of liberty which have given energy to his youth, and in spite of his
censors will afford repose and consolation to his declining age, those
who have thought proper in Parliament to declare against his book ought
to have produced something in it which directly or indirectly militates
with any rational plan of free government. It is something
extraordinary, that they whose memories have so well served them with
regard to light and ludicrous expressions, which years had consigned to
oblivion, should not have been able to quote a single passage in a piece
so lately published, which contradicts anything he has formerly ever
said in a style either ludicrous or serious. They quote his former
speeches and his former votes, but not one syllable from the book. It is
only by a collation of the one with the other that the alleged
inconsistency can be established. But as they are unable to cite any
such contradictory passage, so neither can they show anything in the
general tendency and spirit of the whole work unfavorable to a rational
and generous spirit of liberty; unless a warm opposition to the spirit
of levelling, to the spirit of impiety, to the spirit of proscription,
plunder, murder, and cannibalism, be adverse to the true principles of
freedom.
The author of that book is supposed to have passed from extreme to
extreme; but he has always kept himself in a medium. This charge is not
so wonderful. It is in the nature of things, that they who are in the
centre of a circle should appear directly opposed to those who view them
from any part of the circumference. In that middle point, however, he
will still remain, though he may hear people who themselves run beyond
Aurora and the Ganges cry out that he is at the extremity of the West.
In the same debate Mr. Burke was represented by Mr. Fox as arguing in a
manner which implied that the British Constitution could not be
defended, but by abusing all republics ancient and modern. He said
nothing to give the least ground for such a censure. He never abused all
republics. He has never professed himself a friend or an enemy to
republics or to monarchies in the abstract. He thought that the
circumstances and habits of every country, which it is always perilous
and productive of the greatest calamities to force, are to decide upon
the form of its government. There is nothing in his nature, his temper,
or his faculties which should make him an enemy to any republic, modern
or ancient. Far from it. He has studied the form and spirit of republics
very early in life; he has studied them with great attention, and with a
mind undisturbed by affection or prejudice. He is, indeed, convinced
that the science of government would be poorly cultivated without that
study. But the result in his mind from that investigation has been and
is, that neither England nor France, without infinite detriment to them,
as well in the event as in the experiment, could be brought into a
republican form; but that everything republican which can be introduced
with safety into either of them must be built upon a monarchy,--built
upon a real, not a nominal monarchy, _as its essential basis_; that all
such institutions, whether aristocratic or democratic, must originate
from their crown, and in all their proceedings must refer to it; that by
the energy of that mainspring alone those republican parts must be set
in action, and from thence must derive their whole legal effect, (as
amongst us they actually do,) or the whole will fall into confusion.
These republican members have no other point but the crown in which they
can possibly unite.
This is the opinion expressed in Mr. Burke's book. He has never varied
in that opinion since he came to years of discretion. But surely, if at
any time of his life he had entertained other notions, (which, however,
he has never held or professed to hold,) the horrible calamities brought
upon a great people by the wild attempt to force their country into a
republic might be more than sufficient to undeceive his understanding,
and to free it forever from such destructive fancies. He is certain that
many, even in France, have been made sick of their theories by their
very success in realizing them.
To fortify the imputation of a desertion from his principles, his
constant attempts to reform abuses have been brought forward. It is
true, it has been the business of his strength to reform abuses in
government, and his last feeble efforts are employed in a struggle
against them. Politically he has lived in that element; politically he
will die in it. Before he departs, I will admit for him that he deserves
to have all his titles of merit brought forth, as they have been, for
grounds of condemnation, if one word justifying or supporting abuses of
any sort is to be found in that book which has kindled so much
indignation in the mind of a great man. On the contrary, it spares no
existing abuse. Its very purpose is to make war with abuses,--not,
indeed, to make war with the dead, but with those which live, and
flourish, and reign.
The _purpose_ for which the abuses of government are brought into view
forms a very material consideration in the mode of treating them. The
complaints of a friend are things very different from the invectives of
an enemy. The charge of abuses on the late monarchy of France was not
intended to lead to its reformation, but to justify its destruction.
They who have raked into all history for the faults of kings, and who
have aggravated every fault they have found, have acted consistently,
because they acted as enemies. No man can be a friend to a tempered
monarchy who bears a decided hatred to monarchy itself. He, who, at the
present time, is favorable or even fair to that system, must act towards
it as towards a friend with frailties who is under the prosecution of
implacable foes. I think it a duty, in that case, not to inflame the
public mind against the obnoxious person by any exaggeration of his
faults. It is our duty rather to palliate his errors and defects, or to
cast them into the shade, and industriously to bring forward any good
qualities that he may happen to possess. But when the man is to be
amended, and by amendment to be preserved, then the line of duty takes
another direction. When his safety is effectually provided for, it then
becomes the office of a friend to urge his faults and vices with all the
energy of enlightened affection, to paint them in their most vivid
colors, and to bring the moral patient to a better habit. Thus I think
with regard to individuals; thus I think with regard to ancient and
respected governments and orders of men. A spirit of reformation is
never more consistent with itself than when it refuses to be rendered
the means of destruction.
I suppose that enough is said upon these heads of accusation. One more I
had nearly forgotten, but I shall soon dispatch it. The author of the
Reflections, in the opening of the last Parliament, entered on the
journals of the House of Commons a motion for a remonstrance to the
crown, which is substantially a defence of the preceding Parliament,
that had been dissolved under displeasure. It is a defence of Mr. Fox.
It is a defence of the Whigs. By what connection of argument, by what
association of ideas, this apology for Mr. Fox and his party is by him
and them brought to criminate his and their apologist, I cannot easily
divine. It is true that Mr. Burke received no previous encouragement
from Mr. Fox, nor any the least countenance or support, at the time when
the motion was made, from him or from any gentleman of the party,--one
only excepted, from whose friendship, on that and on other occasions, he
derives an honor to which he must be dull indeed to be insensible.[11]
If that remonstrance, therefore, was a false or feeble defence of the
measures of the party, they were in no wise affected by it. It stands on
the journals. This secures to it a permanence which the author cannot
expect to any other work of his. Let it speak for itself to the present
age and to all posterity. The party had no concern in it; and it can
never be quoted against them. But in the late debate it was produced,
not to clear the party from an improper defence in which they had no
share, but for the kind purpose of insinuating an inconsistency between
the principles of Mr. Burke's defence of the dissolved Parliament and
those on which he proceeded in his late Reflections on France.
It requires great ingenuity to make out such a parallel between the two
cases as to found a charge of inconsistency in the principles assumed in
arguing the one and the other. What relation had Mr. Fox's India Bill to
the Constitution of France? What relation had that Constitution to the
question of right in an House of Commons to give or to withhold its
confidence from ministers, and to state that opinion to the crown? What
had this discussion to do with Mr. Burke's idea in 1784 of the ill
consequences which must in the end arise to the crown from setting up
the commons at large as an opposite interest to the commons in
Parliament? What has this discussion to do with a recorded warning to
the people of their rashly forming a precipitate judgment against their
representatives? What had Mr. Burke's opinion of the danger of
introducing new theoretic language, unknown to the records of the
kingdom, and calculated to excite vexatious questions, into a
Parliamentary proceeding, to do with the French Assembly, which defies
all precedent, and places its whole glory in realizing what had been
thought the most visionary theories? What had this in common with the
abolition of the French monarchy, or with the principles upon which the
English Revolution was justified,--a Revolution in which Parliament, in
all its acts and all its declarations, religiously adheres to "the form
of sound words," without excluding from private discussions such terms
of art as may serve to conduct an inquiry for which none but private
persons are responsible? These were the topics of Mr. Burke's proposed
remonstrance; all of which topics suppose the existence and mutual
relation of our three estates,--as well as the relation of the East
India Company to the crown, to Parliament, and to the peculiar laws,
rights, and usages of the people of Hindostan. What reference, I say,
had these topics to the Constitution of France, in which there is no
king, no lords, no commons, no India Company to injure or support, no
Indian empire to govern or oppress? What relation had all or any of
these, or any question which could arise between the prerogatives of the
crown and the privileges of Parliament, with the censure of those
factious persons in Great Britain whom Mr. Burke states to be engaged,
not in favor of privilege against prerogative, or of prerogative against
privilege, but in an open attempt against our crown and our Parliament,
against our Constitution in Church and State, against all the parts and
orders which compose the one and the other?
No persons were more fiercely active against Mr. Fox, and against the
measures of the House of Commons dissolved in 1784, which Mr. Burke
defends in that remonstrance, than several of those revolution-makers
whom Mr. Burke condemns alike in his remonstrance and in his book. These
revolutionists, indeed, may be well thought to vary in their conduct. He
is, however, far from accusing them, in this variation, of the smallest
degree of inconsistency. He is persuaded that they are totally
indifferent at which end they begin the demolition of the Constitution.
Some are for commencing their operations with the destruction of the
civil powers, in order the better to pull down the ecclesiastical,--some
wish to begin with the ecclesiastical, in order to facilitate the ruin
of the civil; some would destroy the House of Commons through the crown,
some the crown through the House of Commons, and some would overturn
both the one and the other through what they call the people. But I
believe that this injured writer will think it not at all inconsistent
with his present duty or with his former life strenuously to oppose all
the various partisans of destruction, let them begin where or when or
how they will. No man would set his face more determinedly against those
who should attempt to deprive them, or any description of men, of the
rights they possess. No man would be more steady in preventing them from
abusing those rights to the destruction of that happy order under which
they enjoy them. As to their title to anything further, it ought to be
grounded on the proof they give of the safety with which power may be
trusted in their hands. When they attempt without disguise, not to win
it from our affections, but to force it from our fears, they show, in
the character of their means of obtaining it, the use they would make of
their dominion. That writer is too well read in men not to know how
often the desire and design of a tyrannic domination lurks in the claim
of an extravagant liberty. Perhaps in the beginning it _always_ displays
itself in that manner. No man has ever affected power which he did not
hope from the favor of the existing government in any other mode.
* * * * *
The attacks on the author's consistency relative to France are (however
grievous they may be to his feelings) in a great degree external to him
and to us, and comparatively of little moment to the people of England.
The substantial charge upon him is concerning his doctrines relative to
the Revolution of 1688. Here it is that they who speak in the name of
the party have thought proper to censure him the most loudly and with
the greatest asperity. Here they fasten, and, if they are right in their
fact, with sufficient judgment in their selection. If he be guilty in
this point, he is equally blamable, whether he is consistent or not. If
he endeavors to delude his countrymen by a false representation of the
spirit of that leading event, and of the true nature and tenure of the
government formed in consequence of it, he is deeply responsible, he is
an enemy to the free Constitution of the kingdom. But he is not guilty
in any sense. I maintain that in his Reflections he has stated the
Revolution and the Settlement upon their true principles of legal reason
and constitutional policy.
His authorities are the acts and declarations of Parliament, given in
their proper words. So far as these go, nothing can be added to what he
has quoted. The question is, whether he has understood them rightly. I
think they speak plain enough. But we must now see whether he proceeds
with other authority than his own constructions, and, if he does, on
what sort of authority he proceeds. In this part, his defence will not
be made by argument, but by wager of law. He takes his compurgators, his
vouchers, his guaranties, along with him. I know that he will not be
satisfied with a justification proceeding on general reasons of policy.
He must be defended on party grounds, too, or his cause is not so
tenable as I wish it to appear. It must be made out for him not only
that in his construction of these public acts and monuments he conforms
himself to the rules of fair, legal, and logical interpretation, but it
must be proved that his construction is in perfect harmony with that of
the ancient Whigs, to whom, against the sentence of the modern, on his
part, I here appeal.
This July it will be twenty-six years[12] since he became connected with
a man whose memory will ever be precious to Englishmen of all parties,
as long as the ideas of honor and virtue, public and private, are
understood and cherished in this nation. That memory will be kept alive
with particular veneration by all rational and honorable Whigs. Mr.
Burke entered into a connection with that party through that man, at an
age far from raw and immature,--at those years when men are all they are
ever likely to become,--when he was in the prime and vigor of his
life,--when the powers of his understanding, according to their
standard, were at the best, his memory exercised, his judgment formed,
and his reading much fresher in the recollection and much readier in the
application than now it is. He was at that time as likely as most men to
know what were Whig and what were Tory principles. He was in a situation
to discern what sort of Whig principles they entertained with whom it
was his wish to form an eternal connection. Foolish he would have been
at that time of life (more foolish than any man who undertakes a public
trust would be thought) to adhere to a cause which he, amongst all those
who were engaged in it, had the least sanguine hopes of as a road to
power.
There are who remember, that, on the removal of the Whigs in the year
1766, he was as free to choose another connection as any man in the
kingdom. To put himself out of the way of the negotiations which were
then carrying on very eagerly and through many channels with the Earl of
Chatham, he went to Ireland very soon after the change of ministry, and
did not return until the meeting of Parliament. He was at that time free
from anything which looked like an engagement. He was further free at
the desire of his friends; for, the very day of his return, the Marquis
of Rockingham wished him to accept an employment under the new system.
He believes he might have had such a situation; but again he cheerfully
took his fate with the party.
It would be a serious imputation upon the prudence of my friend, to have
made even such trivial sacrifices as it was in his power to make for
principles which he did not truly embrace or did not perfectly
understand. In either case the folly would have been great. The question
now is, whether, when he first practically professed Whig principles, he
understood what principles he professed, and whether in his book he has
faithfully expressed them.
When he entered into the Whig party, he did not conceive that they
pretended to any discoveries. They did not affect to be better Whigs
than those were who lived in the days in which principle was put to the
test. Some of the Whigs of those days were then living. They were what
the Whigs had been at the Revolution,--what they had been during the
reign of Queen Anne,--what they had been at the accession of the present
royal family.
What they were at those periods is to be seen. It rarely happens to a
party to have the opportunity of a clear, authentic, recorded
declaration of their political tenets upon the subject of a great
constitutional event like that of the Revolution. The Whigs had that
opportunity,--or to speak more properly, they made it. The impeachment
of Dr. Sacheverell was undertaken by a Whig ministry and a Whig House of
Commons, and carried on before a prevalent and steady majority of Whig
peers. It was carried on for the express purpose of stating the true
grounds and principles of the Revolution,--what the Commons emphatically
called their _foundation_. It was carried on for the purpose of
condemning the principles on which the Revolution was first opposed and
afterwards calumniated, in order, by a juridical sentence of the highest
authority, to confirm and fix Whig principles, as they had operated both
in the resistance to King James and in the subsequent settlement, and to
fix them in the extent and with the limitations with which it was meant
they should be understood by posterity. The ministers and managers for
the Commons were persons who had, many of them, an active share in the
Revolution. Most of them had seen it at an age capable of reflection.
The grand event, and all the discussions which led to it and followed
it, were then alive in the memory and conversation of all men. The
managers for the Commons must be supposed to have spoken on that subject
the prevalent ideas of the leading party in the Commons, and of the Whig
ministry. Undoubtedly they spoke also their own private opinions; and
the private opinions of such men are not without weight. They were not
_umbratiles doctores_, men who had studied a free Constitution only in
its anatomy and upon dead systems. They knew it alive and in action.
In this proceeding the Whig principles, as applied to the Revolution and
Settlement, are to be found, or they are to be found nowhere. I wish the
Whig readers of this Appeal first to turn to Mr. Burke's Reflections,
from page 20 to page 50,[13] and then to attend to the following
extracts from the trial of Dr. Sacheverell. After this, they will
consider two things: first, whether the doctrine in Mr. Burke's
Reflections be consonant to that of the Whigs of that period; and,
secondly, whether they choose to abandon the principles which belonged
to the progenitors of some of them, and to the predecessors of them all,
and to learn new principles of Whiggism, imported from France, and
disseminated in this country from Dissenting pulpits, from Federation
societies, and from the pamphlets, which (as containing the political
creed of those synods) are industriously circulated in all parts of the
two kingdoms. This is their affair, and they will make their option.
These new Whigs hold that the sovereignty, whether exercised by one or
many, did not only originate _from_ the people, (a position not denied
nor worth denying or assenting to,) but that in the people the same
sovereignty constantly and unalienably resides; that the people may
lawfully depose kings, not only for misconduct, but without any
misconduct at all; that they may set up any new fashion of government
for themselves, or continue without any government, at their pleasure;
that the people are essentially their own rule, and their will the
measure of their conduct; that the tenure of magistracy is not a proper
subject of contract, because magistrates have duties, but no rights;
and that, if a contract _de facto_ is made with them in one age,
allowing that it binds at all, it only binds those who are immediately
concerned in it, but does not pass to posterity. These doctrines
concerning _the people_ (a term which they are far from accurately
defining, but by which, from many circumstances, it is plain enough they
mean their own faction, if they should grow, by early arming, by
treachery, or violence, into the prevailing force) tend, in my opinion,
to the utter subversion, not only of all government, in all modes, and
to all stable securities to rational freedom, but to all the rules and
principles of morality itself.
I assert that the ancient Whigs held doctrines totally different from
those I have last mentioned. I assert, that the foundations laid down by
the Commons, on the trial of Dr. Sacheverell, for justifying the
Revolution of 1688, are the very same laid down in Mr. Burke's
Reflections,--that is to say, a breach of the _original contrast_,
implied and expressed in the Constitution of this country, as a scheme
of government fundamentally and inviolably fixed in King, Lords, and
Commons;--that the fundamental subversion of this ancient Constitution,
by one of its parts, having been attempted, and in effect accomplished,
justified the Revolution;--that it was justified _only_ upon the
_necessity_ of the case, as the _only_ means left for the recovery of
that _ancient_ Constitution formed by the _original contract_ of the
British state, as well as for the future preservation of the _same_
government. These are the points to be proved.
A general opening to the charge against Dr. Sacheverell was made by the
attorney-general, Sir John Montague; but as there is nothing in that
opening speech which tends very accurately to settle the principle upon
which the Whigs proceeded in the prosecution, (the plan of the speech
not requiring it,) I proceed to that of Mr. Lechmere, the manager, who
spoke next after him. The following are extracts, given, not in the
exact order in which they stand in the printed trial, but in that which
is thought most fit to bring the ideas of the Whig Commons distinctly
under our view.
* * * * *
_Mr. Lechmere_[14]
"It becomes an _indispensable_ duty upon us, who appear in the name and
on the behalf of all the commons of Great Britain, not only to demand
your Lordships' justice on such a criminal, [Dr. Sacheverell,] _but
clearly and openly to assert our foundations_."