No More Learning

Beauty, as in the meditations of Browne or the
oratory of Taylor, is never to Burke an end in itself.
The wide and varied reading which began at Trinity college
was, apparently, the chief activity of the nine obscure years
(1750—59) which Burke spent as a student of law in London,
eating dinners at the Middle Temple, sojourning at country inns
or rooms during the vacation with his namesake and, perhaps,
kinsman William Burke, and making tentative excursions into
letters with an ironical answer to Bolingbroke's posthumous
writings in A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and an
essay in aesthetics after Addison in A Philosophical Enquiry
into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1756). Fulness of mind was the quality of Burke's conversation
which impressed Johnson and all who came to know him in these
and later years—knowledge and the power of applying that
knowledge, 'diversifying the matter infinitely in your own mind. '
‘His stream of mind is perpetual,' was Johnson's comment;
‘Burke is the only man whose common conversation corresponds
with the general fame which he has in the world.
whatever topic you please, he is ready to meet you. Burke
owed his success in the House of Commons and its committees
not more, perhaps, to his eloquence than to this fulness of mind,
Take up


## p. 3 (#25) ###############################################

1]
Early Life and Work
3
to the fact that, whatever topic he handled, America, India,
Ireland, finance or trade, he spoke from a copious and close
knowledge of the subject.
The works which Burke composed during these years are not
of great importance. A Philosophical Enquiry is an unequal,
and, in the main, rather jejune, treatise of which the fairest criticism
is probably Lessing's, that it ‘is uncommonly useful as a collection
of all the occurrences and perceptions which the philosophers
must assume as indisputable in inquiries of this kind. ' Burke
distinguishes the sublime so sharply from the beautiful that his
description of the latter includes little which goes beyond the
pretty. More interesting and suggestive is the analysis of the
pleasure we take in terrible and painful spectacles—whether a
tragedy in the theatre or an execution in the street. But, perhaps,
most interesting of all is his discussion of the aesthetic and
emotional qualities of words, which he finds to depend less on the
images which they evoke than their other properties of sound and
association. The business of poetry and rhetoric is 'to affect
rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of
things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present
a clear idea of the things themselves. ' The germ of Laocoon is
contained in these paragraphs.
A Vindication is a much more characteristic and significant
document. In parodying the eloquence of Bolingbroke, Burke
caught some of the first tones of his own more sonorous and
varied harmonies. The conception of the essay, a defence of
religion by the application of a reductio ad absurdum to Boling-
broke's method of attack, revealed the deep religious spirit
in which all Burke's political and social speculation bottoms
and roots itself. Bolingbroke had indicted revealed religions by
pointing to some of the consequences which, in history, had
flowed from dogmatic creeds, and Burke answers him by applying
the same method to the criticism of political society.
Shew me an absurdity in religion, and I will undertake to shew you an
hundred for one in political laws and institutions. . . . If after all, you should
confess all these things, yet plead the necessity of political institutions, weak
and wicked as they are, I can argue with equal, perhaps superior, force con-
cerning the necessity of artificial religion; and every step you advance in your
argument, you add a strength to mine.
But, perhaps, the most interesting quality of the essay is the
sidelight that it throws on Burke's temperament, the sensitive,
brooding imagination which, coupled with a restless, speculative
1-2


## p. 4 (#26) ###############################################

4
[CH.
Edmund Burke
intellect, seeking ever to illuminate facts by principles, gives tone
to Burke's speeches and pamphlets ; for it is this temperament
which imparts vividness and colour to the dry details of historical
and statistical knowledge, and it is this temperament which at
once directs, keeps in check and prescribes its limits to, that
speculative, enquiring intellect. In the sentences in which Burke
paints the lot of those who bear the burden of political society,
the unhappy wretches employed in lead, tin, iron, copper and
coal mines, who scarce ever see the light of the sun, the enfans
perdus of the army of civil society; in these vivid paragraphs,
and not less in his failure to draw from them any but an ironical
conclusion, a reductio ad absurdum of Bolingbroke's paradoxes,
we get an insight into one of the most radical characteristics
of Burke's mind. In his later works, he did not often touch
directly on the subject of the poor and their lot, though it was
a theme, he says, on which he had 'often reflected and never
reflected without feeling from it’; but his sensibility was not
more acute than his conviction was profound that legislation
and political adjustment could do little or nothing to alleviate
their lot. Burke's whole life was a prolonged warfare against the
folly and injustice of statesmen ; but there was no admixture
in his nature of what the old physiologists called the sanguine
temperament. His political life was inspired by no gleam of
the confidence which animated a statesman like Gladstone. The
connection between revealed religion and political society was, to
him, a deeper one than the superficial irony of A Vindication
might suggest. If we confine our view to this life, the lot of
humanity must always seem a dubious one. Wise government
may lighten the lot of men, it can never make it more than
tolerable for the great majority. The effect of this cast of mind
on Burke's attitude towards the French revolution, and the
interval which it creates between him and the great poets of
the romantic revival, with whom he has otherwise much in common,
will appear later.
In closing Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790),
Burke declares that
they come from one, almost the whole of whose public exertion has been a
struggle for the liberty of others; from one in whose breast no anger durable
or vehement has ever been kindled, but by what he considered as tyranny.
In all those struggles, he declared in 1795, when his hopes for
catholic emancipation in Ireland were shattered by the dismissal
of Lord Fitzwilliam, he had been unsuccessful.


## p. 5 (#27) ###############################################

5
1] Outline of his Political Career
My sanguine hopes are blasted, and I must consign my feelings on that
terrible disappointment to the same patience in which I have been obliged
to bury the vexation I suffered on the defeat of the other great, just, and
honourable causes in which I have had some share, and which have given
more of dignity than of peace to a long laborious life.
A brief enumeration of these 'great, just, and honourable causes'
will indicate sufficiently for the purposes of this History the
outlines of Burke's public career.
After a brief time as secretary to William Gerard Hamilton,
then chief secretary for Ireland, Burke entered public life as
member for Wendover (1765), to which he was presented by Lord
Verney, the friend and fellow-speculator of Burke's kinsman and
namesake mentioned above. At the same time, he became
secretary to Lord Rockingham, then in power and engaged in
repealing Grenville's unfortunate Stamp act. Thenceforth, through
the life of that short administration and in the sixteen years of
opposition which followed, Burke was the animating spirit of the
Rockingham section of the whigs, the germ of the subsequent
liberal party. The two chief causes for which he fought during
these years were those of the freedom of the House of Commons
against the designs of George III and the ‘king's friends, and
of the American colonies against the claim of the home govern-
ment to tax them directly. The writings in which Burke's views
in these conflicts are most fully preserved are Observations on
a late publication entitled 'The Present State of the Nation'
(1769), Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770),
the speech On American Taxation (1774), that On moving his
Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies (1775) and A
Letter . . . to. . . [the] Sheriffs of. . . Bristol (1777)”. These, of course,
are only those utterances which Burke thought fit to issue to the
public. Of his innumerable speeches on these and other subjects,
including the great speech against employing Indians in the war,
we have only the scantiest records.
Two other topics interested Burke during these years : Ireland
and India, and, as the American war drew to an end, they became
his chief preoccupation. He had early reflected and written on
the iniquity of the penal laws—though the draft which he
prepared about 1760—5 was not issued till much later and
he supported and watched with sympathy the policy or revolution
which emancipated Irish trade and secured the independence
1 To these may be added the posthumously published An Address to the King, drawn
ap when a secession of the whigs from parliament was contemplated in 1777 and an
Address to the British Colonists in North America.
6


## p. 6 (#28) ###############################################

6
[ch.
Edmund Burke
of the Irish parliament (1778–82). By reason of his support of
Irish trade, he lost, in 1780, the representation of Bristol, which
his opposition to the American war had gained for him in
1774 ; and Two Letters. . . to Gentlemen in the City of Bristol
(1778), with the Speech at the Guildhall, in Bristol, previous to
the late Election (1780), are the noble record of his courage, inde-
pendence and wisdom in this hour of defeat. In the years following
the outbreak of the French revolution, Burke advocated, with
unabated ardour, the cause of catholics, his views being expressed,
not in speeches, but in long letters to Sir Hercules Langrishe,
Thomas Burgh, his son Richard Burke, Dr Hussey and others.
In the government of our East Indian dominions, Burke was
early interested. 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.