(1730-1797)
[Footnote 2: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
[Illustration: Edmund Burke. [TN]]
Edmund Burke, the great British politician, and one of the greatest
political philosophers that ever lived, was born at Dublin, January 1,
1730, as son of a petty attorney. Conformably to the wishes of his
father, he began to study law in London, but found it so little
attractive that, encouraged by eminent men, particularly by Johnson, he
turned to literary pursuits. His first work, "Vindication of Natural
Society" (1756), which at once won him fame, is a keen satire on
Bolingbroke, showing that the attacks of that writer upon revealed
religion might as well be turned against all social and political
institutions. His reputation was still enhanced by the "Philosophical
Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful"
(1757); and at the same time he showed, by publishing "Dodd's Annual
Register," that he was equally gifted for politics. As a preliminary for
practical activity in that domain, he became private secretary of Gerard
Hamilton, the lieutenant-general's assistant for Ireland, but soon found
that his chief's smart mediocrity only wanted to turn to advantage the
secretary's scantily rewarded talent. He returned to London (1764), and
at once entered upon the political career in which he was to play so
eminent a part.
The Grenville ministry was dismissed and replaced by an administration
of rather heterogeneous elements, under Lord Rockingham, not a great
statesman, but combining unblemished character and solid gifts with rank
and wealth. Burke became his private secretary and influential adviser,
being at the same time elected a member for Wendover. Matters then were
in a very critical state: while discontent was fast rising in America
and commerce trembling for its colonial trade, two parties were fiercely
opposed in Parliament. Pitt deemed it treason against the Constitution
and to the colonies to tax America without its consent. Grenville
declared it treason to crown and legislature to abandon that right.
Burke, though in principle more inclining to Pitt, advised a middle
course by redressing the grievances of the colonies, while maintaining
the dignity of the crown. The government proposed (January, 1766) to
repeal Grenville's Stamp Act, but to guard the constitutional rights of
the mother-country by a "Declaratory Act." In the debate on these bills
Burke made his maiden speech, which called forth universal admiration; a
friend wrote to him, "You have made us hear a new eloquence." The bills
passed, but the ministry, mined by both parties, soon afterward was
obliged to resign. Burke summed up its activity in an excellent
pamphlet, "A Short Account of a Late Short Administration," and now
entered into opposition against Lord Chatham's ministry, which he called
"a tessellated pavement without cement." On the other hand, he
victoriously refuted the attacks of the Grenvilles against Rockingham,
in his "Observations on the Present State of the Nation," exhibiting the
emptiness of his opponents' declamations on the declining wealth of the
country, and proving that its resources were fast increasing.
Burke rises still higher in the "Thoughts on the Causes of the Present
Discontents" (1770), a powerful plea for the British Constitution in its
development from 1688, and exhibiting the full maturity of his talent.
He denies that the prevailing discontents are due to some factious
libellers exciting the people, who have no interest in disorder, but are
only roused by the impatience of suffering. The discontents were real,
and their cause was a perversion of the true principles on which the
Constitution rested. As hitherto, business had gone alternately through
the hands of Whigs and Tories, the opposition controlling the
government; but now a court faction had sprung up called "the king's
friends," a double cabinet, acting as irresponsible wire-pullers behind
the scenes. These men deriving, like Janissaries, a kind of freedom from
the very condition of their servitude, were sitting in secondary, but
efficient, departments of office and in the household of the royal
family, so as to occupy the avenues to the throne and to forward or
frustrate the execution of any measure according to their own interests;
they endeavored to separate the crown from the administration, and to
divide the latter within itself. To this cabal it was owing that British
policy was brought into derision in those foreign countries which, a
while ago, trembled at the power of England's arms. Above all, they
tried to pervert the principles of Parliament by raising divisions among
the people, by influencing the elections, by separating representatives
from their constituents, and by undermining the control of the
legislature over the executive. They maintained that all political
connections were in their nature factious; but free commonwealths were
ever made by parties, _i.e._, bodies of men united for promoting by
their joint endeavors the national interest upon great leading
principles in which they were agreed; government by parties was the very
soul of representative institutions; it had raised England to her
present power and protected the liberty of the people; while the cant,
"measures not men," had always been the pretext for getting loose from
every honorable engagement.
Burke finds the remedy in restoring the Constitution to its original
principles; all patriots must form a firm combination against the cabal;
a just connection between representatives and constituents must be
re-established; Parliament ought not to meddle with the privileges of
the executive, but exercise real control upon the acting powers of the
state, and if necessary, not be afraid to resort to impeachment, "that
great guardian of the purity of the Constitution;" finally, if all means
fail, there must be an interposition of the body of the people
itself--"an unpleasant remedy but legal, when it is evident that nothing
else can hold the Constitution to its true principles."
He at the same time displayed a prominent activity in Parliament, where
soon all internal questions gave way to the great contest with America.
In 1771 he had accepted the place of an agent for New York, had become
intimately acquainted with Franklin, and won a deep insight into
American affairs. Of the six duties imposed by Townshend's Revenue Act
(1767) five had been repealed, the tea duty alone remained. December 18,
1773, the cargo of an East Indian tea-ship was thrown into the sea at
Boston, and the first armed conflict ensued. Court and government were
resolved to put down this rebellion; Burke, on the contrary, supported
in his great speech "On American Taxation" Rose-Fuller's motion (April,
1774) for suppressing the last duty. England had no right to tax the
colonies, nor had she ever pretended to do so before Grenville's Stamp
Act; that, as well as the most important duties of the Revenue Act, had
been repealed; the tea-duty was slight and it produced short of nothing,
the cost of collection devouring it to the bone; for the Americans
refused to buy imported tea, and they were right to do so; having
inherited English principles they resisted for the same reason for which
Hampden had resisted the payment of the trifling ship-money, because the
principle on which it was demanded would have made him a slave. It would
be a signal folly to maintain the shadow of a duty and to risk the loss
of an empire merely because the preamble of the Revenue Act said it was
expedient that a revenue should be raised in his majesty's dominions in
America.
[Illustration: Burke, Johnson and their friends.]
The blindness of the majority turned away from those wise counsels.
Parliament was dissolved. Burke, elected for Bristol, forthwith
introduced thirteen resolutions, which he defended in his celebrated
speech for "Conciliation with the Colonies" (March 22, 1775). As he had
told his constituents his aim was to reconcile British superiority with
American liberty, he proposed to remove the ground of the difference in
order to restore the former confidence of the colonies in the
mother-country. "Fighting is not the best way of gaining a people of
more than two millions, in which the fierce spirit of liberty is
probably stronger than in any other country, and that liberty is founded
upon English principles." Now, a fundamental point of our Constitution
is that the people have power of "granting their own money;" the
colonial assemblies have uncontested competence to raise taxes, and have
frequently granted them for imperial purposes; sometimes so liberally
that, in 1743, the Commons resolved to reimburse the expense; no method
for procuring a representation in Parliament of the colonies has
hitherto been advised, consequently no revenue by imposition has been
raised before the Stamp Act; we therefore ought to acknowledge that only
the general assemblies can grant "aids to his Majesty." To enforce the
reverse principle is not only unjust, but impossible, "when three
thousand miles of ocean lie between us and them. Seas roll and months
pass between the order and the execution. We may impoverish the
colonies and cripple our own most important trade, but it is
preposterous to make them unserviceable, in order to keep them
obedient." The motions were rejected; three years afterward, when it was
too late, Burke's opponent, Lord North, proposed a similar plan.
In 1780 Burke introduced his bill for "Economical reform in support of
several petitions to correct the gross abuses in the management of
public expenditure before laying fresh burdens upon the people." His
speech derives a particular interest from its defining the difference of
timely and gradual reformation from hasty and harsh, making clear work.
The former was an amicable and temperate arrangement with a friend in
power, leaving room for growth; the latter was imposing terms upon a
conquered enemy under a state of inflammation. In 1782 Lord North was
obliged to resign, and Rockingham became again premier, Burke
paymaster-general of the army. He now carried his economical reform,
abolishing sinecures, suppressing useless expenses, and cutting down
salaries, among which was his own.
After Rockingham's death and the overthrow of the short Shelburne
administration, Burke turned his activity to the misgovernment of India;
his speeches in support of Fox's East-India Bill (December 1, 1783), and
on the Nabob of Arcot's debts (February 15, 1783), show that he had
thoroughly mastered that intricate subject. He violently denounced the
oppression exercised by the company, a prelude to his campaign against
Warren Hastings, which he continued for eight years. His speech
justifying the impeachment of the governor-general, said Erskine,
"irresistibly carried away its brilliant audience by a superhuman
eloquence."
Burke in this contest was, as always, animated by the purest motives,
but his passion went too far in comparing Hastings to Verres, and did
not sufficiently allow for the difficult circumstances in which his
adversary was placed. Without the latter's unscrupulous energy, India
would have been lost. Hastings finally was acquitted, but Burke's
attacks nevertheless had the effect of uncovering and redressing the
prevailing abuses.
The last period of Burke's life is filled up by his great struggle
against the French revolution. Already in 1769 he had prophetically
asserted that the derangement of French finances must infallibly lead to
a violent convulsion, the influence of which upon France and even Europe
could be scarcely divined; now he directed the attention of the House
(February 4, 1790) to the dangers of the revolution, by which the French
had shown themselves "the ablest architects of ruin," pulling down all
their domestic institutions, making "a digest of anarchy" called "the
rights of men," and establishing a ferocious, tyrannical, and
atheistical democracy. It might be said that they had done service to
England, a rival, by reducing their country to impotence and expunging
it out of the system of Europe; but, by the vicinity of the two
countries, their present distemper might prove more contagious than the
gilded tyranny of Louis XIV. had been, and "much as it would afflict
him, he would abandon his best friends and join with his worst enemies
to oppose all violent exertions of the spirit of innovation, which by
tearing to pieces the contexture of the state prevented all real
reformation;" the last passage alluding to the apology of Fox, hitherto
his closest friend, for French proceedings.
These ideas Burke more fully developed in his famous "Reflections on the
Revolution in France" (1790); liberals maintained that by this work he
had deserted the cause of liberty; conservatives asserted that he had
become the stoutest champion of order combined with rational freedom. It
must be acknowledged that Burke erred by judging the state of France
before the revolution too favorably; if he justly appreciated the
pernicious influence of Rousseau, "that great professor and hero of
vanity," he ought to have discerned that a nation, the higher classes of
which were undermined by materialism and unbelief, while the masses
lived in deep misery, was incapable of a temperate reform; the follies
and terrors of the revolution were the children of the sins of the
"ancien regime." But how amply has history confirmed his judgment on the
revolution itself! While Fox admired the constitution of 1791 as "the
most astonishing and glorious edifice of liberty that ever was erected,"
Burke foresaid that this constitutional king would be torn from his
throne by the mob, that the wildest anarchy would put France in
confusion, and that after its exhaustion an unlimited military despotism
would be established.
This work, which produced a European sensation, receives its true light
by Burke's "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" (1791). His former
friends having sided with Fox, he refuted the reproach of having
abandoned his principles by an elaborate comparison of the English
revolution of 1688 with that of France. His later writings, among which
the "Thoughts on French Affairs" (1791) and "Thoughts on a Regicide
Peace" (1796) are the principal, were directed against the foreign
influence of the revolutionary system, "France being no more a state but
a faction, which must be destroyed or will destroy Europe." Here again
Burke was wrong; if France was a revolutionary crater, the safest way
was to let it burn out in itself, while the insane aggression of
continental powers only confirmed the reign of terror. Burke would go to
war for the idea of prescriptive right; Pitt declined to fight for the
French monarchy, and would make war only for the defence of English
interests.
Although Burke had the satisfaction of gaining the majority for his
views, he retired from Parliament in 1794; a pension which he obtained
he defended in the "Letter to a Noble Lord," a dignified plea, "pro
domo." One of his last works was "Thoughts and Details on Scarcity"
(1795). In a time when political economy was still in a state of
infancy, he held the most enlightened opinions on all questions relating
to it; his doctrines on prices, wages, rent, etc., are still worth
reading. Above all, he opposes indiscreet government tampering with the
trade of provisions. "Once habituated to get cheap bread, the people
will never be satisfied to get it otherwise, and on the first scarcity
they will turn and bite the hand that fed them."
Burke died July 8, 1797. His was a character of unblemished purity,
manly uprightness, and perfect disinterestedness. He was a conservative
of the truest and best kind, but in his later years went too far in
supporting existing institutions merely because they existed. Lacking
practical accommodation to circumstances, he would probably not have
been a great minister; neither was he a consummate parliamentary
tactician and debater, nevertheless he stands in the first ranks of
statesmen and orators. Lord Brougham goes too far in calling his
speeches spoken dissertations; they were carefully prepared set
speeches. In them, as in his writings, we admire the most varied
information, philosophical acuteness, penetrating sagacity, curious
felicity of expression, and an eloquence embracing the full range and
depth of the subject. Fox avowed that he had learned more from Burke
than from all other men and authors, and for the same reason his works
will remain a mine of political wisdom. The only drawback is that in his
eagerness he sometimes overstated his case, and, embittered by the
struggles of his later years, occasionally condescended to expressions
bordering upon scurrility.
[Signature of the author.]