed thedeadly sin of breaking up the party; and they never mentioned hisname without bitterness. To men like Godwin, the author of _PoliticalJustice_, Burke was as antichrist. Bentham and James Mill thought ofhim as a declaimer who lived upon applause, and who, as one of themsays, was for protecting everything old, not because it was goodbut because it existed. In one quarter only did he exert a profoundinfluence. His maxim that men might employ their sagacity indiscovering the latent wisdom which underlies general prejudices andold institutions, instead of exploding them, inspired Coleridge, asI have already said; and the Coleridgian school are Burke's directdescendants, whenever they deal with the significance and therelations of Church and State. But they connected these views soclosely with their views in metaphysics and theology, that theassociation with Burke was effectually disguised. 

The only English writer of that age whom we can name along withBurke in the literature of enduring power, is Wordsworth, that greatrepresentative in another and a higher field, and with many rareelements added that were all his own of those harmonising andconciliatory forces and ideas that make man's destiny easier to him, through piety in its oldest and best sense; through reverence forthe past, for duty, for institutions. He was born in the year of the_Present Discontents_ (1770), and when Burke wrote the _Reflections_, Wordsworth was standing, with France "on the top of golden hours, "listening with delight among the ruins of the Bastille, or on thebanks of the Loire, to "the homeless sound of joy that was in thesky. " When France lost faith and freedom, and Napoleon had built histhrone on their grave, he began to see those strong elements which forBurke had all his life been the true and fast foundation of thesocial world. Wide as is the difference between an oratorical and adeclamatory mind like Burke's, and the least oratorical of all poets, yet under this difference of form and temper there is a strikinglikeness in spirit. There was the same energetic feeling about moralideas, the same frame of counsel and prudence, the same love for theslowness of time, the same slight account held of mere intellectualknowledge, and even the same ruling sympathy with that side of thecharacter of Englishmen which Burke exulted in, as "_their aweof kings and reverence for priests, " "their sullen resistanceof innovation" "their unalterable perseverance in the wisdom ofprejudice_. "

The conservative movement in England ran on for many years in theecclesiastical channel rather than among questions where Burke'swritings might have been brought to bear. On the political sidethe most active minds, both in practice and theory, worked out theprinciples of liberalism, and they did so on a plan and by methodsfrom which Burke's utilitarian liberalism and his historicconservatism were equally remote. There are many signs around us thatthis epoch is for the moment at an end. The historic method, fittingin with certain dominant conceptions in the region of natural science, is bringing men round to a way of looking at society for which Burke'smaxims are exactly suited; and it seems probable that he will be morefrequently and more seriously referred to within the next twenty yearsthan he has been within the whole of the last eighty. 

THE END

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.