it as a writer, as a man, and as an Englishman, he finds matter not only
of consolation, but of pride. He proposed to convey to a foreign people,
not his own ideas, but the prevalent opinions and sentiments of a
nation, renowned for wisdom, and celebrated in all ages for a
well-understood and well-regulated love of freedom. This was the avowed
purpose of the far greater part of his work. As that work has not been
ill received, and as his critics will not only admit, but contend, that
this reception could not be owing to any excellence in the composition
capable of perverting the public judgment, it is clear that he is not
disavowed by the nation whose sentiments he had undertaken to describe.
His representation is authenticated by the verdict of his country. Had
his piece, as a work of skill, been thought worthy of commendation, some
doubt might have been entertained of the cause of his success. But the
matter stands exactly as he wishes it. He is more happy to have his
fidelity in representation recognized by the body of the people than if
he were to be ranked in point of ability (and higher he could not be
ranked) with those whose critical censure he has had the misfortune to
incur.
It is not from this part of their decision which the author wishes an
appeal. There are things which touch him more nearly. To abandon them
would argue, not diffidence in his abilities, but treachery to his
cause. Had his work been recognized as a pattern for dexterous argument
and powerful eloquence, yet, if it tended to establish maxims or to
inspire sentiments adverse to the wise and free Constitution of this
kingdom, he would only have cause to lament that it possessed qualities
fitted to perpetuate the memory of his offence. Oblivion would be the
only means of his escaping the reproaches of posterity. But, after
receiving the common allowance due to the common weakness of man, he
wishes to owe no part of the indulgence of the world to its
forgetfulness. He is at issue with the party before the present, and,
if ever he can reach it, before the coming generation.
The author, several months previous to his publication, well knew that
two gentlemen, both of them possessed of the most distinguished
abilities, and of a most decisive authority in the party, had differed
with him in one of the most material points relative to the French
Revolution: that is, in their opinion of the behavior of the French
soldiery, and its revolt from its officers. At the time of their public
declaration on this subject, he did not imagine the opinion of these two
gentlemen had extended a great way beyond themselves. He was, however,
well aware of the probability that persons of their just credit and
influence would at length dispose the greater number to an agreement
with their sentiments, and perhaps might induce the whole body to a
tacit acquiescence in their declarations, under a natural and not always
an improper dislike of showing a difference with those who lead their
party. I will not deny that in general this conduct in parties is
defensible; but within what limits the practice is to be circumscribed,
and with what exceptions the doctrine which supports it is to be
received, it is not my present purpose to define. The present question
has nothing to do with their motives; it only regards the public
expression of their sentiments.
The author is compelled, however reluctantly, to receive the sentence
pronounced upon him in the House of Commons as that of the party. It
proceeded from the mouth of him who must be regarded as its authentic
organ. In a discussion which continued for two days, no one gentleman of
the opposition interposed a negative, or even a doubt, in favor of him
or his opinions. If an idea consonant to the doctrine of his book, or
favorable to his conduct, lurks in the minds of any persons in that
description, it is to be considered only as a peculiarity which they
indulge to their own private liberty of thinking. The author cannot
reckon upon it. It has nothing to do with them as members of a party. In
their public capacity, in everything that meets the public ear or public
eye, the body must be considered as unanimous.
They must have been animated with a very warm zeal against those
opinions, because they were under no _necessity_ of acting as they did,
from any just cause of apprehension that the errors of this writer
should be taken for theirs. They might disapprove; it was not necessary
they should _disavow_ him, as they have done in the whole and in all the
parts of his book; because neither in the whole nor in any of the parts
were they directly, or by any implication, involved. The author was
known, indeed, to have been warmly, strenuously, and affectionately,
against all allurements of ambition, and all possibility of alienation
from pride or personal pique or peevish jealousy, attached to the Whig
party. With one of them he has had a long friendship, which he must ever
remember with a melancholy pleasure. To the great, real, and amiable
virtues, and to the unequalled abilities of that gentleman, he shall
always join with his country in paying a just tribute of applause. There
are others in that party for whom, without any shade of sorrow, he bears
as high a degree of love as can enter into the human heart, and as much
veneration as ought to be paid to human creatures; because he firmly
believes that they are endowed with as many and as great virtues as the
nature of man is capable of producing, joined to great clearness of
intellect, to a just judgment, to a wonderful temper, and to true
wisdom. His sentiments with regard to them can never vary, without
subjecting him to the just indignation of mankind, who are bound, and
are generally disposed, to look up with reverence to the best patterns
of their species, and such as give a dignity to the nature of which we
all participate. For the whole of the party he has high respect. Upon a
view, indeed, of the composition of all parties, he finds great
satisfaction. It is, that, in leaving the service of his country, he
leaves Parliament without all comparison richer in abilities than he
found it. Very solid and very brilliant talents distinguish the
ministerial benches. The opposite rows are a sort of seminary of genius,
and have brought forth such and so great talents as never before
(amongst us at least) have appeared together. If their owners are
disposed to serve their country, (he trusts they are,) they are in a
condition to render it services of the highest importance. If, through
mistake or passion, they are led to contribute to its ruin, we shall at
least have a consolation denied to the ruined country that adjoins us:
we shall not be destroyed by men of mean or secondary capacities.
All these considerations of party attachment, of personal regard, and of
personal admiration rendered the author of the Reflections extremely
cautious, lest the slightest suspicion should arise of his having
undertaken to express the sentiments even of a single man of that
description. His words at the outset of his Reflections are these:--
"In the first letter I had the honor to write to you, and which at
length I send, I wrote neither _for_ nor _from_ any description of men;
nor shall I in this. My errors, if any, are _my own_. My reputation
_alone_ is to answer for them." In another place he says, (p. 126,[7])
"I have _no man's_ proxy. I speak _only_ from _myself_, when I disclaim,
as I do with all possible earnestness, all communion with the actors in
that triumph, or with the admirers of it. When I assert anything else,
as concerning the people of England, I speak from observation, _not from
authority_."
To say, then, that the book did not contain the sentiments of their
party is not to contradict the author or to clear themselves. If the
party had denied his doctrines to be the current opinions of the
majority in the nation, they would have put the question on its true
issue. There, I hope and believe, his censurers will find, on the trial,
that the author is as faithful a representative of the general sentiment
of the people of England, as any person amongst them can be of the ideas
of his own party.
The French Revolution can have no connection with the objects of any
parties in England formed before the period of that event, unless they
choose to imitate any of its acts, or to consolidate any principles of
that Revolution with their own opinions. The French Revolution is no
part of their original contract. The matter, standing by itself, is an
open subject of political discussion, like all the other revolutions
(and there are many) which have been attempted or accomplished in our
age. But if any considerable number of British subjects, taking a
factious interest in the proceedings of France, begin publicly to
incorporate themselves for the subversion of nothing short of the
_whole_ Constitution of this kingdom,--to incorporate themselves for the
utter overthrow of the body of its laws, civil and ecclesiastical, and
with them of the whole system of its manners, in favor of the new
Constitution and of the modern usages of the French nation,--I think no
party principle could bind the author not to express his sentiments
strongly against such a faction. On the contrary, he was perhaps bound
to mark his dissent, when the leaders of the party were daily going out
of their way to make public declarations in Parliament, which,
notwithstanding the purity of their intentions, had a tendency to
encourage ill-designing men in their practices against our Constitution.
The members of this faction leave no doubt of the nature and the extent
of the mischief they mean to produce. They declare it openly and
decisively. Their intentions are not left equivocal. They are put out of
all dispute by the thanks which, formally and as it were officially,
they issue, in order to recommend and to promote the circulation of the
most atrocious and treasonable libels against all the hitherto cherished
objects of the love and veneration of this people. Is it contrary to the
duty of a good subject to reprobate such proceedings? Is it alien to the
office of a good member of Parliament, when such practices increase, and
when the audacity of the conspirators grows with their impunity, to
point out in his place their evil tendency to the happy Constitution
which he is chosen to guard? Is it wrong, in any sense, to render the
people of England sensible how much they must suffer, if, unfortunately,
such a wicked faction should become possessed in this country of the
same power which their allies in the very next to us have so
perfidiously usurped and so outrageously abused? Is it inhuman to
prevent, if possible, the spilling _their_ blood, or imprudent to guard
against the effusion of _our own?_ Is it contrary to any of the honest
principles of party, or repugnant to any of the known duties of
friendship, for any senator respectfully and amicably to caution his
brother members against countenancing, by inconsiderate expressions, a
sort of proceeding which it is impossible they should deliberately
approve?
He had undertaken to demonstrate, by arguments which he thought could
not be refuted, and by documents which he was sure could not be denied,
that no comparison was to be made between the British government and the
French usurpation.--That they who endeavored madly to compare them were
by no means making the comparison of one good system with another good
system, which varied only in local and circumstantial differences; much
less that they were holding out to us a superior pattern of legal
liberty, which we might substitute in the place of our old, and, as they
describe it, superannuated Constitution. He meant to demonstrate that
the French scheme was not a comparative good, but a positive evil.--That
the question did not at all turn, as it had been stated, on a parallel
between a monarchy and a republic. He denied that the present scheme of
things in France did at all deserve the respectable name of a republic:
he had therefore no comparison between monarchies and republics to
make.--That what was done in France was a wild attempt to methodize
anarchy, to perpetuate and fix disorder. That it was a foul, impious,
monstrous thing, wholly out of the course of moral Nature. He undertook
to prove that it was generated in treachery, fraud, falsehood,
hypocrisy, and unprovoked murder.--He offered to make out that those who
have led in that business had conducted themselves with the utmost
perfidy to their colleagues in function, and with the most flagrant
perjury both towards their king and their constituents: to the one of
whom the Assembly had sworn fealty; and to the other, when under no sort
of violence or constraint, they had sworn a full obedience to
instructions.--That, by the terror of assassination, they had driven
away a very great number of the members, so as to produce a false
appearance of a majority.--That this fictitious majority had fabricated
a Constitution, which, as now it stands, is a tyranny far beyond any
example that can be found in the civilized European world of our age;
that therefore the lovers of it must be lovers, not of liberty, but, if
they really understand its nature, of the lowest and basest of all
servitude.
He proposed to prove that the present state of things in France is not a
transient evil, productive, as some have too favorably represented it,
of a lasting good; but that the present evil is only the means of
producing future and (if that were possible) worse evils.--That it is
not an undigested, imperfect, and crude scheme of liberty, which may
gradually be mellowed and ripened into an orderly and social freedom;
but that it is so fundamentally wrong as to be utterly incapable of
correcting itself by any length of time, or of being formed into any
mode of polity of which a member of the House of Commons could publicly
declare his approbation.
If it had been permitted to Mr. Burke, he would have shown distinctly,
and in detail, that what the Assembly calling itself National had held
out as a large and liberal toleration is in reality a cruel and
insidious religious persecution, infinitely more bitter than any which
had been heard of within this century.--That it had a feature in it
worse than the old persecutions.--That the old persecutors acted, or
pretended to act, from zeal towards some system of piety and virtue:
they gave strong preferences to their own; and if they drove people from
one religion, they provided for them another, in which men might take
refuge and expect consolation.--That their new persecution is not
against a variety in conscience, but against all conscience. That it
professes contempt towards its object; and whilst it treats all religion
with scorn, is not so much as neutral about the modes: it unites the
opposite evils of intolerance and of indifference.
He could have proved that it is so far from rejecting tests, (as
unaccountably had been asserted,) that the Assembly had imposed tests of
a peculiar hardship, arising from a cruel and premeditated pecuniary
fraud: tests against old principles, sanctioned by the laws, and binding
upon the conscience.--That these tests were not imposed as titles to
some new honor or some new benefit, but to enable men to hold a poor
compensation for their legal estates, of which they had been unjustly
deprived; and as they had before been reduced from affluence to
indigence, so, on refusal to swear against their conscience, they are
now driven from indigence to famine, and treated with every possible
degree of outrage, insult, and inhumanity.--That these tests, which
their imposers well knew would not be taken, were intended for the very
purpose of cheating their miserable victims out of the compensation
which the tyrannic impostors of the Assembly had previously and
purposely rendered the public unable to pay. That thus their ultimate
violence arose from their original fraud.
He would have shown that the universal peace and concord amongst
nations, which these common enemies to mankind had held out with the
same fraudulent ends and pretences with which they had uniformly
conducted every part of their proceeding, was a coarse and clumsy
deception, unworthy to be proposed as an example, by an informed and
sagacious British senator, to any other country.--That, far from peace
and good-will to men, they meditated war against all other governments,
and proposed systematically to excite in them all the very worst kind of
seditions, in order to lead to their common destruction.--That they had
discovered, in the few instances in which they have hitherto had the
power of discovering it, (as at Avignon and in the Comtat, at Cavaillon
and at Carpentras,) in what a savage manner they mean to conduct the
seditions and wars they have planned against their neighbors, for the
sake of putting themselves at the head of a confederation of republics
as wild and as mischievous as their own. He would have shown in what
manner that wicked scheme was carried on in those places, without being
directly either owned or disclaimed, in hopes that the undone people
should at length be obliged to fly to their tyrannic protection, as some
sort of refuge from their barbarous and treacherous hostility. He would
have shown from those examples that neither this nor any other society
could be in safety as long as such a public enemy was in a condition to
continue directly or indirectly such practices against its peace.--That
Great Britain was a principal object of their machinations; and that
they had begun by establishing correspondences, communications, and a
sort of federal union with the factious here.--That no practical
enjoyment of a thing so imperfect and precarious as human happiness must
be, even under the very best of governments, could be a security for the
existence of these governments, during the prevalence of the principles
of France, propagated from that grand school of every disorder and every
vice.
He was prepared to show the madness of their declaration of the
pretended rights of man,--the childish, futility of some of their
maxims, the gross and stupid absurdity and the palpable falsity of
others, and the mischievous tendency of all such declarations to the
well-being of men and of citizens and to the safety and prosperity of
every just commonwealth. He was prepared to show, that, in their
conduct, the Assembly had directly violated not only every sound
principle of government, but every one, without exception, of their own
false or futile maxims, and indeed every rule they had pretended to lay
down for their own direction.
In a word, he was ready to show that those who could, after such a full
and fair exposure, continue to countenance the French insanity were not
mistaken politicians, but bad men; but he thought that in this case, as
in many others, ignorance had been the cause of admiration.
These are strong assertions. They required strong proofs. The member who
laid down these positions was and is ready to give, in his place, to
each position decisive evidence, correspondent to the nature and quality
of the several allegations.
In order to judge on the propriety of the interruption given to Mr.
Burke, in his speech in the committee of the Quebec Bill, it is
necessary to inquire, First, whether, on general principles, he ought to
have been suffered to prove his allegations? Secondly, whether the time
he had chosen was so very unseasonable as to make his exercise of a
parliamentary right productive of ill effects on his friends or his
country? Thirdly, whether the opinions delivered in his book, and which
he had begun to expatiate upon that day, were in contradiction to his
former principles, and inconsistent with the general tenor of his public
conduct?
They who have made eloquent panegyrics on the French Revolution, and who
think a free discussion so very advantageous in every case and under
every circumstance, ought not, in my opinion, to have prevented their
eulogies from being tried on the test of facts. If their panegyric had
been answered with an invective, (bating the difference in point of
eloquence,) the one would have been as good as the other: that is, they
would both of them have been good for nothing. The panegyric and the
satire ought to be suffered to go to trial; and that which shrinks from
if must be contented to stand, at best, as a mere declamation.
I do not think Mr. Burke was wrong in the course he took. That which
seemed to be recommended to him by Mr. Pitt was rather to extol the
English Constitution than to attack the French. I do not determine what
would be best for Mr. Pitt to do in his situation. I do not deny that
_he_ may have good reasons for his reserve. Perhaps they might have been
as good for a similar reserve on the part of Mr. Fox, if his zeal had
suffered him to listen to them. But there were no motives of ministerial
prudence, or of that prudence which ought to guide a man perhaps on the
eve of being minister, to restrain the author of the Reflections. He is
in no office under the crown; he is not the organ of any party.
The excellencies of the British Constitution had already exercised and
exhausted the talents of the best thinkers and the most eloquent writers
and speakers that the world ever saw. But in the present case a system
declared to be far better, and which certainly is much newer, (to
restless and unstable minds no small recommendation,) was held out to
the admiration of the good people of England. In that case it was surely
proper for those who had far other thoughts of the French Constitution
to scrutinize that plan which has been recommended to our imitation by
active and zealous factions at home and abroad. Our complexion is such,
that we are palled with enjoyment, and stimulated with hope,--that we
become less sensible to a long-possessed benefit from the very
circumstance that it is become habitual. Specious, untried, ambiguous
prospects of new advantage recommend themselves to the spirit of
adventure which more or less prevails in every mind. From this temper,
men and factions, and nations too, have sacrificed the good of which
they had been in assured possession, in favor of wild and irrational
expectations. What should hinder Mr. Burke, if he thought this temper
likely at one time or other to prevail in our country, from exposing to
a multitude eager to game the false calculations of this lottery of
fraud?
I allow, as I ought to do, for the effusions which come from a _general_
zeal for liberty. This is to be indulged, and even to be encouraged, as
long as _the question is general_. An orator, above all men, ought to be
allowed a full and free use of the praise of liberty. A commonplace in
favor of slavery and tyranny, delivered to a popular assembly, would
indeed be a bold defiance to all the principles of rhetoric. But in a
question whether any particular Constitution is or is not a plan of
rational liberty, this kind of rhetorical flourish in favor of freedom
in general is surely a little out of its place. It is virtually a
begging of the question. It is a song of triumph before the battle.
"But Mr. Fox does not make the panegyric of the new Constitution; it is
the destruction only of the absolute monarchy he commends." When that
nameless thing which has been lately set up in France was described as
"the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty which had been
erected on the foundation of human integrity in any time or country," it
might at first have led the hearer into an opinion that the construction
of the new fabric was an object of admiration, as well as the demolition
of the old. Mr. Fox, however, has explained himself; and it would be too
like that captious and cavilling spirit which I so perfectly detest, if
I were to pin down the language of an eloquent and ardent mind to the
punctilious exactness of a pleader. Then Mr. Fox did not mean to applaud
that monstrous thing which, by the courtesy of France, they call a
Constitution. I easily believe it. Far from meriting the praises of a
great genius like Mr. Fox, it cannot be approved by any man of common
sense or common information. He cannot admire the change of one piece of
barbarism for another, and a worse. He cannot rejoice at the destruction
of a monarchy, mitigated by manners, respectful to laws and usages, and
attentive, perhaps but too attentive, to public opinion, in favor of the
tyranny of a licentious, ferocious, and savage multitude, without laws,
manners, or morals, and which, so far from respecting the general sense
of mankind, insolently endeavors to alter all the principles and
opinions which have hitherto guided and contained the world, and to
force them into a conformity to their views and actions. His mind is
made to better things.