No More Learning

It is usual now to affirm dogmatically that he
participated in the speculations of his brother Richard, his
kinsman William and Lord Verney, in East India stock. It may
be so, but is not proved; and Burke himself declared, in 1772,
'I have never had any concern in the funds of the East India com-
pany, nor have taken any part whatsoever in its affairs, except when
they came before me in the course of parliamentary proceedings. '
During the attempts made by Lord North's government to regulate
the East India company, Burke was the warm supporter and
diligent adviser of the company (1766—74). It was after 1780
that he became an active member of the committees which
investigated the affairs of India, and, in consequence of what was
revealed, the relentless foe of Warren Hastings and of the privileges
and powers of the company. In the East India bill of 1783, he
flung to the winds that fear of increasing the influence of the
crown which had dictated his earlier support of the company, and
proposed to transfer to parliament and the crown the whole
administration and patronage of India. In 1785, he entered upon
the attack upon Hastings which was to occupy him for ten years.
In the same year, he delivered the famous Speech on the . . . Nabob of
Arcot's Private Debts. The articles of indictment against Hastings,
with the speeches delivered by Burke, fill some six volumes of the
collected works. With the speeches of 1783 and 1785, they are
the record of his labours in this cause, in conducting which he
exhibited at once all the vast range of his knowledge, the varied
powers of bis eloquence and the worst errors of taste and judg-
ment of which his great and increasing sensibility of mind made
him guilty in the years from 1780 onwards.
The last great cause in which Burke fought his usual splendid
but losing battle was that of resistance to the French revolution


## p. 7 (#29) ###############################################

1]
Pamphlets on Public Affairs
7
and the philosophy and spirit of atheistical Jacobinism. Beginning
with a speech on the army estimates (9 February 1790), the crusade
was continued with ever increasing indignation through the famous
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), A Letter. . . to a
Member of the National Assembly (1791), An Appeal from the
New to the Old Whigs (1791), Thoughts on French Affairs (1791),
Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), A Letter . . . to a Noble
Lord (1795) and Letters. . . on the Proposals for Peace with the
Regicide Directory of France (1795—7). Burke died in 1797
with his last hopes for justice to Irish catholics shattered, and
believing that his country was on the eve of a peace which could
be no peace but only a humiliating truce while the enemy made
ready to pursue their destructive crusade.
These, in outline, are the campaigns of Burke. Whatever be
now our judgment on the questions of a bygone age with which he
was concerned, the importance of the principles to which his mind
always gravitated, his preoccupation at every juncture with the
fundamental issues of wise government, and the splendour of the
eloquence in which he set forth these principles, an eloquence in
which the wisdom of his thought and the felicity of his language
and imagery seem inseparable from one another, an eloquence that
is wisdom (not ‘seeming wisdom'as Hobbes defined eloquence),
have made his speeches and pamphlets a source of perennial
freshness and interest.
The first of the pamphlets on public affairs was a brief
statement of what had been achieved by the Rockingham
administration to restore order and good government at home
and in the colonies. The Observations are a more detailed
defence of that administration against the attack of an anonymous
pamphlet, attributed to George Grenville. Grenville, in this
pamphlet, defended his own government, which was responsible
for the peace of Paris and the first proposal to tax the colonies,
and criticised the repeal of the Stamp act. Both the peace and
the resolution to tax America were the consequence, he argued,
of the charges incurred by the great wars. Burke's reply
consists in showing that Grenville had underestimated the power
of England and her expanding trade to support these increased
charges, and especially had exaggerated the sufferings of this
country when compared with those of France, the condition of
whose lower classes, and the straitness and distraction of whose
finances,' seemed, to Burke, at this period, to forbode ‘some
extraordinary convulsion . . . the effect of which on France, and
6


## p. 8 (#30) ###############################################

8
[CH.
Edmund Burke
even on all Europe, it is difficult to conjecture. ' But much of
the ground that is covered in this first controversial pamphlet
was again traversed with a more confident step, with a wider
outlook and a loftier eloquence, in the writings which followed
it. Less hampered by the necessity of controverting an opponent,
Burke addresses himself to the fundamental constitutional and
imperial questions at issue in a spirit of elevated political wisdom.
The position which Burke adopts in Present Discontents
(1770) is eloquent of the temper in which he ever approached
questions affecting the constitution. The conflict which raged
round Wilkes and the Middlesex election was, he saw clearly,
a conflict between the crown and the constituencies, the crown
acting by an instrumental house of commons. ' He admitted
the ultimate authority of the people. Although government
certainly is an institution of divine authority, yet its forms, and
the persons who administer it, all originate from the people. '
But he shrank from the inference that, if government were
emancipating itself from the control of the people, if the crown
were threatening to deprive the House of Commons of its peculiar
'virtue, spirit and essence,' namely, to be “the express image of
the feelings of the nation' it was because the constituencies
themselves had ceased to represent the people. The proposals
to enlarge the number of constituents, coupled, as they were,
with the expedient of triennial parliaments, he always re-
sisted. To Burke, a constitutional state was one in which, in
some degree, a balance had been secured between the various
powers which, in the state, represent the complex nature of man,
and, in the British constitution, as it had taken shape in history;
and especially with the revolution, he saw, if not an ideal, yet,
the weak and imperfect nature of man considered, a wonderful
balance of powers, aristocracy (the power which springs from
man's natural regard for inherited distinction and privilege) and
property exerting in a healthy and not sinister fashion their
natural and inevitable influence, while the popular will made
itself felt directly and indirectly, by actual and by virtual'
representation, as a controlling and, at times, an inspiring in-
fluence. He would not do anything to disturb this balance.
‘Our constitution stands on a nice equipoise with steep precipices
and deep waters upon all sides of it. In removing it from a
dangerous leaning towards one side there may be a risk of over-
setting it on the other. He would rather ‘by lessening the number
add to the weight and independency of our voters.


## p. 9 (#31) ###############################################

1]
The Present Discontents
9
Unable, therefore, to acquiesce in the only practical means by
which the people were to recover the control of parliament, and
enforce loyalty to principle and party, Burke could only indicate
the chief symptom of the disease, the disintegration of party, and
elaborate a philosophic defence of party-government, which, since
Bolingbroke, it had become the fashion, and was now the interest,
of many to decry.
Characteristically, Burke defends party as an indispensable
instrument of practicable statesmanship, and as an institution
which has its roots in some of the profoundest and most beautiful
instincts of the heart; for utility, but utility rooted—if one may
so speak-in man's moral constitution, is Burke's court of appeal
in all questions of practical politics. Bolingbroke’s condemnation
of party as identical with faction, and his dream of a patriot king
who should govern without reference to party, must have seemed
to Burke the result of a view of human nature that was at once
too cynical and too sanguine. Party-loyalty might degenerate into
self-seeking factiousness, but, in its idea, party is 'a body of men
united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national
interest upon some particular principle in which they are all
agreed’; and the feelings which cement a party are not purely
selfish, but include and 'bring into the service and conduct of the
common-wealth''the dispositions that are lovely in private life. '
To be unable to act in loyal concert with others is to condemn
ourselves to ineffectiveness, and 'all virtue which is impracticable
is spurious,' for public life is a situation of power and energy : he
trespasses against his duty who sleeps upon his watch, as well as
he that goes over to the enemy. ' 'In the way which they call
party,' he declared, when, at a later juncture, he was charged with
factiousness, 'I worship the constitution of your fathers; and I
shall never blush for my political company. '
Though not one of the best, and certainly the most inconclusive,
of all Burke's political writings, Present Discontents reveals the
chief characteristics of his thought and style—the tendency to
go at once to the root of the matter, to illuminate facts by
principles, and to clothe these in felicitous images and phrases
which seem to shed a new light, to 'pour resistless day,' on the
moral and political constitution of man. In these things, Burke
is without a rival. His aphorisms crowd upon one another and
rise out of one another (as was noted by one who heard his first
speech in the House of Commons) until the reader can hardly go
forward, so many vistas of fresh thought are opened before him.


## p. 10 (#32) ##############################################

IO
[ch.
Edmund Burke
And Burke's political aphorisms are so pregnant that they distend
the mind with the same sense of fulness with which Shakespeare's
lines affect the student of the passions and movements of the
human heart.
But Burke's oratory was not here illumined by the vision of a
large concrete issue in which the future of an empire and the fate
of peoples depended on the wisdom or unwisdom of the policy
chosen and pursued. That came with the American controversy.
It
may be clear to the student of history that the causes of that
conflict, and of the ultimate separation of the colonies from the
mother country, lay deeper than in the schemes of taxation by
which Grenville, Townshend and North precipitated matters. It is
yet equally certain that, at a great juncture, English statesmanship
was found wanting in the wisdom, imagination and sympathy
requisite to solve the problem of governing a growing overseas
empire. It was his gifts of sympathy and imagination, combined
with a wise spirit of practicable statesmanship which distinguishes
Burke among all who discussed the colonial question on one side
or the other, and have caused his words to bear fruit in the long
run, fruitless as, at the moment, they seemed to be.
Two or three principles underlie all that Burke said or
wrote on the question. The first of these is that, in practical
politics, the guiding star of statesmanship is expediency, not
legal or abstract right. Our arguments on political questions
may often be
conclusive as to right, but the very reverse as to policy and practice. '
‘Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature;
of which the reason is but a part and by no means the greatest part. ' 'The
opinion of my having some abstract right in my favour would not put me
much at my ease in passing sentence; unless I could be sure that there were
no rights which in their exercise were not the most odious of all wrongs, and
the most vexatious of all injustice. '
Such quotations could be multiplied. It is the principle which
dictated the coupling of the Declaratory act with the repeal of
the Stamp act in 1766, the assertion of a legal right which, in
some conceivable emergency, it might be necessary to assert, but
the general exercise of which was to be regulated by an entire
regard for liberty and the spirit of the British constitution.
When the word 'expediency' is given its full moral significance,
this principle may be said to be the foundation-stone of Burke's
political philosophy.
The second position reiterated in these speeches is that, in the
search for what is expedient and, therefore, right, the statesman


## p. 11 (#33) ##############################################

1] Principles of the American Speeches II
must be guided by circumstances, of which the most important is
the temper and character of the people for whom he is legislating.
The statesman, like Bacon's natural philosopher, rules by obeying.
The principle is obvious, but its application requires sympathy
and imagination, and George III, with his entire lack of both, was
a better representative of the average Englishman than either
Burke or Chatham. Burke's imagination was filled with the
greatness of the American people, the wild, irregular greatness
of a people who had grown up to manhood nurtured by a wise
and salutary neglect. ' 'Nothing in history is parallel to it,' he
declares in his earliest reply to Grenville. 'All the reasonings
about it that are likely to be at all solid must be drawn from its
actual circumstances. ' And such reasoning will include the all-
important consideration that these people are Englishmen with
the inherited tradition of political liberty and self-government.
The magnificent paragraphs, in the speech On Conciliation,
devoted to the Americans, their numbers, their enterprise, their
spirit and the sources from which it is sustained, are not a purple
patch of diffuse, descriptive oratory alone. Like the similar
.
paragraphs on the peoples and civilisation of India, in a later
speech, they are an appeal to the imagination of the speaker's
audience, that, realising the magnitude of the issue at stake, they
may rise above a narrow legalism to the contemplation of what is
greater even than America, namely an empire which shall include
free peoples, and different civilisations.
But, to discover what is expedient in the complexity of cir-
cumstances, which include the tempers of people, is no easy task,
and, hence, Burke's third principle, that our safest guide is
experience. The past illumines the future, it may be but a few
feet in advance, yet sufficiently to walk by.
Again and again and again revert to your own principles-leave America, if
she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself. . . . Leave the Americans as they
anciently stood, and these distinctions born of our unhappy contest will die
along with it. . . . Be content to bind America by laws of trade; you have always
done it. Let this be your reason for binding their trade. Do not burthen
them with taxes; you were not used to do so from the beginning. Let this
be your reason for not taxing. These are arguments for states and kingdoms.
Leave the rest to the schools; for there only they may be discussed with
safety.
Such are the principles which guided Burke in adumbrating
in these speeches the lines to be followed in solving the problem
the character and complexity of which he alone seems to have
grasped, the problem of governing and maintaining the great


## p. 12 (#34) ##############################################

I 2
[CH.
Edmund Burke
empire which Chatham's successful wars had called into exist-
ence,
of reconciling the strong presiding power that is so useful towards the con-
servation of a vast, disconnected, infinitely diversified empire, with that
liberty and safety of the provinces, which they must enjoy (in opinion and
practice at least) or they will not be provinces.
He was provided with no theoretical plan that would suit all
circumstances, the natives of Hindustan and those of Virginia
alike, the Cutchery court and the grand jury of Salem. ' His
appeal was to the wisdom of experience, the spirit of the English
constitution and the magnanimity of statesmen.
Of the American speeches, the greatest, as it is the most
elaborate, is, doubtless, the second, On Conciliation ; but the first,
On American Taxation, which has more the character of being,
as, indeed, it was, the spontaneous product of debate, combines,
in a wonderful manner, simplicity and directness of reasoning with
ardour and splendour of eloquence. There is something of Rubens
or Rembrandt in the easy, broad, bold strokes with which Burke
paints the history of English policy in America ; the rich, diffused,
warm colouring of the whole ; the concentration of the high lights
and more brilliant tints on the chief episodes and figures—the
upright but narrow-minded Grenville ; Conway, whose face in the
hour of victory was as the face of an angel; the tessellated ministry
of Chatham ; the passing of that great and theatrical figure, and
the dazzling advent of Townshend. Such characters' had been a
feature of earlier oratory and history like that of Bolingbroke and
Clarendon-both of them writers with whose work Burke was inti-
mately acquainted—but these, again, are, in Burke's speeches, no
mere rhetorical device or literary ornament. They illustrate his con-
viction that politics have their roots in human character ; that, to
understand policies, we must study personalities, whether indivi-
duals or corporate bodies like the House of Commons and the
National Assembly.
The speech On Conciliation is the most greatly builded of all
Burke's speeches, not excepting those on India, which belong rather
to forensic than deliberative oratory. Perhaps its structure is too
elaborate for its immediate purpose. The sonorous parade of the
parallel cases of Wales, Chester and Ireland was not likely to have
much weight with the House of Commons. It is rather a great
concio ad populum et regem, a last impassioned, elevated and
conciliatory appeal to the government and the nation; and, if
delivered under the conditions of a later period, when it would
6


## p. 13 (#35) ##############################################

1
1]
Speech On Conciliation
13
>
have been read in every household on the day following, could not
but have reacted with power on both House and government. As
it is, it remains some compensation to English literature for the
dismemberment of the British empire. Whether we reflect on the
art with which it is constructed, the skill with which the speaker
winds into the heart of his subject and draws from it the material
of his splendid peroration on 'the spirit of the English constitution'
and its power to unite, invigorate and vivify the British empire in
all its diverse members; or reflect on the temper, passionate and
moving yet restrained and conciliatory, in which the argument is
conducted; or recall simply the greater flights of picturesque
eloquence, the description of American industry and enterprise, the
imagery in which the speaker clothes his conception of the spirit of
the English constitution and the sovereign authority of parliament-
the speech takes its own place beside the greatest masterpieces of
our literature, the plays of Shakespeare and the poems of Milton.
It produces the same impression of supremacy in its own kind; it
abounds, like these, in phrases which seem to enrich our language
with a new felicity and dignity: ‘enjoyments which deceive the
burthen of life,' a wise and salutary neglect,' 'I do not know the
method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people,' 'man
acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on
metaphysical speculations,’ ‘magnanimity in politics is not seldom
the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill
together
In these speeches, Burke is the orator following consciously
the ancient tradition of oratory; combining all the styles, the plain,
the ornate, the impassioned, each used as the theme requires, in the
manner which Cicero, in the Orator, describes as constituting the
authentic Attic and Demosthenic eloquence. In Burke's Letter to
the Sheriffs of Bristol, the style is more uniform and unadorned,
a vigorous and straight hitting polemic. He sweeps aside with
the scorn of which he was a master the cant charges which, in
time of war, are levelled at those who question either the foolish
policy or arbitrary tyranny of the government, and defines,
more clearly than ever, what had always been his conception of
the nature of the problem presented by the government of a com-
plex and scattered empire, and the entire competence in the
matter of 'prudence, constituted as the god of this lower world,'
and prudence only.
What Burke deplored in the American policy of George III
1 See Boswell's Life of Johnson (ed. Hill, G. B. , vol. 11, p. 260).


## p. 14 (#36) ##############################################

14
(ch.
Edmund Burke
>
and his ministers was the entire absence of this prudence. He did
not take any side in the battle of 'rights,' natural and legal, but
stood firmly upon the basis of experience and expediency. In the
cases of Ireland and India, he showed that, by a policy based on
expediency he understood something very different from oppor-
tunism ; that, if he disdained discussion of metaphysical rights, it
was not that he did not believe in the existence of rights prior to
and above all human conventions and laws, but because he deemed
that their abstract definition was either an impossible or a useless
labour, apt to hinder, rather than to promote, their practical realisa-
tion. But that there is an eternal law of which human law is, at its
best, but declaratory is the assumption and the express affirmation
underlying his attacks on the tyranny of the penal laws in Ireland
and on the claim to arbitrary power in India put forward by Warren
Hastings, as the vindication of his treatment of the rajah of
Benares. There is a law which neither despot nor people may
violate ; any law in contradiction of it not only may, but must, be
resisted,
because made against the principle of a superior law, which it is not in the
power of any community, or of the whole race of men to alter-I mean the
will of Him who gave us our nature, and in giving impressed an invariable
law upon it. It would be hard to point out any error more truly subversive
of all the wonder and beauty, of all the peace and happiness of human society,
than the position—that any body of men have a right to make what laws they
please, or that laws can derive any authority from their institution merely
and independent of the quality of the subject-matter. No argument of policy,
reason of state, or preservation of the constitution can be pleaded in favour of
such a practice.
So he wrote between 1760 and 1765 in Tracts relative to the Laws
against Popery in Ireland and his position is unchanged in 1788
when he denounces Warren Hastings.
Arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man
can give. . . . We are all born in subjection. . . to one great, immutable, preexistent
Law, prior to all our devices, and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to
all our ideas, and all our sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which
we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the Universe, out of which
we cannot stir. . . . Those who give and those who receive arbitrary power are
alike criminal, and there is no man but is bound to resist it to the best of his
power whenever it shall show its face in the world.
It is in view of this fundamental doctrine that we must interpret
Burke's appeals to experience and expediency. In the last resort,
Burke's politics are religious, and rest on the conviction that
human authority and laws derive from an ultimate Divine authority
and law. The bearing of this conviction on Burke's attitude to
the incidents and doctrines of the French revolution will appear


## p. 15 (#37) ##############################################

1]
Ireland and Bristol
15
later. It accounts for the deeper note of passion audible in the
speeches and pamphlets on Irish and Indian questions when these
are compared with the more persuasive and conciliatory defence
of the Americans and the cause of prudence and her great teacher
experience.
Ireland, indeed, though perhaps closer to Burke's heart than
any other country, fills a comparatively small part of his collected
works, though, to a student of his mind and thought, not the least
interesting part. He had studied Irish history, and knew from
what a tissue of falsehoods the prevalent English view of the
rebellion in 1641 and other episodes in that history was woven.
He knew the working of the penal laws from within, and for the
ancient church whose worship and creed were barred and penalised
he had an understanding and sincere respect. None of his writings
is less touched with the faults of Burke's great qualities, occasional
rhetorical parade, an extravagant sensibility, a tendency to factious
exaggeration, than are the letters To a Peer of Ireland on the Penal
Laws (1782), To Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) and to others
which Matthew Arnold collected and republished in 1881, including,
with these, the Speech at the Guildhall, in Bristol (1780) when
Burke closed his connection with that great mercantile constituency.
No better and more triumphant apologia was ever written. Burke
had his back to the wall and, in the end, declined the election.
But he was fighting, also, with the consciousness that what he fore-
told had come true. America was lost.
America was lost. England had sown the
wind and was reaping the whirlwind. And part of that harvest
was Ireland. The refusal to grant those concessions, for supporting
which Burke forfeited the confidence of his constituents (despite
Two Letters (1778) in defence of his vote), had resulted in a practical
revolution in Ireland and 'a universal surrender of all that had
been thought the peculiar, reserved, uncommunicable rights of
England. . . . We were taught wisdom by humiliation. ' And from
the same source had flowed the other cause of complaint in Bristol,
the repeal of the penal laws. When Burke turns from the justice
of the policy of repeal to vindicate its expedience, his argument is
summarised in an aposiopesis, 'Gentlemen, America— He does not
spare his critics nor disguise the humiliation of England any the more
that he approves of the measures of justice which that humiliation
has exacted from an unwilling country. And he is equally fearless
in his defence of his conduct as regards the defeated bill for the
relief of debtors, and the amendment of the gross and cruel facts
in our law. ' The only purple patch in the speech is the brief
6


## p. 16 (#38) ##############################################

16
[ch.
Edmund Burke
1
6
panegyric upon Howard, the reformer of prisons. Otherwise, the
style is as simple and nervous as the prose of Swift, but fired
with a nobler passion and illumined by a wider vision of general
principles.
If Ireland were a subordinate though a very real interest to
Burke, India was the centre of his activity from 1780 until the
French revolution came, not to supersede India but to share with
it and Ireland his thoughts and labours. From the problem of
the government of colonies peopled by Englishmen, habituated to
freedom and jealous of authority, he turned to the other problem
with which Chatham's wars had also embarrassed England, the
problem of governing a great empire of peoples who had never
known any other rule than an absolute despotism, a despotism
which, through an era of anarchy, was passing, or had passed, to a
trading company and its ill-controlled and ill-remunerated servants.
*The proud day of Asia is passed. The relaxation and dissolution
'
of the Mogul government had made the Indian company what the
Roman law had supposed 'irreconcilable to reason and property-
eundem Negotiatorem et Dominum; the same power became the
general trader, the same power became the supreme lord. '
The Indian speeches are distinguished from the American not
alone by the greater passion that inspires them but by partaking
more of the nature of forensic and, occasionally, epideictic or
panegyric, than of deliberative oratory? Each of them is an
indictment—that On Mr Fox's East-India Bill (1783) of the East
India company and its administration; that on the Nabob of
Arcot's Debts (1785) of Dundas's India board for its protection of
the nabob's creditors; and the series of speeches with which
Burke opened and closed the trial of Warren Hastings, an im-
peachment which, for variety and vehemence of oratory, has no
parallel except in Cicero's Verrines. And they are not only
indictments—like the speech on the employment of Indians in the
American war—but legal indictments, in which proof is inter-
woven with narrative and exposition.
The distinction is of importance, because it explains the fact
that these speeches, despite the occasional splendour of their
eloquence, are of less vital interest than the American, Irish, or
French revolution speeches and pamphlets; and because, in oratory
of this description, the faults of Burke's judgment and tempera-
ment made themselves, at times, only too apparent. It is im-
possible to read the most eloquent of indictments, especially of
1 Adopting Aristotle's classification in Rhetoric.
套
​i
i
I
.


## p. 17 (#39) ##############################################

1] India and Warren Hastings 17
individuals, based on alleged facts, without the wish to hear the
other side. The force of the indictment, we feel, depends on the
strength of the evidence advanced in support of the speaker's
charges, and these, in Aristotle's phrase, are åtexvol TiOTELS,
proofs which depend neither on the arguments nor the elo-
quence of the orator but on the credibility of witnesses, and the
authenticity and interpretation of documents. And the more
vehement, the less judicial in tone, the orator, the more insistent
becomes the thoughtful reader's demand for relative evidence.
But, in the Indian speeches, Burke's tone is never judicial ; when
Hastings is in question, it is never either temperate or fair. The
Verrine orations of Cicero are not more fiercely vituperative than
the speeches of Burke before the House of Lords. But, from
what we know otherwise of Verres, he was all that Cicero tells us.
The history of Warren Hastings’s government has been the subject
of careful investigation, and, whatever we may think of his faults,
he was certainly no Verres. Burke's whole treatment of that great
case was vitiated by his determination to find the sole motive of
every crime with which Hastings was charged in a base, selfish,
corrupt cupidity,— Money is the beginning, the middle, and the
end of every kind of act done by Mr Hastings-pretendedly for the
Company, but really for himself. ' But, of all charges, this is the
least true. Hastings was not scrupulous in his choice of means,
and he was responsible for acts both of extortion and cruelty, but
the motives which actuated them were public not private, the
service of the company and the preservation of British rule in
India at a season of the utmost peril. The fury with which Burke
assailed Hastings's character was, therefore, misdirected.
He
fledged the arrows of his eloquence with the vindictive malice of
Francis, and, in so doing, obscured and weakened what is the main
burden and justification of his indictment, and of all his labours
in the cause of India--the distinction, which he places in the fore-
front of his opening addresses to the House of Lords, and recurs to
in his final replies, between absolute authority and arbitrary
power. In so far as he meets Hastings's claim to arbitrary power
by an appeal to the authority of law as formulated in the codes of
the Hindoos, the Mohammedans and the Tartars, the argument is
more interesting (“there never was such food for the curiosity of
the human mind as is found in the manners of this people'ie.
the Gentûs or Hindoos) than relevant, for, at the time when
Warren Hastings was struggling with the Mahrattas and Hyder
Ali, all law in India was in suspension. If, in the anarchy which
B, L, XL.
CH. I.
2


## p. 18 (#40) ##############################################

18
[CH.
Edmund Burke
prevailed, Hastings had fettered himself by the ideal prescripts of
Timur or Mohammed, the British power in India would, indeed,
have been Swift's 'single man in his shirt' contending with eleven
armed men. But, in his appeal to the eternal laws which no human
power may abrogate any more than it may dispense with physical
laws, Burke (as has been already indicated) was stating the funda-
mental principle of his political philosophy, and, at the same time,
helping, almost as effectively as Hastings himself, to lay the founda-
tion of British rule in India. In the American and Indian speeches
of Burke is contained, one might say without exaggeration and
making full allowance for the faults of the Indian series, the grammar
of British empire—the free self-government of white communities,
the just rule of peoples for whom representative government is im-
practicable, the qualification of absolute government by an entire
regard for the welfare and the prejudices of the governed.
The great instrument of Burke's oratory in the Indian, as in
the American, speeches is the philosophical imagination. The
same faculty that evoked a vivid and instructive picture of the
spirit and enterprise of a people yet in the gristle' elaborates,
in the speech on Fox's East India bill, a sublimer and more moving
vision of the ancient civilisation of India,
princes once of great dignity, authority, and opulence. . . an ancient and
venerable priesthood, the depository of their laws, learning and history, the
guides of the people while living and their consolation in death . . . millions of
ingenious manufacturers and mechanics; millions of the most diligent and
not the least intelligent, tillers of the earth. . . almost all the religions professed
by men, the Braminical, the Mussulman, the Eastern and the Western
Christian.
And, over against this picture, he places that of English rule, the
rule of merchants intent only on profits and corrupt gain. The sen-
tences seem to ring for ever in the ear, in which the orator describes
the young men who ruled India, with all the avarice of age and all
the impetuosity of youth, rolling in wave after wave, birds of prey
and
passage
who leave no trace that England has been represented
in India 'by any thing better than the ourang-outang or the tyger,'
for their prey is lodged in England ; and the cries of India are
given to seas and winds, to be blown about at every breaking up of
the monsoon over a remote and unhearing ocean. But the most
terrible and the most faithful picture of British misrule which
Burke painted, and of what that misrule meant for the wretched
natives, is that in the speech On the Nabob of Arcot's Debts; and
nothing in Burke's speeches is more Miltonic in its sublimity and
gloom than the description of the vengeance taken by Hyder Ali
6


## p. 19 (#41) ##############################################

1]
The French Revolution
19
on the 'abused, insulted, racked and ruined' Carnatic. Of the
epideictic or panegyric oratory with which Burke occasionally
illumines his tenebrous and fiery denunciations of waste and
oppression, the Indian speeches afford the most sustained and
elaborate example in the eulogy of Fox which closes the speech
on the East India bill, 'a studied panegyric; the fruit of much
meditation; the result of the observation of nearly twenty years. '
These words were spoken in 1783. In 1791, that friendship was
formally terminated, and Burke and Fox met as strangers in the
conduct of the long impeachment. It was not a private quarrel
which alienated them. It was the French revolution. That great
upheaval agitated Burke's sensitive and passionate imagination
certainly no less than the misgovernment of India, but it did so in
a way that has left a more interesting record in his work, for it
quickened and intensified the activity of his speculation. In
judging of events and persons, his mind was, perhaps, not less
prejudiced; but, in the main, the controversy which he waged was
not forensic but deliberative, a discussion not of facts and proofs
but of principles and the spirit that inspires or is inspired by
principles. He was at war with the philosophy and with the
temper of the revolution. He was driven back on first principles;
and the flame which was kindled in his imagination served to
irradiate and illumine every vein and nerve in the complex and
profound philosophy of human nature and political society which
had underlain and directed all that, since he entered public life
and earlier, he had done or written as statesman and thinker.
It is a mistake to represent Burke as by philosophical principle
and temperament necessarily hostile to revolution or rebellion.
Politically, he was the child of the revolution of 1688, and an
ardent champion of the principles of that revolution. He condoned
and approved the revolution (for as such he regarded it) by
which Ireland, in 1781, secured freedom of trade and legislative
independence. He believed that the Americans had done right in
resisting by arms the attempt to tax them directly. Moreover,
the fundamental principle of Burke's political philosophy, his
conviction that behind all human law was a divine law which
human authority could never override, carried with it, as the
same principle did for the Calvinists of Holland or for the
puritans of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
the possibility that it might be a duty to rebel. Burke and
Rousseau are agreed on one point, that force is not right,
that no force majeure can justify a man in renouncing his
2-2


## p. 20 (#42) ##############################################

20
[Ch.
Edmund Burke
-
liberty, or, what is the same thing, his responsibility to God.
It was not a revolt against legitimate authority, it was not
even any radical reconstruction of the machinery of the state
(though Burke always distrusted the wisdom and, even, the possi-
bility of radical reformation), which made him the enemy of the
revolution. He admits, in his Reflections, that such reconstruction
was required, and would have had the Assembly set to work with
an eye upon their old constitution to guide them, and, where that
failed them, on the British constitution. What roused Burke's
passionate antagonism was the philosophy of the revolution and the
spirit of the revolution, an abstract philosophy which seemed to him
false to the fundamental facts of man's moral and political nature,
a spirit which he detested as the relentless enemy alike of liberty
and religion-of that religion which alone can teach men to
subordinate power to duty, to accept the mysterious dispensation
which assigns to each of us his place in society, which alone can
guide us in life and console us in death. His foe was the same in
this as in all his previous conflicts,-arbitrary power, not claiming
legal right for its justification, as the British parliament had claimed
it in the case of America, nor inherited absolute authority, as
Hastings had in the case of Cheyte Sing and the begums, but
asserting the indisputable authority of the people, of democracy.
Compared with such a tyranny, every other seemed less deplorable.
Under a cruel prince men have the balmy consolation of mankind to assuage
the smart of their wounds; they have the plandits of the people to animate
their generous constancy under suffering; but those who are subjected to
wrong under multitudes are deprived of all external consolations. They seem
deserted by mankind; overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species.
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is the most im-
portant manifesto of Burke's anti-revolutionary crusade. A critic
has remarked, with some justice, that the writings on the revolution
‘are perhaps the worse written for not being speeches. . . they did
not call out Burke's architectonic faculty. But Burke was not
less a master of disposition than of invention, and there is an art
in the loosely ordered sequence of his Reflections. Such an elaborate
architecture as that of the speech On Conciliation would have
been out of place in dealing with what was still fluid. None of
the fatal issues of the revolution had yet emerged, but, studying
its principles and its temper, the trend of its shifting and agitated
currents, Burke foresees them all, down to the advent of the
popular general as the saviour of society. Beginning with Price's
i Oliver Elton, & Survey of English Literature (1912), vol. 1.
6


## p. 21 (#43) ##############################################

1]
Reflections on the Revolution in France 21
sermon, the occasion of his pamphlet, he endeavours to show that
the revolution of 1688 did not involve any breach of the hereditary
principle, or invalidate the inherited right of the king to govern
independent of the choice of the people. He recurred at great
length to this in the later Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.
The argument is necessarily inconclusive, yet not without im-
portance as establishing the fact that the success of the revolution
was due to the skill with which its managers had succeeded in
transferring unimpaired to the new government the authority of
the old. This was just what the assembly had failed to do;
and, hence, the necessity for the authority of the guillotine
and the sword. A brief contrast of the English revolution with
the French leads, naturally, to just such a sketch of the personal
factor in the Assembly—the classes from which it was drawn
-as, at an earlier date, in the speech On American Taxation,
when discussing the source of colonial discontent, he had given
of English statesmen and the House of Commons. Recurring to
Price's eulogy of the French revolution, he is led rapidly on to
what was the distinctive character of that revolution, the subject
of Price's approval and Burke's condemnation. It lay in the
fact that, unlike all other revolutions, the French started from no
mere desire for the redress of grievances or shifting of the centre
of gravity of government, but promulgated a new philosophy, a new
gospel, judged by which all governments are usurpations, and that
its watchword was the rights of man. '
Against these there can be no prescription; against these no argument is
binding: these admit no temperament and no compromise : anything withheld
from their fall demand is so much of fraud and injustice.
The paragraphs on the abstract rights of man and the inevitable
tendency of such a doctrine to identify right with power leads
Burke back again to Price and his exultation over the leading in
triumph of the king and queen from Versailles. And, thence, he
passes to an impassioned outburst on the spirit of the revolution,
the temper of those in whom the religion of the ‘rights of man' has
*vanquished all the mean superstitions of the heart,' has cast out all
the sentiments of loyalty and reverence which constitute ‘the decent
drapery of life,' serving 'to cover the defects of our naked shivering
nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation. From these
two sections, on the rights of man’and the spirit of their devotees,
1 Burke had himself declared, in 1777, that 'to the free choice therefore of the
people, without either king or parliament, we owe that happy establishment, out of
which both king and parliament were regenerated. ' An Address to the King. This
was not published till after Burke's death.
>
:


## p. 22 (#44) ##############################################

22
[CH.
Edmund Burke
naturally flows all that follows—the vindication of prejudice, the
importance of religion in the state and defence of an established
church, the review of the progress of democratic tyranny in France
in the abolition of nobility and confiscation of the church and the
examination of the constitution set up by the Assembly—the
legislature, executive, judicature and army, their consistence with
the doctrine of the rights of man' and their probable doom.
To the charge of inconsistency which the publication of
Reflections and his speeches in the House brought upon him,
Burke replied in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs
(1791), published anonymously and written in the third person.
From a general defence of the consistency of his denunciation of
the French revolution with his defence of the American colonies
and proposals for economic reform, Burke proceeds to elaborate
his defence of the view he had put forward in Reflections of
the revolution of 1688, as preserving, not destroying, inherited,
prescriptive rights; and closes with an elaboration of his views on
the prescriptive, inherited character of all the institutions and
rights which constitute a state ; the involuntary, inherited nature
of all our most sacred ties and duties. Taken together, these two
pamphlets form the most complete statement of Burke's anti-
revolutionary philosophy, which his other writings on the subject
serve only to amplify and adorn.
It is in his attack on the abstract and individualistic doctrine of
the ‘rights of man' that Burke develops most fully this philosophy
of society, and breaks most decisively with the mechanical and
atomic political theory which, inherited from Locke, had dominated
the thought of the eighteenth century. Over against the view of
the state as the product of a 'contract' among individuals, whose
‘rights' exist prior to that contract, and constitute the standard
by which at every stage the just claim of society on the individual
is to be tested, he develops the conception of the individual as
himself the product of society, born to an inheritance of rights
(which are 'all the advantages' for which civil society is made)
and of reciprocal duties, and, in the last resort, owing these con-
crete rights (actual rights which fall short in perfection of those
ideal rights 'whose abstract perfection is their practical defect')
to convention and prescription. Society originates not in a free
contract but in necessity, and the shaping factor in its institutions
has not been the consideration of any code of abstract preexistent
rights (“the inherent rights of the people') but 'convenience. '
And, of these conveniences or rights, two are supreme, government
6


## p. 23 (#45) ##############################################

1]
His Political Philosophy
23
6
and prescription, the existence of “a power out of themselves
by which the will of individuals may be controlled,' and the
recognition of the sacred character of prescription. In whatever
way a particular society may have originated—conquest, usurpation,
revolution ('there is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings
of all government')-in process of time, its institutions and rights
come to rest upon prescription. In any ancient community such
as that of France or Britain, every constituent factor, including
what we choose to call the people, is the product of convention.
The privileges of every order, the rights of every individual, rest
upon prescription embodied in law or established by usage. This
is the compact or agreement which gives its corporate form and
capacity to a state,' and, if it is once broken, the people are
a number of vague, loose individuals and nothing more. Alas! they little
know how many & weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves
into a mass which has a true politic personality 1.
There is, therefore, no right of revolution, or rebellion at will.
The 'civil, social man' never may rebel except when he must
rebel. Revolution is always the annulment of some rights. It
will be judged in the last resort by the degree in which it
preserves as well as destroys, and by what it substitutes for what
it takes away. At its best, revolution is the extreme medicine of
the constitution,' and Burke's quarrel with the Assembly is that
they have made it 'its daily bread'; that, when the whole constitu-
tion of France was in their hands to preserve and to reform, they
elected only to destroy.
Burke's denunciation of the spirit or temper of the revolution
follows as naturally from his philosophy of the state as that from
the doctrine of the revolutionists. The rights of man' was a
religion, a fanaticism expelling every other sentiment, and Burke
meets it with a philosophy which is also a religion, no mere
theory of the state but a passionate conviction. He and the
revolutionists were at one in holding that there is a law, a principle
superior to positive law, by which positive law must be tested.
Had he not declared that there were positive rights which, in their
exercise, were the most odious of all wrongs, and the most
vexatious of all injustice'? But, whereas they sought this law in
abstract rights prior to, and independent of, the state, for Burke,
the essential condition of every 'right' is the state itself. There
can be no right which is incompatible with the very existence of
the state. Justice is not to be sought in or by the destruction of
1 An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.


## p. 24 (#46) ##############################################

24
[ch.
Edmund Burke
that which has given us the idea of justice, has made us the moral
beings we are, for it is the privilege of 'that wonderful structure
Man’ to be in a great degree the creature of his own making,
and 'He who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue willed
also the necessary means of its perfection; He willed therefore the
state? ' The state is no mere prudential contract for material ends,
security of property and life (though these are its primary ends
and fundamental conditions); it is the partnership between men
from which has sprung science and art and virtue—all human
perfection; a partnership which links one generation to another,
the living to the dead and the unborn. It is more; ' each contract
of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval
contract of eternal society,' which is the law of God and ‘holds all
physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. To
the religion of the natural man, Burke thus opposes the religion
of the state, of man as civilisation has made him, for ‘Art is man's
nature. ' The established church is the recognition of the sacred
character of the state. The prejudices and sentiments which
attach us to the community are not to be abolished by the con-
quering light of reason, but cherished as the very substance of the
moral reason. It is this thought which underlies Burke's defence
of prejudice. Following, as it does, the highly coloured threnody
on the fate of the queen of France and the decay of the senti-
ments of loyalty and chivalry, Burke has exposed himself to the
charge of identifying moral feeling with fleeting and artificial
sentiments. But this is only partly just. Burke does not really
confound the sentiments which adorn life with those which sustain
life, the draperies of the moral life with its flesh and blood. His
defence of prejudice against the claims of a fanatical abstract
reason is just such a recognition of the nature of moral reason as
that which turned Wordsworth from Godwin's 'political justice'
to the emotions and prejudices of the peasant.
To Burke, thus encountering the philosophy and fanaticism of
the French revolution with a deeper philosophy and an equal zeal,
war with France was a crusade ; and he pressed for it passionately
1 It must be admitted, too, that, at this stage, Burke is more disposed than when
he wrote the Tracts relative to the Laws against Popery (see the first quotation at p. 14),
or defended the American rebellion or the Irish 'revolution,' to identify the state with
the particular constitution of a concrete state, Britain or France; to refuse to consider
any claim of right' which is incompatible with this position which comes near to
denying any right of reform at all. It is against this view that Wordsworth protested
in his early Apology for the French Revolution. But it is a mistake to take this rejection
of reform as the cardinal artiole of Burke's political creed. His thought, in its whole
drift and content, has a deeper significance.
>


## p. 25 (#47) ##############################################

1] Letters on a Regicide Peace
a
25
before Pitt's hand was forced by the invasion of Holland.
The rest of Burke's life was mainly devoted to the crusade
against Jacobinism at home and abroad, and it is well to
understand what he understood by the term. It is not republi-
canism, nor even democracy, though it is, he seems to think, that
to which a pure democracy inevitably tends. Burke did not
believe that this country was at war with the French people, for
there was no French public. "The country is composed but of
two descriptions; audacious tyrants and trembling slaves. ' By
Jacobinism, he understood the tyranny of unprincipled and irre-
sponsible ability or talent talent divorced from religious awe and
all regard for individual liberty and property, supporting itself
by appealing to the passions and ignorance of the poor. This was
the character of the government of France as one set of rulers
succeeded another in what he calls 'the tontine of infamy, and
the war which it waged was a war of conquest essential to its own
existence. Peace with such a power could only be made on the
same conditions as it was to be made with the Saracens in the full
tide of conquest. This is the burden of the impassioned and lurid
Letters on a Regicide Peace (1797), which, like the denunciations
of Warren Hastings, tend to weary us, by the reiteration of shrill
vituperation, the want of coolness and balance of judgment. Burke
was, in himself, the counter-revolution,' and, as in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, excess begat excess.
This is not the place for a full discussion of Burke's treatment
of the French revolution. He died before any final issue was even
in sight. It might be urged, with some justice, that he was so
moved by the furious symptoms of the disease that he never
thoroughly gauged its deeper sources or foresaw the course it
must ultimately run, clearly as he did foresee its immediate issues.
It might be contended that, fleeing from one abstraction, he drew
near to another, and consecrated prescription, inherited right, when
judged and condemned by that expediency which is the sanction
of prescription. In a history of literature, it is more interesting
to note that he had not enough faith in his own principles ; for
the deficiency reveals the writer's temperament. Believing, as he
did, that society and the particular form which society has taken
is of divine origin, that in the history of a nation was revealed
the working of providence shaping the moral and spiritual being
of those who composed it, he is singularly fearful of the issue.
1 Letter to William Smith (1795) and the first of the Letters on a Regicide Peace
(1797).


## p. 26 (#48) ##############################################

26
[CH.
Edmund Burke
Was the British constitution which the political wisdom of
generations had shaped so wanting in elasticity that it could
endure no change, adapt itself to no new conditions? Could the
folly of the Assembly, the madness of the Terror, the cynical
corruption of the Directory undo, in a few years, the work
of centuries and permanently alter the character of the French
people? The France which emerged from the revolution was, in
all essential respects, De Tocqueville has argued, the France of
the ancien régime. What disappeared was already dead. In
the Code Napoléon, which embodied the legal outcome of the
revolution, law became the expression of settled national
character, not of every passionate and casual mood. '
We touch here on a trait of Burke's character which is
evident in his earliest pamphlet, the ironical reply to Bolingbroke,
the want of any sanguine strain in his mental constitution,
or, if one cares to put it so, of faith. Despite all that he had
said of the wisdom latent in prejudice ; despite the wonder and
admiration with which, in the speech On Conciliation, he con-
templated a people governing themselves when the machinery of
government had been withdrawn; the advent of democracy inspired
him with anxiety qualified neither by faith in the inherent good
sense and rectitude of human nature, nor by any confidence in
the durability of inherited sentiment and prejudice. Nothing, it
seemed to him, but the overruling providence of God could have
evolved from the weak and selfish natures of men the miracle of a
free state with all its checks and balances and adjustments to
the complex character and manifold wants of the physical and
spiritual nature of man; and, in a moment, the work of ages
might be undone, the 'nice equipoise' overset, the sentiments and
prejudices of ages destroyed, and 'philosophy' and 'Jacobinism’
be among us, bringing with them anarchy and the end of all
things. ' Nothing marks so clearly the interval between Burke's
temperament and that of the romantic revival as it is revealed in
Wordsworth. What Burke has of the deeper spirit of that move-
ment is seen not so much in the poetic imagery of his finest prose
as in the philosophical imagination which informs his conception
of the state, in virtue of which he transcends the rationalism of the
century. His vision of the growth of society, his sense of something
mysterious and divine at work in human institutions and preju-
dices, of something at once sacred and beautiful in the sentiments
of chivalrous loyalty and honour, in the stately edifice of the
British constitution with all its orders, in the ancient civilisation
>


## p. 27 (#49) ##############################################

1]
His Temperament
27
of India-all these have in them more than Sir Walter Scott's love
of a romantic and picturesque past. There is in them the same
mood of mind as is manifest in Wordsworth's sense of something
mysterious and divine in the life of nature and the emotions of
simple men, which links the eternal process of the stars to the
moral admonitions of the human heart. But there is a difference.
The illusion or faith, call it what one will, which made lyrical the
prose of Rousseau and inspired the youthful Wordsworth when he
hailed the French revolution as a new era in the history of the race,
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven,
was a stranger to Burke's mind; nor has the stoicism with
which he contemplates the successive defeat of all his under-
takings anything in common with the soberer optimism, the
cultivation of a steadfast hopefulness, which, in Wordsworth's
mind, succeeded to disillusionment, and rested on his faith in the
invincibility of the moral reason. Wordsworth the post-masters
did not remain a democrat, but Wordsworth the poet derived from
his early experiences of the peasantry a faith in human nature, in
those who go to make the people, which Burke's experience of
'the swinish multitude' at contested elections, and in Gordon riots,
never permitted to his reflective mind and sensitive temperament.
In his crusade against Jacobinism and a regicide peace, Burke
appealed to kings and nobles and the duty of a government to
guide the people; in continuing the crusade against Napoleon,
Wordsworth delighted to note that the firmest opposition came
from the peasantry of Spain and the Tyrol : ‘In the conduct of
this argument,' he writes, in The Convention of Cintra, 'I am not
speaking to the humbler ranks of society: it is unnecessary: they
trust in nature and are safe. '
This temper of Burke's mind is reflected in his prose. In
essential respects, in idiom, structure and diction, the prose of
Burke is that of his period, the second half of the eighteenth
century. To the direct, conversational prose of Dryden and Swift,
changed social circumstances and the influence of Johnson had
given a more oratorical cast, more dignity and weight, but, also,
more of heaviness and conventional elegance. From the latter faults,
Burke is saved by his passionate temperament, his ardent imagina-
tion and the fact that he was a speaker conscious always of his
audience. Burke loves a generalisation as much as Johnson, and his
generalisations are profounder, more philosophic, if, like Johnson's,


## p. 28 (#50) ##############################################

28
[CH.
Edmund Burke
us,
they begin in common sense. But Burke never fails to illuminate his Reni
generalisations by concrete and glowing imagery. And the splen- en
dour of his imagery, the nervous vigour of his style, its pregnancy, i
connect his prose with that of the great sixteenth and seventeenth
century writers, Hooker and Milton and Browne and Clarendon.
Though he does not abuse quotation, like some of the seventeenth titt
century writers, he employs it with great effect, weaving the day
quotation with consummate skill into the texture of his own prose: te
‘Old religious factions,' he says, speaking of the unitarians, “are volcanoes
burnt ont. But when a new fire breaks out. . . when men come before and
rise up like an exhalation from the ground, they come in a questionable shape,
and we must exorcise them, and try whether their intents be wicked or
charitable; whether they bring airs from Heaven or blasts from Hell.
What Burke's prose has not is the lyrical note of the, not
more imaginative, but more romantic, prose of Wordsworth and
Coleridge, of Carlyle and Ruskin ; the note, not of exaltation,
which was often Burke's mood, but of exultation, a mood with
which he never was acquainted.
A rapid review of the main causes which engaged Burke's
oratory has necessitated the omission in their proper places of one
or two speeches and writings which deserve notice in even a short
sketch. The quietest, the lightest in tone--if Burke's oratory can
ever be so described—is the speech on economical reform of
February 1780. It forms a point of rest between the earlier and
the later storms. In no other speech is Burke so content to be
simply persuasive, at times genial and amusing ; and the philo-
sophical colour of his mind, the tendency to elevate the discussion
of every point by large generalisations, the fruit of long study
and deep insight, gains a new interest from the absence of the
passion with which his wisdom is usually coloured or set aglow.
The exordium, after stating the end of his reforms to be not
merely economy but the reduction of corrupt influence, winds its
way into the subject by a skilful suggestion of the odium which
such proposals must excite and of the necessity which alone has
induced him to incur that odium-a necessity arising at once from
the dire straits in which the war has involved the nation's finances
and from the imperative demand of the people. The first con-
sideration is skilfully heightened by a reference to the reform of
French finances under Louis XVI and Necker-'The French have
imitated us; let us, through them, imitate ourselves; ourselves
in our better and happier days. ' The second is used to point the
difference in characteristic fashion between a timely and temperate,
第四
​TE


## p. 29 (#51) ##############################################

6
1] Speech on Economical Reform
29
and a late and violent, reform. The principles which have shaped
his proposals are then enunciated and the details elaborated with
a knowledge of the expedients and methods of finance which
justifies Burke's claim that he had made political economy an
object of his studies before it had employed the thoughts of
speculative men in other parts of Europe. ' And, at every turn, the
dry details of economy are illuminated by broad generalisations,
on not the economic only, but the moral, aspects of the question-
'Kings are naturally lovers of low company'—and by the colours
of a rich imagination, as in the description of the last relics of
feudal institutions :
Our palaces are vast inhospitable balls. There the bleak winds, there 'Boreas
and Eurus and Caurus and Argestes loud, howling through the vacant
lobbies, and clattering the doors of deserted guard-rooms, appal the imagination
and conjure up the grim spectres of departed tyrants—the Saxon, the Norman,
and the Dane; the stern Edwards and fierce Henries-who stalk from deso-
lation to desolation, through the dreary vacuity and melancholy succession
of chill and comfortless chambers.
Burke's humour, when not barbed and winged with scorn, is some-
what elephantine. The paragraph on the difficulties which beset
Lord Talbot's attempts to reform the Household from the fact that
'the turnspit in the king's kitchen was a member of Parliament'
is a good example of his over-elaborate, somewhat turgid art.
The peroration, on the other hand, on the will of the people
and the responsibility of the House to its constituents, with a
covert reference to the corrupt influence of the court, illustrates the
power of this diffuseness, this elaboration of the details of a figure,
to adorn a sentiment which comes warm from the speaker's heart :
Let us cast away from us, with a generous scorn, all the love-tokens and
symbols that we have been vain and light enough to accept;-all the bracelets
and snuff-boxes and miniature pictures, and hair devices, and all the other
adulterous trinkets that are the pledges of our alienation, and monuments of
our shame. Let us return to our legitimate home and all jars and quarrels
will be lost in embraces. . . . Let us identify, let us incorporate ourselves with the
people. Let us cut all the cables and snap the chains which tie us to an un-
faithful shore, and enter the friendly harbour that shoots far out into the
main its moles and jettees to receive us.
Fifteen years after this speech, the government of Pitt was
attacked for granting a pension to Burke, and, in accepting it, he
was said to have been false to the principles laid down by himself
on the subject of economy. The chief critics of the pension in
the House of Lords were the duke of Bedford and the earl of
Lauderdale. Burke replied in A Letter to a Noble Lord, the
finest example of his blended irony, philosophy, feeling and
>


## p. 30 (#52) ##############################################

30
C
Edmund Burke
[CH.
imagination. As a master of pure irony, Burke is surpassed
by Swift, who is at once more unscrupulous and less elaborate,
more inventive and venomous. Except when he had to deal
with those whom he regarded as the enemies of the human race,
the professors of the cannibal philosophy of France,' Burke
could never have attacked anyone with the venom with which
Swift assailed Wharton. It is the truth which gives such deadly
force to Burke's ironical description of the duke of Bedford, this
noble champion of the rights of man, as himself the creature, the
Leviathan, of royal favour and prescriptive right.