BURKE
I
It is the special merit of the English constitutional system that the
king stands outside the categories of political conflict. He is the
dignified emollient of an organized quarrel which, at least in theory,
is due to the clash of antagonistic principle. The merit, indeed, is
largely accidental; and we shall miss the real fashion in which it came
to be established unless we remark the vicissitudes through which it has
passed. The foreign birth of the first two Hanoverians, the insistent
widowhood of Queen Victoria, these rather than deliberate foresight have
secured the elevated nullification of the Crown. Yet the first
twenty-five years of George III's reign represent the deliberate effort
of an obstinate man to stem the progress of fifty years and secure once
more the balance of power. Nor was the effort defeated without a
struggle which went to the root of constitutional principle.
And George III attempted the realization of his ambition at a time
highly favorable to its success. Party government had lost much credit
during Walpole's administration. Men like Bolingbroke, Carteret and the
elder Pitt were all of them dissatisfied with a system which depended
for its existence upon the exclusion of able men from power. A
generation of corrupt practice and the final defeat of Stuart hopes had
already deprived the Whigs of any special hold on their past ideals.
They were divided already into factions the purpose of which was no more
than the avid pursuit of place and pension. Government by connection
proved itself irreconcilable with good government. But it showed also
that once corruption was centralized there was no limit to its
influence, granted only the absence of great questions. When George III
transferred that organization from the office of the minister to his own
court, there was already a tolerable certainty of his success. For more
than forty years the Tories had been excluded from office; and they
were more than eager to sell their support. The Church had become the
creature of the State. The drift of opinion in continental Europe was
towards benevolent despotism. The narrow, obstinate and ungenerous mind
of George had been fed on high notions of the power he might exert. He
had been taught the kingship of Bolingbroke's glowing picture; and a
reading in manuscript of the seventh chapter of Blackstone's first book
can only have confirmed the ideals he found there. Nor was it obvious
that a genuine kingship would have been worse than the oligarchy of the
great Whig families.
What made it worse, and finally impossible, was the character of the
king. The pathetic circumstances of his old age have combined somewhat
to obscure the viciousness of his maturity. He was excessively ignorant
and as obstinate as arbitrary. He trusted no one but himself, and he
totally misunderstood the true nature of his office. There is no
question which arose in the first forty years of his reign in which he
was not upon the wrong side and proud of his error. He was wrong about
Wilkes, wrong about America, wrong about Ireland, wrong about France. He
demanded servants instead of ministers. He attacked every measure for
the purification of the political system. He supported the Slave trade
and he opposed the repeal of the Test Act. He prevented the grant of
Catholic emancipation at the one moment when it might have genuinely
healed the wounds of Ireland. He destroyed by his perverse creations the
value of the House of Lords as a legislative assembly. He was clearly
determined to make his will the criterion of policy; and his design
might have succeeded had his ability and temper been proportionate to
its greatness. It was not likely that the mass of men would have seen
with regret the destruction of the aristocratic monopoly in politics.
The elder Pitt might well have based a ministry of the court upon a
broad bottom of popularity. The House of Commons, as the event proved,
could be as subservient to the king as to his minister.
Yet the design failed; and it failed because, with characteristic
stupidity, the king did not know the proper instruments for his
purpose. Whatever he touched he mismanaged. He aroused the suspicion of
the people by enforcing the resignation of the elder Pitt. In the Wilkes
affair he threw the clearest light of the century upon the true nature
of the House of Commons. His own system of proscription restored to the
Whig party not a little of the idealism it had lost; and Burke came to
supply them with a philosophy. Chatham remained the idol of the people
despite his hatred. He raised Wilkes to be the champion of
representative government and of personal liberty. He lost America and
it was not his fault that Ireland was retained. The early popularity he
received he never recovered until increasing years and madness had made
him too pathetic for dislike. The real result of his attempt was to
compel attention once again to the foundations of politics; and George's
effort, in the light of his immense failures, could not, in the nature
of things, survive that analysis.
Not, of course, that George ever lacked defenders. As early as 1761, the
old rival of Walpole, Pulteney, whom a peerage had condemned to
obsolescence, published his _Seasonable Hints from an Honest Man on the
new Reign_. Pulteney urged the sovereign no longer to be content with
the "shadow of royalty." He should use his "legal prerogatives" to check
"the illegal claims of factious oligarchy." Government had become the
private possession of a few powerful men. The king was but a puppet in
leading strings. The basis of government should be widened, for every
honest man was aware that distinctions of party were now merely nominal.
The Tories should be admitted to place. They were now friendly to the
accession and they no longer boasted their hostility to dissent. They
knew that Toleration and the Establishment were of the essence of the
Constitution. Were once the Whig oligarchy overthrown, corruption would
cease and Parliament could no longer hope to dominate the kingdom. "The
ministers," he said, "will depend on the Crown not the Crown on
ministers" if George but showed "his resolution to break all factitious
connections and confederacies." The tone is Bolingbroke's, and it was
the lesson George had insistently heard from early youth. How sinister
was the advice, men did not see until the elder Pitt was in political
exile, with Wilkes an outlaw, and general warrants threatening the whole
basis of past liberties.
The first writer who pointed out in unmistakable terms the meaning of
the new synthesis was Junius. That his anonymity concealed the malignant
talent of Sir Philip Francis seems now beyond denial. Junius, indeed,
can hardly claim a place in the history of political ideas. His genius
lay not in the discussion of principle but the dissection of
personality. His power lay in his style and the knowledge that enabled
him to inform the general public of facts which were the private
possession of the inner political circle. His mind was narrow and
pedantic. He stood with Grenville on American taxation; and he
maintained without perceiving what it meant that a nomination borough
was a freehold beyond the competence of the legislature to abolish. He
was never generous, always abusive, and truth did not enter into his
calculations. But he saw with unsurpassed clearness the nature of the
issue and he was a powerful instrument in the discomfiture of the king.
He won a new audience for political conflict and that audience was the
unenfranchised populace of England. His letters, moreover, appearing as
they did in the daily journals gave the press a significance in politics
which it has never lost. He made the significance of George's effort
known to the mass of men at a time when no other means of information
was at hand. The opposition was divided; the king's friends were in a
vast majority; the publication of debates was all but impossible.
English government was a secret conflict in which the entrance of
spectators was forbidden even though they were the subjects of debate.
It was the glory of Junius that he destroyed that system. Not even the
combined influence of the Crown and Commons, not even Lord Mansfield's
doctrine of the law of libel, could break the power of his vituperation
and Wilkes' courage. Bad men have sometimes been the instruments of
noble destiny; and there are few more curious episodes in English
history than the result of this alliance between revengeful hate and
insolent ambition.
II
Yet, in the long run, the real weapon which defeated George was the
ideas of Edmund Burke; for he gave to the political conflict its real
place in philosophy. There is no immortality save in ideas; and it was
Burke who gave a permanent form to the debate in which he was the
liberal protagonist. His career is illustrative at once of the merits
and defects of English politics in the eighteenth century. The son of an
Irish Protestant lawyer and a Catholic mother, he served, after learning
what Trinity College, Dublin, could offer him, a long apprenticeship to
politics in the upper part of Grub Street. The story that he applied,
along with Hume, for Adam Smith's chair at Glasgow seems apocryphal;
though the _Dissertation on the Sublime and the Beautiful_ (1756) shows
his singular fitness for the studies that Hutcheson had made the special
possession of the Scottish school. It was in Grub Street that he appears
to have attained that amazing amount of varied yet profound knowledge
which made him without equal in the House of Commons. His earliest
production was a _Vindication of Natural Society_ (1756), written in the
manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and successful enough in its imitative
satire not only to deceive its immediate public, but also to become the
basis of Godwin's _Political Justice_. After a vain attempt to serve in
Ireland with "Single-Speech" Hamilton, he became the private secretary
to Lord Rockingham, the leader of the one section of the Whig party to
which an honorable record still remained. That connection secured for
him a seat in Parliament at the comparatively late age of thirty-six;
and henceforward, until his death in 1797, he was among its leading
members. His intellectual pre-eminence, indeed, seems from the very
outset to have been recognized on all hands; though he was still, in the
eyes of the system, enough of an outsider to be given, in the short
months during which he held office, the minor office of
Paymaster-General, without a seat in the Cabinet. The man of whom all
England was the political pupil was denied without discussion a place at
the council board. Yet when Fox is little more than a memory of great
lovableness and Pitt a marvellous youth of apt quotations, Burke has
endured as the permanent manual of political wisdom without which
statesmen are as sailors on an uncharted sea.
For it has been the singular good fortune of Burke not merely to obtain
acceptance as the apostle of philosophic conservatism, but to give deep
comfort to men of liberal temper. He is, indeed, a singularly lovable
figure. "His stream of mind is perpetual," said Johnson; and Goldsmith
has told us how he wound his way into a subject like a serpent. Macaulay
thought him the greatest man since Milton, Lord Morley the "greatest
master of civil wisdom in our tongue." "No English writer," says Sir
Leslie Stephen, "has received or has deserved more splendid panegyrics."
Even when the last criticism has been made, detraction from these
estimates is impossible. It is easy to show how irritable and violent
was his temperament. There is evidence and to spare of the way in which
he allowed the spirit of party to cloud his judgment. His relations with
Lord Chatham give lamentable proof of the violence of his personal
antipathies. As an orator, his speeches are often turgid, wanting in
self-control, and full of those ample digressions in which Mr. Gladstone
delighted to obscure his principles. Yet the irritation did not conceal
a magnificent loyalty to his friends, and it was in his days of
comparative poverty that he shared his means with Barry and with Crabbe.
His alliance with Fox is the classic partnership in English politics,
unmarried, even enriched, by the tragedy of its close. He was never
guilty of mean ambition. He thought of nothing save the public welfare.
No man has ever more consistently devoted his energies to the service of
the nation with less regard for personal advancement. No English
statesman has ever more firmly moved amid a mass of details to the
principle they involve.
He was a member of no school of thought, and there is no influence to
whom his outlook can be directly traced. His politics, indeed, bear upon
their face the preoccupation with the immediate problems of the House of
Commons. Yet through them all the principles that emerge form a
consistent whole. Nor is this all. He hated oppression with all the
passion of a generous moral nature. He cared for the good as he saw it
with a steadfastness which Bright and Cobden only can claim to
challenge. What he had to say he said in sentences which form the maxims
of administrative wisdom. His horizon reached from London out to India
and America; and he cared as deeply for the Indian ryot's wrongs as for
the iniquities of English policy to Ireland. With less width of mind
than Hume and less intensity of gaze than Adam Smith, he yet had a width
and intensity which, fused with his own imaginative sympathy, gave him
more insight than either. He had an unerring eye for the eternal
principles of politics. He knew that ideals must be harnessed to an Act
of Parliament if they are not to cease their influence. Admitting while
he did that politics must rest upon expediency, he never failed to find
good reason why expediency should be identified with what he saw as
right. It is a stainless and a splendid record. There are men in English
politics to whom a greater immediate influence may be ascribed, just as
in political philosophy he cannot claim the persistent inspiration of
Hobbes and Locke. But in that middle ground between the facts and
speculation his supremacy is unapproached. There had been nothing like
him before in English politics; and in continental politics Royer
Collard alone has something of his moral fibre, though his practical
insight was far less profound. Hamilton had Burke's full grasp of
political wisdom, but he lacked his moral elevation. So that he remains
a figure of uniqueness. He may, as Goldsmith said, have expended upon
his party talents that should have illuminated the universal aspect of
the State. Yet there is no question with which he dealt that he did not
leave the richer for his enquiry.
III
The liberalism of Burke is most apparent in his handling of the
immediate issues of the age. Upon Ireland, America and India, he was at
every point upon the side of the future. Where constitutional reform was
in debate no man saw more clearly than he the evils that needed remedy;
though, to a later generation, his own schemes bear the mark of timid
conservatism. In the last decade of his life he encountered the greatest
cataclysm unloosed upon Europe since the Reformation, and it is not too
much to say that at every point he missed the essence of its meaning.
Yet even upon France and the English Constitution he was full of
practical sagacity. Had his warning been uttered without the fury of
hate that accompanied it, he might well have guided the forces of the
Revolution into channels that would have left no space for the military
dictatorship he so marvellously foresaw. Had he perceived the real evils
of the aristocratic monopoly against which he so eloquently inveighed,
forty barren years might well have been a fruitful epoch of wise and
continuous reform. But Burke was not a democrat, and, at bottom, he had
little regard for that popular sense of right which, upon occasion, he
was ready to praise. What impressed him was less the evils of the
constitution than its possibilities, could the defects quite alien from
its nature but be pruned away. Moments, indeed, there are of a deeper
vision, and it is not untrue to say that the best answer to Burke's
conservatism is to be found in his own pages. But he was too much the
apostle of order to watch with calm the struggles involved in the
overthrow of privilege. He had too much the sense of a Divine Providence
taking thought for the welfare of men to interfere with violence in his
handiwork. The tinge of caution is never absent, even from his most
liberal moments; and he was willing to endure great evil if it seemed
dangerous to estimate the cost of change.
His American speeches are the true text-book for colonial
administration. He put aside the empty plea of right which satisfied
legal pedants like George Grenville. What moved him was the tragic
fashion in which men clung to the shadow of a power they could not
maintain instead of searching for the roots of freedom. He never
concealed from himself that the success of America was bound up with the
maintenance of English liberties. "Armies," he said many years later,
"first victorious over Englishmen, in a conflict for English
constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated (though
in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject subjection,
would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of England itself." He had
firm hold of that insidious danger which belittles freedom itself in the
interest of curtailing some special desire. "In order to prove that the
Americans have no right to their liberties," he said in the famous
_Speech on Conciliation with America_ (1775), "we are every day
endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our
own." The way for the later despotism of the younger Pitt, was, as Burke
saw, prepared by those who persuaded Englishmen of the paltry character
of the American contest. His own receipt was sounder. In the _Speech on
American Taxation_ (1774) he had riddled the view that the fiscal
methods of Lord North were likely to succeed. The true method was to
find a way of peace. "Nobody shall persuade me," he told a hostile House
of Commons, "when a whole people are concerned that acts of lenity are
not means of conciliation." "Magnanimity in politics," he said in the
next year, "is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and
little minds go ill together." He did not know, in the most superb of
all his maxims, how to draw up an indictment against a whole people. He
would win the colonies by binding them to England with the ties of
freedom. "The question with me," he said, "is not whether you have a
right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your
interest to make them happy." The problem, in fact, was one not of
abstract right but of expediency; and nothing could be lost by
satisfying American desire. Save for Johnson and Gibbon, that was
apparent to every first-class mind in England. But the obstinate king
prevailed; and Burke's great protest remained no more than material for
the legislation of the future. Yet it was something that ninety years
after his speech the British North America Act should have given his
dreams full substance.
Ireland had always a place apart in Burke's affections, and when he
first entered the House of Commons he admitted that uppermost in his
thoughts was the desire to assist its freedom. He saw that here, as in
America, no man will be argued into slavery. A government which defied
the fundamental impulses of men was bound to court disaster. How could
it seek security where it defied the desires of the vast majority of its
subjects? Why is the Irish Catholic to have less justice than the
Catholic of Quebec or the Indian Mohammedan? The system of Protestant
control, he said in the _Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe_ (1792), was
"well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a
people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself." The
Catholics paid their taxes; they served with glory in the army and navy.
Yet they were denied a share in the commonwealth. "Common sense," he
said, "and common justice dictate ... some sort of compensation to a
people for their slavery." The British Constitution was not made "for
great, general and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will
destroy them, or they will destroy the constitution." The argument that
the body of Catholics was prone to sedition was no reason to oppress
them. "No man will assert seriously," he said, "that when people are of
a turbulent spirit the best way to keep them in order is to furnish them
with something to complain of." The advantages of subjects were, as he
urged, their right; and a wise government would regard "all their
reasonable wishes as so many claims." To neglect them was to have a
nation full of uneasiness; and the end was bound to be disaster.
There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long attempt to
mitigate the evils of Company rule in India. Research may well have
shown that in some details he pressed the case too far; yet nothing has
so far come to light to cast doubt upon the principles he there
maintained. He was the first English statesman fully to understand the
moral import of the problem of subject races; and if he did not make
impossible the Joseph Sedleys of the future, at least he flung an
eternal challenge to their malignant complacency. He did not ask the
abandonment of British dominion in India, though he may have doubted the
wisdom of its conquest. All that he insisted upon was this, that in
imperial adventure the conquering race must abide by a moral code. A
lie was a lie whether its victim be black or white. The European must
respect the powers and rights of the Hindu as he would be compelled by
law to respect them in his own State. "If we are not able," he said, "to
contrive some method of governing India well which will not of necessity
become the means of governing Great Britain ill, a ground is laid for
their eternal separation, but none for sacrificing the people of that
country to our constitution." England must be in India for India's
benefit or not at all; political power and commercial monopoly such as
the East India Company enjoyed could be had only insofar as they are
instruments of right and not of violence. The Company's system was the
antithesis of this. "There is nothing," he said in a magnificent
passage, "before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless
prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites
continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting." Sympathy
with the native, regard for his habits and wants, the Company's servants
failed to display. "The English youth in India drink the intoxicating
draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear
it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in
principle, neither nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert
themselves for the excesses of their premature power. The consequences
of their conduct, which in good minds (and many of theirs are probably
such) might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the
rapidity of their flight. Their prey is lodged in England; and the cries
of India are given to seas and winds to be blown about in every breaking
up of the monsoon over a remote and unhearing ocean." More than a
century was to pass before the wisest of Burke's interpreters attempted
the translation of his maxims into statute. But there has never, in any
language, been drawn a clearer picture of the danger implicit in
imperial adventure. "The situation of man," said Burke, "is the
preceptor of his duty." He saw how a nation might become corrupted by
the spoils of other lands. He knew that cruelty abroad is the parent of
a later cruelty at home. Men will complain of their wrongdoing in the
remoter empire; and imperialism will employ the means Burke painted in
unforgettable terms in his picture of Paul Benfield. He denied that the
government of subject races can be regarded as a commercial transaction.
Its problem was not to secure dividends but to accomplish moral benefit.
He abhorred the politics of prestige. He knew the difficulties involved
in administering distant territories, the ignorance and apathy of the
public, the consequent erosion of responsibility, the chance that wrong
will fail of discovery. But he did not shrink from his conclusion. "Let
us do what we please," he said, "to put India from our thoughts, we can
do nothing to separate it from our public interest and our national
reputation." That is a general truth not less in Africa and China than
in India itself. The main thought in Burke's mind was the danger lest
colonial dominion become the breeding-ground of arbitrary ideas. That
his own safeguards were inadequate is clear enough at the present time.
He knew that the need was good government. He did not nor could he
realize how intimately that ideal was connected with self-government.
Yet the latest lesson is no more than the final outcome of his teaching.
IV
A background so consistent as this in the inflexible determination to
moralize political action resulted in a noble edifice. Yet, through it
all, the principles of policy are rather implied than admitted. It was
when he came to deal with domestic problems and the French Revolution
that Burke most clearly showed the real trend of his thought. That trend
is unmistakable. Burke was a utilitarian who was convinced that what was
old was valuable by the mere fact of its arrival at maturity. The State
appeared to him an organic compound that came but slowly to its full
splendour. It was easy to destroy; creation was impossible. Political
philosophy was nothing for him but accurate generalization from
experience; and he held the presumption to be against novelty. While he
did not belittle the value of reason, he was always impressed by the
immense part played by prejudice in the determination of policy. He had
no doubt that property was a rightful index to power; and to disturb
prescription seemed to him the opening of the flood gates. Nor must we
miss the religious aspect of his philosophy. He never doubted that
religion was the foundation of the English State. "Englishmen," he said
in the _Reflections on the French Revolution_ (1790), "know, and what is
better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society
and the source of all good and of all comfort." The utterance is
characteristic, not merely in its depreciation of reason, but in its
ultimate reliance upon a mystic explanation of social facts. Nothing was
more alien from Burke's temper than deductive thinking in politics. The
only safeguard he could find was in empiricism.
This hatred of abstraction is, of course, the basis of his earliest
publication; but it remained with him to the end. He would not discuss
America in terms of right. "I do not enter into these metaphysical
distinctions," he said in the _Speech on American Taxation_, "I hate the
very sound of them." "One sure symptom of an ill-conducted state," he
wrote in the _Reflections_, "is the propensity of the people to resort
to theories." "It is always to be lamented," he said in a _Speech on the
Duration of Parliament_, "when men are driven to search into the
foundations of the commonwealth." The theory of a social contract he
declared "at best a confusion of judicial with civil principles," and he
found no sense in the doctrine of popular sovereignty. "The lines of
morality," he said in the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_ (1791),
"are not like ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as
well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These
exceptions and modifications are made, not by the process of logic but
by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rank of the
virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the
standard of them all." Nor did he hesitate to draw the obvious
conclusion. "This," he said, "is the true touchstone of all theories
which regard man and the affairs of men--does it suit his nature in
general, does it suit his nature as modified by his habits?"
Of the truth of this general attitude it is difficult to make denial.
But when Burke came to apply it to the British Constitution the "rules
of prudence" he was willing to admit are narrow enough to cause
surprised enquiry. He did not doubt that the true end of a legislature
was "to give a direction, a form, a technical dress ... to the general
sense of the community"; he admitted that popular revolt is so much the
outcome of suffering that in any dispute between government and people,
the presumption is at least equal in the latter's favor. He urged the
acceptance of Grenville's bill for improving the method of decision upon
disputed elections. He made a magnificent defence of the popular cause
in the Middlesex election. He was in favor of the publication of
parliamentary debates and of the voting lists in divisions. He supported
almost with passion the ending of that iniquitous system by which the
enfranchisement of revenue officers gave government a corrupt reservoir
of electoral support. His _Speech on Economical Reform_ (1780) was the
prelude to a nobly-planned and successful attack upon the waste of the
Civil list.
Yet beyond these measures Burke could never be persuaded to go. He was
against the demand for shorter Parliaments on the excellent ground that
the elections would be more corrupt and the Commons less responsible. He
opposed the remedy of a Place Bill for the good and sufficient reason
that it gave the executive an interest against the legislature. He would
not, as in the great speech at Bristol (1774), accept the doctrine that
a member of Parliament was a mere delegate of his constituents rather
than a representative of his own convictions. "Government and
legislation," he said, "are matters of reason and of judgment"; and once
the private member had honorably arrived at a decision which he thought
was for the interest of the whole community, his duty was done. All
this, in itself, is unexceptionable; and it shows Burke's admirable
grasp of the practical application of attractive theories to the event.
But it is to be read in conjunction with a general hostility to basic
constitutional change which is more dubious. He had no sympathy with the
Radicals. "The bane of the Whigs," he said, "has been the admission
among them of the corps of schemers ... who do us infinite mischief by
persuading many sober and well-meaning people that we have designs
inconsistent with the Constitution left us by our forefathers." "If the
nation at large," he wrote in another letter, "has disposition enough to
oppose all bad principles and all bad men, its form of government is, in
my opinion, fully sufficient for it; but if the general disposition be
against a virtuous and manly line of public conduct, there is no form
into which it can be thrown that will improve its nature or add to its
energy"; and in the same letter he foreshadows a possible retirement
from the House of Commons as a protest against the growth of radical
opinion in his party. He resisted every effort to reduce the suffrage
qualification. He had no sympathy with the effort either to add to the
county representation or to abolish the rotten boroughs. The framework
of the parliamentary system seemed to him excellent. He deplored all
criticism of Parliament, and even the discussion of its essentials. "Our
representation," he said, "is as nearly perfect as the necessary
imperfections of human affairs and of human creatures will suffer it to
be." It was in the same temper that he resisted all effort at the
political relief of the Protestant dissenters. "The machine itself," he
had said, "is well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the
materials were sound"; and he never moved from that opinion.
Burke's attitude was obsolete even while he wrote; yet the
suggestiveness of his very errors makes examination of their ground
important. Broadly, he was protesting against natural right in the name
of expediency. His opponents argued that, since men are by nature equal,
it must follow that they have an equal right to self-government. To
Burke, the admission of this principle would have meant the overthrow of
the British constitution. Its implication was that every institution not
of immediate popular origin should be destroyed. To secure their ends,
he thought, the radicals were compelled to preach the injustice of those
institutions and thus to injure that affection for government upon which
peace and security depend. Here was an effort to bring all institutions
to the test of logic which he thought highly dangerous. "No rational man
ever did govern himself," he said, "by abstractions and universals." The
question for him was not the abstract rightness of the system upon some
set of _a priori_ principles but whether, on the whole, that system
worked for the happiness of the community. He did not doubt that it did;
and to overthrow a structure so nobly tested by the pressure of events
in favor of some theories outside historic experience seemed to him
ruinous to society. Government, for him, was the general harmony of
diverse interests; and the continual adjustments and exquisite
modifications of which it stood in need were admirably discovered in the
existing system. Principles were thus unimportant compared to the
problem of their application. "The major," he said of all political
premises, "makes a pompous figure in the battle, but the victory depends
upon the little minor of circumstances."
To abstract natural right he therefore opposed prescription. The
presumption of wisdom is on the side of the past, and when we change,
we act at our peril. "Prescription," he said in 1782, "is the most solid
of all titles, not only to property, but to what is to secure that
property, to government." Because he saw the State organically he was
impressed by the smallness both of the present moment and the
individual's thought. It is built upon the wisdom of the past for "the
species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost
always acts right." And since it is the past alone which has had the
opportunity to accumulate this rightness our disposition should be to
preserve all ancient things. They could not be without a reason; and
that reason is grounded upon ancestral experience. So the prescriptive
title becomes "not the creature, but the master, of positive law ... the
soundest, the most general and the most recognized title between man and
man that is known in municipal or public jurisprudence." It is by
prescription that he defends the existence of Catholicism in Ireland not
less than the supposed deformities of the British Constitution. So, too,
his main attack on atheism is its implication that "everything is to be
discussed." He does not say that all which is has rightness in it; but
at least he urges that to doubt it is to doubt the construction of a
past experience which built according to the general need. Nor does he
doubt the chance that what he urges may be wrong. Rather does he insist
that at least it gives us security, for him the highest good. "Truth,"
he said, "may be far better ... but as we have scarcely ever that
certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the
truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company
charity, the highest of the virtues."
Such a philosophy, indeed, so barely stated, would seem a defence of
political immobility; but Burke attempted safeguards against that
danger. His insistence upon the superior value of past experience was
balanced by a general admission that particular circumstances must
always govern the immediate decision. "When the reason of old
establishments is gone," he said in his _Speech on Economical Reform_,
"it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burden of them." "A
disposition to preserve and an ability to improve," he wrote in the
_Reflections on the French Revolution_, "taken together would be my
standard of a statesman." But that "ability to improve" conceals two
principles of which Burke never relaxed his hold. "All the reformations
we have hitherto made," he said, "have proceeded upon the principle of
reference to antiquity"; and the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_,
which is the most elaborate exposition of his general attitude, proceeds
upon the general basis that 1688 is a perpetual model for the future.
Nor is this all. "If I cannot reform with equity," said Burke, "I will
not reform at all"; and equity seems here to mean a sacrifice of the
present and its passionate demands to the selfish errors of past policy.
Burke, indeed, was never a democrat, and that is the real root of his
philosophy. He saw the value of the party-system, and he admitted the
necessity of some degree of popular representation. But he was entirely
satisfied with current Whig principles, could they but be purged of
their grosser deformities. He knew too well how little reason is wont to
enter into the formation of political opinion to make the sacrifice of
innovation to its power. He saw so much of virtue in the old order, that
he insisted upon the equation of virtue with quintessence. Men of great
property and position using their influence as a public trust, delicate
in their sense of honor, and acting only from motives of right--these
seemed to him the men who should with justice exercise political power.
He did not doubt that "there is no qualification for government but
virtue and wisdom ... wherever they are actually found, they have, in
whatever state, condition, profession or trade, the passport to heaven";
but he is careful to dissociate the possibility that they can be found
in those who practice the mechanical arts. He did not mean that his
aristocracy should govern without response to popular demand. He had no
objection to criticism, nor to the public exercise of government. There
was no reason even for agreement, so long as each party was guided by an
honorable sense of the public good. This, so he urged, was the system
which underlay the temporary evils of the British Constitution. An
aristocracy delegated to do its work by the mass of men was the best
form of government his imagination could conceive. It meant that
property must be dominant in the system of government, that, while
office should be open to all, it should be out of the reach of most.
"The characteristic essence of property," he wrote in the _Reflections_,
"... is to be unequal"; and he thought the perpetuation of that
inequality by inheritance "that which tends most to the perpetuation of
society itself." The system was difficult to maintain, and it must be
put out of the reach of popular temptation. "Our constitution," he said
in the _Present Discontents_, "stands on a nice equipoise, with sharp
precipices and deep waters on all sides of it. In removing it from a
dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a danger towards
oversething it on the other." In straining, that is to say, after too
large a purification, we may end with destruction. And Burke, of course,
was emphatic upon the need that property should be undisturbed. It was
always, he thought, at a great disadvantage in any struggle with
ability; and there are many passages in which he urges the consequent
special representation which the adequate defence of property requires.
The argument, at bottom, is common to all thinkers over-impressed by the
sanctity of past experience. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, Taine and
Renan in France, Sir Henry Maine and Lecky in England, have all urged
what is in effect a similar plea. We must not break what Bagehot called
the cake of custom, for men have been trained to its digestion, and new
food breeds trouble. Laws are the offspring of the original genius of a
people, and while we may renovate, we must not unduly reform. The true
idea of national development is always latent in the past experience of
the race and it is from that perpetual spring alone that wisdom can be
drawn. We render obedience to what is with effortless unconsciousness;
and without this loyalty to inherited institutions the fabric of society
would be dissolved. Civilization, in fact, depends upon the performance
of actions defined in preconceived channels; and if we obeyed those novel
impulses of right which seem, at times, to contradict our inheritance,
we should disturb beyond repair the intricate equilibrium of countless
ages. The experience of the past rather than the desires of the present
is thus the true guide to our policy. "We ought," he said in a famous
sentence, "to venerate where we are unable presently to comprehend."
It is easy to see why a mind so attuned recoiled from horror at the
French Revolution. There is something almost sinister in the destiny
which confronted Burke with the one great spectacle of the eighteenth
century which he was certain not merely to misunderstand but also to
hate. He could not endure the most fragmentary change in tests of
religious belief; and the Revolution swept overboard the whole religious
edifice. He would not support the abolition even of the most flagrant
abuses in the system of representation; and he was to see in France an
overthrow of a monarchy even more august in its prescriptive rights than
the English Parliament. Privileges were scattered to the winds in a
single night. Peace was sacrificed to exactly those metaphysical
theories of equality and justice which he most deeply abhorred. The
doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in that last and
noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps its most perfect
justification. On all hands there was the sense of a new world built by
the immediate thought of man upon the wholehearted rejection of past
history. Politics was emphatically declared to be a system of which the
truths could be stated in terms of mathematical certainty. The religious
spirit which Burke was convinced lay at the root of good gave way before
a general scepticism which, from the outset of his life, he had declared
incompatible with social order. Justice was asserted to be the centre of
social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of those prescriptive
privileges which Burke regarded as the protective armour of the body
politic. Above all, the men who seized the reins of power became
convinced that theirs was a specific of universal application. Their
disciples in England seemed in the same diabolic frenzy with themselves.
In a moment of time, the England which had been the example to Europe of
ordered popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only less
barbaric than the despotic princes of the continent. That Price and
Priestley should suffer the infection was, even for Burke, a not
unnatural thing. But when Charles Fox cast aside the teaching of twenty
years for its antithesis, Burke must have felt that no price was too
great to pay for the overthrow of the Revolution.
Certainly his pamphlets on events in France are at every point
consistent with his earlier doctrine. The charge that he supported the
Revolution in America and deserted it in France is without meaning; for
in the one there is no word that can honorably be twisted to support the
other. And when we make allowances for the grave errors of personal
taste, the gross exaggeration, the inability to see the Revolution as
something more than a single point in time, it becomes obvious enough
that his criticism, de Maistre's apart, is by far the soundest we
possess from the generation which knew the movement as a living thing.
The attempt to produce an artificial equality upon which he seized as
the essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private to
the king, the inevitable precursor of dictatorship. He realized that
freedom is born of a certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of
doctrinaire thinkers left no room. That worship of symmetrical form
which underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he
exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political wisdom.
"The nature of man is intricate"; he wrote in the _Reflections_, "the
objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and
therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable
either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs." The note
recurs in substance throughout his criticism. Much of its application,
indeed, will not stand for one moment the test of inquiry; as when, for
instance, he correlates the monarchical government of France with the
English constitutional system and extols the perpetual virtues of 1688.
The French made every effort to find the secret of English principles,
but the roots were absent from their national experience.
A year after the publication of the _Reflections_ he himself perceived
the narrowness of that judgment. In the _Thoughts on French Affairs_
(1791) he saw that the essence of the Revolution was its foundation in
theoretic dogma. It was like nothing else in the history of the world
except the Reformation; which last event it especially resembles in its
genius for self-propagation. Herein he has already envisaged the
importance of that "_patrie intellectuelle_" which Tocqueville
emphasized as born of the Revolution. That led Burke once again to
insist upon the peculiar genius of each separate state, the difficulties
of a change, the danger of grafting novelties upon an ancient fabric. He
saw the certainty that in adhering to an abstract metaphysical scheme
the French were in truth omitting human nature from their political
equation; for general ideas can find embodiment in institutional forms
only after they have been moulded by a thousand varieties of
circumstance. The French created an universal man not less destructive
of their practical sagacity than the Frankenstein of the economists.
They omitted, as Burke saw, the elements which objective experience must
demand; with the result that, despite themselves, they came rather to
destroy than to fulfil. Napoleon, as Burke prophesied, reaped the
harvest of their failure.
Nor was he less right in his denunciation of that distrust of the past
which played so large a part in the revolutionary consciousness. "We are
afraid," he wrote in the _Reflections_, "to put men to live and trade
each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this
stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to
avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of
ages." Of Siéyès' building constitutions overnight, this is no unfair
picture; but it points a more general truth never long absent from
Burke's mind. Man is for him so much the creature of prejudice, so much
a mosaic of ancestral tradition, that the chance of novel thought
finding a peaceful place among his institutions is always small. For
Burke, thought is always at the service of the instincts, and these lie
buried in the remote experience of the state. So that men like
Robespierre were asking from their subjects an impossible task. That
which they had conceived in the gray abstractness of their speculations
was too little related to what the average Frenchman knew and desired to
be enduring. Burke looks with sober admiration at the way in which the
English revolution related itself at every point to ideas and theories
with which the average man was as familiar as with the physical
landmarks of his own neighborhood. For the motives which underlie all
human effort are, he thought, sufficiently constant to compel regard.
That upon which they feed submits to change; but the effort is slow and
the disappointments many. The Revolution taught the populace the thirst
for power. But it failed to remember that sense of continuity in human
effort without which new constructions are built on sand. The power it
exercised lacked that horizon of the past through which alone it suffers
limitation to right ends.
The later part of Burke's attack upon the Revolution does not belong to
political philosophy. No man is more responsible than he for the temper
which drew England into war. He came to write rather with the zeal of a
fanatic waging a holy war than in the temper of a statesman confronted
with new ideas. Yet even the _Letters on a Regicide Peace_ (1796) have
flashes of the old, incomparable insight; and they show that even in the
midst of his excesses he did not war for love of it. So that it is
permissible to think he did not lightly pen those sentences on peace
which stand as oases of wisdom in a desert of extravagant rhetoric. "War
never leaves where it found a nation," he wrote, "it is never to be
entered upon without mature deliberation." That was a lesson his
generation had still to learn; nor did it take to heart the even nobler
passage that follows. "The blood of man," he said, "should never be shed
but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our
friends, for our God, for our country, for mankind. The rest is vanity;
the rest is crime." It is perhaps the most tragic wrong in that
century's history that these words were written to justify an effort of
which they supply an irrefutable condemnation.
V
Criticism of Burke's theories can be made from at least two angles. It
is easy to show that his picture of the British Constitution was remote
from the facts even when he wrote. Every change that he opposed was
essential to the security of the next generation; and there followed
none of the disastrous consequences he had foreshadowed. Such criticism
would be at almost every point just; and yet it would fail to touch the
heart of Burke's position. What is mainly needed is analysis at once of
his omissions and of the underlying assumptions of what he wrote. Burke
came to his maturity upon the eve of the Industrial Revolution; and we
have it upon the authority of Adam Smith himself that no one had so
clearly apprehended his own economic principles. Yet there is no word in
what Burke had to say of their significance. The vast agrarian changes
of the time contained, as it appears, no special moment even for him who
burdened himself unduly to restore the Beaconsfield estate. No man was
more eager than he that the public should be admitted to the mysteries
of political debate; yet he steadfastly refused to draw the obvious
inference that once the means of government were made known those who
possessed the knowledge would demand their share in its application. He
did not see that the metaphysics he so profoundly distrusted was itself
the offspring of that contemptible worship of expediency which
Blackstone generalized into a legalistic jargon. Men never move to the
adumbration of general right until the conquest of political rights has
been proved inadequate. That Burke himself may be said in a sense to
have seen when he insisted upon the danger of examining the foundations
of the State. Yet a man who refuses to admit that the constant
dissatisfaction with those foundations his age expressed is the
expression of serious ill in the body politic is wilfully blind to the
facts at issue. No one had more faithfully than Burke himself explained
why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete; yet nothing would induce him ever
to realize that the alternative to aristocratic government is democracy
and that its absence was the cause of that disquiet of which he realized
that Wilkes was but the symptom.
Broadly, that is to say, Burke would not realize that the reign of
political privilege was drawing to its close. That is the real meaning
of the French Revolution and therein it represents a stream of tendency
not less active in England than abroad. In France, indeed, the lines
were more sharply drawn than elsewhere. The rights men craved were not,
as Burke insisted, the immediate offspring of metaphysic fancy, but the
result of a determination to end the malignant wrong of centuries. A
power that knew no responsibility, war and intolerance that derived only
from the accidental caprice of the court, arrest that bore no relation
to offence, taxation inversely proportionate to the ability to pay,
these were the prescriptive privileges that Burke invited his generation
to accept as part of the accumulated wisdom of the past. It is not
difficult to see why those who swore their oath in the tennis-court at
Versailles should have felt such wisdom worthy to be condemned. Burke's
caution was for them the timidity of one who embraces existent evils
rather than fly to the refuge of an accessible good. In a less degree,
the same is true of England. The constitution that Burke called upon
men to worship was the constitution which made the Duke of Bedford
powerful, that gave no representation to Manchester and a member to Old
Sarum, which enacted the game laws and left upon the statute-book a
penal code which hardly yielded to the noble attack of Romilly. These,
which were for Burke merely the accidental excrescences of a noble
ideal, were for them its inner essence; and where they could not reform
they were willing to destroy.
The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of the past
as the very institutions it came to condemn. The innovations were the
inevitable outcome of past oppression. Burke refused to see that aspect
of the picture. He ascribed to the crime of the present what was due to
the half-wilful errors of the past. The man who grounded his faith in
historic experience refused to admit as history the elements alien from
his special outlook. He took that liberty not to venerate where he was
unable to comprehend which he denied to his opponents. Nor did he admit
the uses to which his doctrine of prescription was bound to be put in
the hands of selfish and unscrupulous men. No one will object to
privilege for a Chatham; but privilege for the Duke of Grafton is a
different thing, and Burke's doctrine safeguards the innumerable men of
whom Grafton is the type in the hope that by happy accident some Chatham
will one day emerge. He justifies the privileges of the English Church
in the name of religious well-being; but it is difficult to see what men
like Watson or Archbishop Cornwallis have got to do with religion. The
doctrine of prescription might be admirable if all statesmen were so
wise as Burke; but in the hands of lesser men it becomes no more than
the protective armour of vested interests into the ethics of which it
refuses us leave to examine.
That suspicion of thought is integral to Burke's philosophy, and it
deserves more examination than it has received. In part it is a
rejection of the Benthamite position that man is a reasoning animal. It
puts its trust in habit as the chief source of human action; and it
thus is distrustful of thought as leading into channels to which the
nature of man is not adapted. Novelty, which is assumed to be the
outcome of thought, it regards as subversive of the routine upon which
civilization depends. Thought is destructive of peace; and it is argued
that we know too little of political phenomena to make us venture into
the untried places to which thought invites us. Yet the first of many
answers is surely the most obvious fact that if man is so much the
creature of his custom no reason would prevail save where they proved
inadequate. If thought is simply a reserve power in society, its
strength must obviously depend upon common acceptance; and that can only
come when some routine has failed to satisfy the impulses of men. But we
may urge a difficulty that is even more decisive. No system of habits
can ever hope to endure long in a world where the cumulative power of
memory enables change to be so swift; and no system of habits can endure
at all unless its underlying idea represents the satisfaction of a
general desire. It must, that is to say, make rational appeal; and,
indeed, as Aristotle said, it can have virtue only to the point where it
is conscious of itself. The uncritical routine of which Burke is the
sponsor would here deprive the mass of men of virtue. Yet in modern
civilization the whole strength of any custom depends upon exactly that
consciousness of right which Burke restricted to his aristocracy. Our
real need is less the automatic response to ancient stimulus than power
to know what stimulus has social value. We need, that is to say, the
gift of criticism rather than the gift of inert acceptance. Not, of
course, that the habits which Burke so earnestly admired are at all part
of our nervous endowment in any integral sense. The short space of the
French Revolution made the habit of thinking in terms of progress an
essential part of our intellectual inheritance; and where the Burkian
school proclaims how exceptional progress has been in history, we take
that as proof of the ease with which essential habit may be acquired.
Habit, in fact, without philosophy destroys the finer side of civilized
life. It may leave a stratum to whom its riches have been discovered;
but it leaves the mass of men soulless automata without spontaneous
response to the chords struck by another hand.
Burke's answer would, of course, have been that he was not a democrat.
He did not trust the people and he rated their capacity as low. He
thought of the people--it was obviously a generalization from his
time--as consistently prone to disorder and checked only by the force of
ancient habit. Yet he has himself supplied the answer to that attitude.
"My observation," he said in his _Speech on the East India Bill_, "has
furnished me with nothing that is to be found in any habits of life or
education which tends wholly to disqualify men for the functions of
government." We can go further than that sober caution. We know that
there is one technique only capable of securing good government and that
is the training of the mass of men to interest in it. We know that no
State can hope for peace in which large types of experience are without
representation. Indeed, if proof were here wanting, an examination of
the eighteenth century would supply it. Few would deny that statesmen
are capable of disinterested sacrifice for classes of whose inner life
they are ignorant; yet the relation between law and the interest of the
dominant class is too intimate to permit with safety the exclusion of a
part of the State from sharing in its guidance. Nor did Burke remember
his own wise saying that "in all disputes between the people and their
rulers the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people";
and he quotes with agreement that great sentence of Sully's which traces
popular violence to popular suffering. No one can watch the economic
struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or calculate the
pain they have involved to humble men, without admitting that they
represent the final protest of an outraged mind against oppression too
intolerable to be borne. Burke himself, as his own speeches show, knew
little or nothing of the pain involved in the agrarian changes of his
age. The one way to avoid violent outbreak is not exclusion of the
people from power but their participation in it. The popular sense of
right may often, as Aristotle saw, be wiser than the opinion of
statesmen. It is not necessary to equate the worth of untrained
commonsense with experienced wisdom to suggest that, in the long run,
neglect of common sense will make the effort of that wisdom fruitless.
This, indeed, is to take the lowest ground. For the case against Burke's
aristocracy has a moral aspect with which he did not deal. He did not
inquire by what right a handful of men were to be hereditary governors
of a whole people. Expediency is no answer to the question, for Bentham
was presently to show how shallow was that basis of consent. Once it is
admitted that the personality of men is entitled to respect
institutional room must be found for its expression. The State is
morally stunted where their powers go undeveloped. There is something
curious here in Burke's inability to suspect deformity in a system which
gave his talents but partial place. He must have known that no one in
the House of Commons was his equal. He must have known how few of those
he called upon to recognize the splendor of their function were capable
of playing the part he pictured for them. The answer to a morally
bankrupt aristocracy is surely not the overwhelming effort required in
its purification when the plaintiff is the people; for the mere fact
that the people is the plaintiff is already evidence of its fitness for
power. Burke gave no hint of how the level of his governing class could
be maintained. He said nothing of what education might accomplish for
the people. He did not examine the obvious consequences of their
economic status. Had his eyes not been obscured by passion the work of
that States-General the names in which appeared to him so astonishing in
their inexperience, might have given him pause. The "obscure provincial
advocates ... stewards of petty local jurisdictions ... the fomenters
and conductors of the petty war of village vexation" legislated, out of
their inexperience, for the world. Their resolution, their constancy,
their high sense of the national need, were precisely the qualities
Burke demanded in his governing class; and the States-General did not
move from the straight path he laid down until they met with intrigue
from those of whom Burke became the licensed champion.
Nor is it in the least clear that his emphasis upon expediency is, in
any real way, a release from metaphysical inquiry. Rather may it be
urged that what was needed in Burke's philosophy was the clear avowal
of the metaphysic it implied. Nothing is more greatly wanted in
political inquiry than discovery of that "intuition more subtle than any
articulate major premise" which, as Mr. Justice Holmes has said, is the
true foundation of so many of our political judgments. The theory of
natural rights upon which Burke heaped such contempt was wrong rather in
its form than in its substance. It clearly suffered from its mistaken
effort to trace to an imaginary state of nature what was due to a
complex experience. It suffered also from its desire to lay down
universal formulæ. It needed to state the rights demanded in terms of
the social interests they involved rather than in the abstract ethic
they implied. But the demands which underlay the thought of men like
Price and Priestley was as much the offspring of experience as Burke's
own doctrine. They made, indeed, the tactical mistake of seeking to give
an unripe philosophic form to a political strategy wherein, clearly
enough, Burke was their master. But no one can read the answers of Paine
and Mackintosh, who both were careful to avoid the panoply of
metaphysics, to the _Reflections_, without feeling that Burke failed
to move them from their main position. Expediency may be admirable in
telling the statesmen what to do; but it does not explain the sources of
his ultimate act, nor justify the thing finally done. The unconscious
deeps which lie beneath the surface of the mind are rarely less urgent
than the motives that are avowed. Action is less their elimination than
their index; and we must penetrate within their recesses before we have
the full materials for judgment.
Considered in this fashion, the case for natural rights is surely
unanswerable. The things that men desire correspond, in some rough
fashion, to the things they need. Natural rights are nothing more than
the armour evolved to protect their vital interests. Upon the narrow
basis of legal history it is, of course, impossible to protect them.
History is rather the record of the thwarting of human desire than of
its achievement. But upon the value of certain things there is a
sufficient and constant opinion to give us assurance that repression
will ultimately involve disorder. Nor is there any difference between
the classes of men in this regard. Forms, indeed, will vary; and the
power we have of answering demand will always wait upon the discoveries
of science. Our natural rights, that is to say, will have a changing
content simply because this is not a static world. But that does not
mean, as Burke insisted, that they are empty of experience. They come,
of course, mainly from men who have been excluded from intimate contact
with the fruits of power. Nonconformists in religion, workers without
land or capital save the power of their own hands, it is from the
disinherited that they draw, as demands, their strength. Yet it is
difficult to see, as Burke would undoubtedly have insisted, that they
are the worse from the source whence they derive. Rather do they point
to grave inadequacy in the substance of the state, inadequacy neglect of
which has led to the cataclysms of historic experience. The
unwillingness of Burke to examine into their foundation reveals his lack
of moral insight into the problem he confronted.
That lack of insight must, of course, be given some explanation; and its
cause seems rooted in Burke's metaphysic outlook. He was profoundly
religious; and he did not doubt that the order of the universe was the
command of God. It was, as a consequence, beneficent; and to deny its
validity was, for him, to doubt the wisdom of God. "Having disposed," he
wrote, "and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will,
but to His, He had, in and by that disposition, vitally subjected us to
act the part which belongs to the place assigned us." The State, in
fact, it is to be built upon the sacrifice of men; and this they must
accept as of the will of God. We are to do our duty in our allotted
station without repining, in anticipation, doubtless, of a later reward.
What we are is thus the expression of his goodness; and there is a real
sense in which Burke may be said to have maintained the inherent
rightness of the existing order. Certainly he throws a cloak of
religious veneration about the purely metaphysical concept of property;
and his insistence upon the value of peace as opposed to truth is surely
part of the same attitude. Nor is it erroneous to connect this
background with his antagonism to the French Revolution. What there was
most distressing to him was the overthrowal of the Church, and he did
not hesitate, in very striking fashion, to connect revolutionary opinion
with infidelity. Indeed Burke, like Locke, seems to have been convinced
that a social sense was impossible in an atheist; and his _Letters on a
Regicide Peace_ have a good deal of that relentless illogic which made
de Maistre connect the first sign of dissent from ultramontanism with
the road to a denial of all faith. Nothing is more difficult than to
deal with a thinker who has had a revelation; and this sense that the
universe was a divine mystery not to be too nearly scrutinized by man
grew greatly upon Burke in his later years. It was not an attitude which
reason could overthrow; for its first principle was an awe in the
presence of facts to which reason is a stranger.
There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic idealism which made him, like
later thinkers of the school, regard existing difficulties with
something akin to complacent benevolence. What interested him was the
idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought, deformed it,
was not of the essence of its nature. He denied, that is to say, that
the degree to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the
purpose itself. A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the
deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the beauty of
the end. It is the great defect of all idealistic philosophy that it
should come to the examination of facts in so optimistic a temper. It
never sufficiently realizes that in the transition from theoretic
purpose to practical realization a significant transformation may occur.
We do not come to grips with the facts. What we are bidden to remember
is the splendor of what the facts are trying to be. The existing order
is beatified as a necessary stage in a beneficent process. We are not to
separate out the constituent elements therein, and judge them as facts
in time and space. Society is one and indivisible; and the defects do
not at any point impair the ultimate integrity of the social bond.
Yet it is surely evident that in the heat and stress of social life, we
cannot afford so long a period as the basis for our judgment. We may
well enough regard the corruption of the monarchy under the later
Hanoverians as the necessary prelude to its purification under Victoria;
but that does not make it any the less corrupt. We may even see how a
monistic view of society is possible to one who, like Burke, is uniquely
occupied with the public good. But the men who, like Muir and Hardy in
the treason trials of the Revolution, think rather in terms of the
existing disharmonies than the beauty of the purpose upon which they
rest, are only human if they think those disharmonies more real than the
purpose they do not meet. They were surely to be pardoned if, reading
the _Reflections_ of Burke, they regarded class distinctions as more
vital than their harmony of interest, when they saw the tenacity with
which privileges they did not share were defended. It is even possible
to understand why some insisted that if those privileges were, as Burke
had argued, essential to the construction of the whole, it was against
that whole, alike in purpose and in realization, that they were in
revolt. For them the fact of discontinuity was vital. They could not but
ask for happiness in their own individual lives no less than in the
State of which they were part. They came to see that without
self-government in the sense of their own active participation in power,
such happiness must go unfulfilled. The State, in fact, may have the
noblest purpose; but its object is attempted by agents who are also
mortal men. The basis of their scrutiny became at once pragmatic. The
test of allegiance to established institutions became immediately the
achievement for which they were responsible. The achievement, as they
urged, was hardly written with adequacy in terms of the lives of humble
men. That was why they judged no attitude of worth which sought the
equation of the real and the ideal. The first lesson of their own
experience of power was the need for its limitation by the instructed
judgment of free minds.[18]
[Footnote 18: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, pp. 65-9.]
VI
No man was more deeply hostile to the early politics of the romantic
movement, to the _Contrat Social_ of Rousseau and the _Political
Justice_ of Godwin, than was Burke; yet, on the whole, it is with the
romantics that Burke's fundamental influence remains. His attitude to
reason, his exaltation of passion and imagination over the conscious
logic of men, were of the inmost stuff of which they were made. In that
sense, at least, his kinship is with the great conservative revolution
of the generation which followed him. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, de
Maistre and Bonald in France, Coleridge and the later Wordsworth in
England, are in a true sense his disciples. That does not mean that any
of them were directly conscious of his work but that the movement he
directed had its necessary outcome in their defence of his ideals. The
path of history is strewn with undistributed middles; and it is possible
that in the clash between his attitude and that of Bentham there were
the materials for a fuller synthesis in a later time. Certainly there is
no more admirable corrective in historical politics that the contrast
they afford.
It is easy to praise Burke and easier still to miss the greatness of his
effort. Perspective apart, he is destined doubtless to live rather as
the author of some maxims that few statesmen will dare to forget than
as the creator of a system which, even in its unfinished implications,
is hardly less gigantic than that of Hobbes or Bentham. His very defects
are lessons in themselves. His unhesitating inability to see how
dangerous is the concentration of property is standing proof that men
are over-prone to judge the rightness of a State by their own wishes.
His own contempt for the results of reasonable inquiry is a ceaseless
lesson in the virtue of consistent scrutiny of our inheritance. His
disregard of popular desire suggests the fatal ease with which we
neglect the opinion of those who stand outside the active centre of
political conflict. Above all, his hostility to the Revolution should at
least make later generations beware lest novelty of outlook be unduly
confounded with erroneous doctrine.
Yet even when such deduction has been made, there is hardly a greater
figure in the history of political thought in England. Without the
relentless logic of Hobbes, the acuteness of Hume, the moral insight of
T.H. Green, he has a large part of the faculties of each. He brought to
the political philosophy of his generation a sense of its direction, a
lofty vigour of purpose, and a full knowledge of its complexity, such as
no other statesman has ever possessed. His flashes of insight are things
that go, as few men have ever gone, into the hidden deeps of political
complexity. Unquestionably, his speculation is rather that of the orator
in the tribune than of the thinker in his study. He never forgot his
party, and he wrote always in that House of Commons atmosphere which
makes a man unjust to the argument and motives of his opponent. Yet,
when the last word of criticism has been made, the balance of
illumination is immense. He illustrates at its best the value of that
party-system the worth of which made so deep an impression on all he
wrote. He showed that government by discussion can be made to illuminate
great principles. He showed also that allegiance to party is never
inconsistent with the deeper allegiance to the demand of conscience.
When he came to the House of Commons, the prospects of representative
government were very dark; and it is mainly to his emphasis upon its
virtues that its victory must be attributed. Institutional change is
likely to be more rapid than in his generation; for we seem to have
reached that moment when, as he foresaw, "they who persist in opposing
that mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of
Providence itself than the mere designs of men." The principles upon
which we proceed are doubtless different from those that he commended;
yet his very challenge to their wisdom only gives to his warning a
deeper inspiration for our effort.