Edmund Burke, born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1729, was the son of a
successful attorney, who gave him as good an education as the times and
the country afforded. He went to school to an excellent Quaker, and
graduated at Trinity College in 1748. He appears to have then gone to
London in 1750 to "keep terms," as it was called, at the Middle Temple,
with the view of being admitted to the bar, in obedience to his father's
desire and ambition. But the desultory habit of mind, the preference for
literature and philosophical speculation to connected study, which had
marked his career in college, followed him and prevented any serious
application to the law. His father's patience was after a while
exhausted, and he withdrew Burke's allowance and left him to his own
resources.
This was in 1755, but in 1756 he married, and made his first appearance
in the literary world by the publication of a book. About these years
from 1750 to 1759 little is known. He published two works, one a
treatise on the 'Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,' and
the other a 'Vindication of Natural Society,' a satire on Bolingbroke.
Stray allusions and anecdotes about other men in the diaries and
correspondence of the time show that he frequented the literary
coffee-houses, and was gradually making an impression on the authors and
wits whom he met there. Besides the two books we have mentioned, he
produced some smaller things, such as an 'Essay on the Drama,' and part
of an 'Abridgment of the History of England.' But although these helped
to secure him admission to the literary set, they did not raise him out
of the rank of obscure literary adventurers, who from the Revolution of
1688, and especially after the union with Scotland, began to swarm to
London from all parts of the three kingdoms. The first recognition of
him as a serious writer was his employment by Dodsley the bookseller, at
a salary of $100 a year, to edit the Annual Register, which Dodsley
founded in 1769. Considered as a biographical episode, this may fairly
be treated as a business man's certificate that Burke was industrious
and accurate. As his income from his father was withdrawn or reduced in
1755, there remain four years during which his way of supporting himself
is unknown. His published works were certainly not "pot-boilers." He
was probably to some extent dependent on his wife's father, Dr. Nugent,
an Irish physician who when Burke made his acquaintance lived in Bath,
but after his daughter's marriage settled in London, and seems to have
frequented and have been acceptable in the same coffee-houses as Burke,
and for the same reasons. But Burke was not a man to remain long
dependent on any one. These nine years were evidently not spent
fruitlessly. They had made him known and brought him to the threshold of
public life.
In 1759, political discussion as we understand it--that is, those
explorations of the foundations of political society and analyses of
social relations which now form our daily intellectual food--was hardly
known. The interest in religion as the chief human concern was rapidly
declining. The interest in human society as an organism to be studied,
and if need be, taken to pieces and put together again, was only just
beginning. Montesquieu's great work, 'The Spirit of the Laws,' which
demanded for expediency and convenience in legislation the place which
modern Europe had long assigned to authority, had only appeared in 1748.
Swift's satires had made serious breaches in the wall of convention by
which the State, in spite of the convulsions of the seventeenth century,
was still surrounded. But the writer whose speculations excited most
attention in England was Bolingbroke. The charm of his style and the
variety of his interests made him the chief intellectual topic of the
London world in Burke's early youth. To write like Bolingbroke was a
legitimate ambition for a young man. It is not surprising that Burke
felt it, and that his earliest political effort was a satire on
Bolingbroke. It attracted the attention of a politician, Gerard
Hamilton, and he quickly picked up Burke as his secretary, treated him
badly, and was abandoned by him in disgust at the end of six years.
The peculiar condition of the English governmental machine made possible
for men of Burke's kind at this period what would not be possible now.
The population had vanished from a good many old boroughs, although
their representation in Parliament remained, and the selection of the
members fell to the lords of the soil. About one hundred and fifty
members of the House of Commons were in this way chosen by great landed
proprietors, and it is to be said to their credit that they used their
power freely to introduce unknown young men of talent into public life.
Moreover in many cases, if not in most, small boroughs, however well
peopled, were expected to elect the proprietor's nominee. Burke after
leaving Hamilton's service was for a short time private secretary to
Lord Rockingham, when the latter succeeded Grenville in the Ministry in
1766; but when he went out, Burke obtained a seat in Parliament in 1765
in the manner we have described, for the borough of Wendover, from
Lord Verney, who owned it. He made his first successful speech the same
year, and was complimented by Pitt. He was already recognized as a man
of enormous information, as any one who edited the Annual Register had
to be.
[Illustration: EDMUND BURKE.]
A man of such powers and tastes in that day naturally became a
pamphleteer. Outside of Parliament there was no other mode of discussing
public affairs. The periodical press for purposes of discussion did not
exist. During and after the Great Rebellion, the pamphlet had made its
appearance as the chief instrument of controversy. Defoe used it freely
after the Restoration. Swift made a great hit with it, and probably
achieved the first sensational sale with his pamphlet on 'The Conduct of
the Allies.' Bolingbroke's 'Patriot King' was a work of the same class.
As a rule the pamphlet exposed or refuted somebody, even if it also
freely expounded. It was inevitable that Burke should early begin to
wield this most powerful of existing weapons. His antagonist was ready
for him in the person of George Grenville, the minister who had made way
for Burke's friend and patron Lord Rockingham. Grenville showed, as
easily as any party newspaper in our own day, that Rockingham and his
friends had ruined the country by mismanagement of the war and of the
finances. Burke refuted him with a mastery of facts and figures, and a
familiarity with the operations of trade and commerce, and a power of
exposition and illustration, and a comprehension of the fundamental
conditions of national economy, which at once made him famous and a
necessary man for the Whigs in the great struggle with the Crown on
which they were entering.
The nature of this struggle cannot be better described in brief space
than by saying that the King, from his accession to the throne down to
the close of the American War, was engaged in a persistent effort to
govern through ministers chosen and dismissed, as the German ministers
are now, by himself; while the subservience of Parliament was secured by
the profuse use of pensions and places. To this attempt, and all the
abuses which inevitably grew out of it, the Whigs with Burke as their
intellectual head offered a determined resistance, and the conflict was
one extraordinarily well calculated to bring his peculiar powers into
play.
The leading events in this long struggle were the attempt of the House
of Commons to disqualify Wilkes for a seat in the House, to punish
reporting their debates as a breach of privilege, and the prosecution of
the war against the American colonies. It may be said to have begun at
the accession of the King, and to have lasted until the resignation of
Lord North after the surrender of Cornwallis, or from 1770 to 1783.
Burke's contributions to it were his pamphlet, 'Thoughts on the Cause of
the Present Discontents,' and several speeches in Parliament: the first,
like the pamphlet, on the general situation, and others on minor
incidents in the struggle. This pamphlet has not only survived the
controversy, but has become one of the most famous papers in the
political literature of the Anglo-Saxon race. It is a century since
every conspicuous figure in the drama passed away; it is seventy years
since every trace of the controversy disappeared from English political
life; most if not all of the principles for which Burke contended have
become commonplaces of English constitutional practice; the discontents
of that day have vanished as completely as those of 1630: but Burke's
pamphlet still holds a high place in every course of English literature,
and is still read and pondered by every student of constitutional
history and by every speculator on government and political morals.
In 1774 Parliament was dissolved for the second time since Burke entered
it: and there a misfortune overtook him which illustrated in a striking
way the practical working of the British Constitution at that period.
Lord Verney, to whom he had owed his seat for the borough of Wendover at
two elections, had fallen into pecuniary embarrassment and could no
longer return him, because compelled to sell his four boroughs. This
left Burke high and dry, and he was beginning to tremble for his
political future, when he was returned for the great commercial city of
Bristol by a popular constituency. The six years during which he sat for
Bristol were the most splendid portion of his career. Other portions
perhaps contributed as much if not more to his literary or oratorical
reputation; but this brought out in very bold relief the great traits of
character which will always endear his memory to the lovers of national
liberty, and place him high among the framers of great political ideals.
In the first place, he propounded boldly to the Bristol electors the
theory that he was to be their representative but not their delegate;
that his parliamentary action must be governed by his own reason and not
by their wishes. In the next, he resolutely sacrificed his seat by
opposing his constituents in supporting the removal of the restrictions
on Irish trade, of which English merchants reaped the benefit. He would
not be a party to what he considered the oppression of his native
country, no matter what might be the effect on his political prospects;
and in 1780 he was not re-elected.
But the greatest achievement of this period of his history was his share
in the controversy over the American War, which was really not more a
conflict with the colonies over taxation, than a resolute and obstinate
carrying out of the King's principles of government. The colonies were,
for the time being, simply resisting pretensions to which the kingdom
at home submitted. Burke's speeches on 'American Taxation' (1774), on
'Conciliation with America' (1775), and his 'Letter to the Sheriffs of
Bristol' (1777) on the same subject, taken as a sequel to the 'Thoughts
on the Present Discontents,' form a body of literature which it is not
too much to pronounce not only a history of the dispute with the
colonies, but a veritable political manual. He does not confine himself
to a minute description of the arguments used in supporting the attempt
to coerce America; he furnishes as he goes along principles of
legislation applicable almost to any condition of society; illustrations
which light up as by a single flash problems of apparently inscrutable
darkness; explanations of great political failures; and receipts
innumerable for political happiness and success. A single sentence often
disposes of half a dozen fallacies firmly imbedded in governmental
tradition. His own description of the rhetorical art of Charles
Townshend was eminently applicable to himself:--"He knew, better by far
than any man I ever was acquainted with, how to bring together within a
short time all that was necessary to establish, to illustrate, and to
decorate that side of the question which he supported."
This observation suggests the great advantage he derives as a political
instructor from the facts that all his political speeches and writings
are polemical. The difficulty of keeping exposition from being dry is
familiar to everybody who has ever sought to communicate knowledge on
any subject. But Burke in every one of his political theses had an
antagonist, who was literally as he says himself, a helper: who did the
work of an opposing counsel at the bar, in bringing out into prominence
all the weak points of Burke's case and all the strong ones of his own;
who set in array all the fallacies to be exposed, all the idols to be
overthrown, all the doubts to be cleared up. Moreover he was not, like
the man who usually figures in controversial dialogues, a sham opponent,
but a creature of flesh and blood like Grenville, or the Sheriffs of
Bristol, or the King's friends, or the Irish Protestant party, who met
Burke with an ardor not inferior to his own. We consequently have, in
all his papers and speeches, the very best of which he was capable in
thought and expression, for he had not only to watch the city but to
meet the enemy in the gate.
After the close of the American War, the remainder of Burke's career was
filled with two great subjects, to which he devoted himself with an
ardor which occasionally degenerated into fanaticism. One was the
government of India by the East India Company, and the other was the
French Revolution. Although the East India Company had been long in
existence, and had towards the middle of the eighteenth century been
rapidly extending its power and influence, comparatively little had
been known by the English public of the nature of its operations.
Attention had been drawn away from it by the events in America and the
long contest with the King in England. By the close of the American War,
however, the "Nabobs," as they were called,--or returned English
adventurers,--began to make a deep impression on English society by the
apparent size of their fortunes and the lavishness of their expenditure.
Burke calculated that in his time they had brought home about
$200,000,000, with which they bought estates and seats in Parliament and
became a very conspicuous element in English public and private life. At
the same time, information as to the mode in which their money was made
and their government carried on was scanty and hard to acquire. The
press had no foreign correspondence; India was six months away, and all
the Europeans in it were either servants of the Company, or remained in
it on the Company's sufferance. The Whigs finally determined to attempt
a grand inquisition into its affairs, and a bill was brought in by Fox,
withdrawing the government of India from the Company and vesting it in a
commission named in the bill. This was preceded by eleven reports from a
Committee of Inquiry. But the bill failed utterly, and brought down the
Whig ministry, which did not get into office again in Burke's time. This
was followed in 1785, on Burke's instigation, by the impeachment of the
most conspicuous of the Company's officers, Warren Hastings. Burke was
appointed one of the managers on behalf of the Commons.
No episode in his career is so familiar to the public as his conduct of
this trial, owing to Warren Hastings having been the subject of one of
the most popular of Macaulay's Essays. None brought out more clearly
Burke's great dialectical powers, or so well displayed his mastery of
details and his power of orderly exposition. The trial lasted eight
years, and was adjourned over from one Parliamentary session to another.
These delays were fatal to its success. The public interest in it died
out long before the close, as usual in protracted legal prosecutions;
the feeling spread that the defendant could not be very guilty when it
took so long to prove his crime. Although Burke toiled over the case
with extraordinary industry and persistence, and an enthusiasm which
never flagged, Hastings was finally acquitted.
But the labors of the prosecution were not wholly vain. It awoke in
England an attention to the government of India which never died out,
and led to a considerable curtailing of the power of the East India
Company, and necessarily of its severity, in dealing with Indian States.
The impeachment was preceded by eleven reports on the affairs of India
by the Committee of the House of Commons, and the articles of
impeachment were nearly as voluminous. Probably no question which has
ever come before Parliament has received so thorough an examination.
Hardly less important was the report of the Committee of the Commons
(which consisted of the managers of the impeachment) on the Lords'
journals. This was an elaborate examination of the rules of evidence
which govern proceedings in the trial of impeachments, or of persons
guilty of malfeasance in office. This has long been a bone of contention
between lawyers and statesmen. The Peers in the course of the trial had
taken the opinion of the judges frequently, and had followed it in
deciding on the admissibility of evidence, a great deal of which was
important to the prosecution. The report maintained, and with apparently
unanswerable force, that when a legislature sits on offenses against the
State, it constitutes a grand inquest which makes its own rules of
evidence; and is not and ought not to be tied up by the rules
administered in the ordinary law courts, and formed for the most part
for the guidance of the unskilled and often uneducated men who compose
juries. As a manual for the instruction of legislative committees of
inquiry it is therefore still very valuable, if it be not a final
authority.
Burke, during and after the Warren Hastings trial, fell into
considerable neglect and unpopularity. His zeal in the prosecution had
grown as the public interest in it declined, until it approached the
point of fanaticism. He took office in the coalition which succeeded the
Fox Whigs, and when the French Revolution broke out it found him
somewhat broken in nerves, irritated by his failures, and in less
cordial relations with some of his old friends and colleagues. He at
once arrayed himself fiercely against the Revolution, and broke finally
with what might be called the Liberty of all parties and creeds, and
stood forth to the world as the foremost champion of authority,
prescription, and precedent. Probably none of his writings are so
familiar to the general public as those which this crisis produced, such
as the 'Thoughts on the French Revolution' and the 'Letters on a
Regicide Peace.' They are and will always remain, apart from the
splendor of the rhetoric, extremely interesting as the last words spoken
by a really great man on behalf of the old order. Old Europe made
through him the best possible defense of itself. He told, as no one else
could have told it, the story of what customs, precedent, prescription,
and established usage had done for its civilization; and he told it
nevertheless as one who was the friend of rational progress, and had
taken no small part in promoting it. Only one other writer who followed
him came near equaling him as a defender of the past, and that was
Joseph de Maistre; but he approached the subject mainly from the
religious side. To him the old regime was the order of Providence. To
Burke it was the best scheme of things that humanity could devise for
the advancement and preservation of civilization. In the papers we have
mentioned, which were the great literary sensations of Burke's day,
everything that could be said for the system of political ethics under
which Europe had lived for a thousand years was said with a vigor,
incisiveness, and wealth of illustration which must make them for all
time and in all countries the arsenal of those who love the ancient ways
and dread innovation.
The failure of the proceedings against Warren Hastings, and the
strong sympathy with the French Revolution--at least in its
beginning--displayed by the Whigs and by most of those with whom Burke
had acted in politics, had an unfortunate effect on his temper. He broke
off his friendship with Fox and others of his oldest associates and
greatest admirers. He became hopeless and out of conceit with the world
around him. One might have set down some of this at least to the effect
of advancing years and declining health, if such onslaughts on
revolutionary ideas as his 'Reflections on the French Revolution' and
his 'Letters on a Regicide Peace' did not reveal the continued
possession of all the literary qualities which had made the success of
his earlier works. Their faults are literally the faults of youth: the
brilliancy of the rhetoric, the heat of the invective, the violence of
the partisanship, the reluctance to admit the existence of any
grievances in France to justify the popular onslaught on the monarchy,
the noblesse, and the Church. His one explanation of the crisis and its
attendant horrors was the instigation of the spirit of evil. The effect
on contemporary opinion was very great, and did much to stimulate the
conservative reaction in England which carried on the Napoleonic wars
and lasted down to the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832.
There were, however, other causes for the cloud which came over Burke's
later years. In spite of his great services to his party and his
towering eminence as an orator and writer, he never obtained a seat in
the Cabinet. The Paymastership of the Forces, at a salary of $20,000 a
year, was the highest reward, either in honor or money, which his party
ever bestowed on him. It is true that in those days the Whigs were very
particular in reserving high places for men of rank and family. In fact,
their government was, from the Revolution of 1688 on, a thorough
oligarchy, divided among a few great houses. That they should not have
broken through this rule in Burke's case, and admitted to the Cabinet a
man to whom they owed so much as they did to him, excited wonder in his
own day, and has down to our own time been one of the historical
mysteries on which the students of that period love to expend their
ingenuity. It is difficult to reconcile this exclusion and neglect of
Burke with the unbounded admiration lavished on him by the aristocratic
leaders of the party. It is difficult too to account for Burke's quiet
acquiescence in what seems to be their ingratitude. There had before his
time been no similar instance of party indifference to such claims as he
could well make, on such honors and rewards as the party had to bestow.
The most probable explanation of the affair is the one offered by his
latest and ablest biographer, Mr. John Morley. Burke had entered public
life without property,--probably the most serious mistake, if in his
case it can be called a mistake, which an English politician can commit.
It is a wise and salutary rule of English public life that a man who
seeks a political career shall qualify for it by pecuniary independence.
It would be hardly fair in Burke's case to say that he had sought a
political career. The greatness of his talents literally forced it on
him. He became a statesman and great Parliamentary orator, so to speak,
in spite of himself. But he must have early discovered the great barrier
to complete success created by his poverty. He may be said to have
passed his life in pecuniary embarrassment. This alone might not have
shut him out from the Whig official Paradise, for the same thing might
have been said of Pitt and Fox: but they had connections; they belonged
by birth and association to the Whig class. Burke's relatives were no
help or credit to him. In fact, they excited distrust of him. They
offended the fastidious aristocrats with whom he associated, and
combined with his impecuniousness to make him seem unsuitable for a
great place. These aristocrats were very good to him. They lent him
money freely, and settled a pension on him, and covered him with social
adulation; but they were never willing to put him beside themselves in
the government. His latter years therefore had an air of tragedy. He was
unpopular with most of those who in his earlier years had adored him,
and was the hero of those whom in earlier years he had despised. His
only son, of whose capacity he had formed a strange misconception, died
young, and he passed his own closing hours, as far as we can judge, with
a sense of failure. But he left one of the great names in English
history. There is no trace of him in the statute book, but he has, it
is safe to say, exercised a profound influence in all succeeding
legislation, both in England and America. He has inspired or suggested
nearly all the juridical changes which distinguish the England of to-day
from the England of the last century, and is probably the only British
politician whose speeches and pamphlets, made for immediate results,
have given him immortality.
[Illustration: Signature: E. L. Godkin]