There is much in the oratory of Edmund Burke to suggest the
amplitude of mind and the power and scope of intellectual grasp that
characterized Shakespeare. He surveyed every subject as if standing
on an eminence and taking a view of it in all its relations, however
complex and remote. United with this remarkable comprehensiveness was
also a subtlety of intellect that enabled him to penetrate the most
complicated relations and unravel the most perplexed intricacies. Why?
Whence? For what end? With what results? were the questions that his
mind seemed always to be striving to answer. The special objects to
which he applied himself were the workings of political institutions,
the principles of wise legislation, and the sources of national
security and advancement. _Rerum cognoscere causas_,—to know the
causes of things—in all the multiform relations of organized society,
was the constant end of his striving. More than any other one that
has written in English he was a political philosopher. But he was far
more than that. He had a memory of extraordinary grasp and tenacity;
and this, united with a tireless industry, gave him an affluence of
knowledge that has rarely been equalled. He had the fancy of a poet,
and his imagination surveyed the whole range of human experience for
illustrations with which to enrich the train of his thought.
For the purposes of legislative persuasion many of Burke’s qualities
were a hindrance rather than a help. His course of reasoning was often
too elaborate to be carried in the mind of the hearer. His exuberant
fancy constantly tempted him into illustrative excursions that led the
hearer too far away from the march of the argument. The one thing which
he always found it difficult to do was to restrain the exuberance
of his genius. He could not be straightforward and unadorned. He
carried his wealth with him and displayed it on all occasions. Mr.
Matthew Arnold has very happily characterized this feature of his
mind as “Asiatic.” “He is the only man,” said Johnson, “whose common
conversation corresponds with the general fame which he has in the
world. No man of sense could meet Burke by accident under a gateway to
avoid a shower without being convinced that he was the first man in
England.”
It is not singular that these characteristics were often thought to
be oppressive. In the House of Commons he sometimes poured forth the
wealth of his knowledge for hour after hour till the members were
burdened and driven out of the House in sheer self-defence. This
peculiarity was well described by the satirist who said:
“He went on refining,
And thought of convincing when they thought of dining.”
Erskine, during the delivery of the speech on “Conciliation with
America,” crept out of the House behind the benches on his hands and
knees, and yet afterward wrote that he thought the speech the most
remarkable one of ancient or modern times.
But this vast superabundance, this superfluity of riches, so oppressive
to the ear of the hearer, must ever be a source of pleasure and profit
to the thoughtful reader. It is safe to say that there is no other
oratory of any language or time that yields so rich a return to the
thoughtful efforts of the genuine student. What Fox said to members of
Parliament in regard to the speech on the “Nabob of Arcot’s debts,” may
be appropriately said with perhaps even greater emphasis to American
students in regard to either of the speeches on American affairs: “Let
gentlemen read this speech by day and meditate on it by night: let them
peruse it again and again, study it, imprint it on their minds, impress
it on their hearts.” After all that has been written, the student
can nowhere find a more correct and comprehensive account of the
causes of the American Revolution than in the speeches on Taxation and
Conciliation.
Burke’s education had given him peculiar qualifications for discussing
American affairs. These qualifications were both general and special.
At the age of fourteen he entered Trinity College in his native city of
Dublin, where he remained six years, performing not only his regular
college duties, but carrying on a very elaborate course of study
of his own devising. He not only read a greater part of the poets
and orators of antiquity, but he also devoted himself to philosophy
in such a way that his mind took that peculiar bent which made him
ultimately what has been called “the _philosophical_ orator” of the
language. In 1750, when he was twenty, he began the study of law at
the Middle Temple, in London. But his law studies were not congenial
to him; and his great energies, therefore, were chiefly devoted to
the study of what would now be called Political Science. It was at
this period that he acquired that habit which never deserted him of
following out trains of thought to their end, and framing his views on
every subject he investigated into an organized system. He was a very
careful student of Bolingbroke’s works; and such an impression had
this writer’s methods of reasoning made upon him, that when his first
pamphlet, “The Vindication of Natural Society” appeared in 1756, it
was thought by many to be a posthumous work of Bolingbroke himself.
In the same year he astonished the reading world by publishing at
the age of twenty-six, his celebrated philosophical treatise on the
“Sublime and Beautiful.” But the best of his thoughts were given to a
contemplation of the forms and principles of civil society. In 1757
he prepared and published two volumes on the “European Settlements in
America,” in the course of which, he showed that he had already traced
the character of the Colonial institutions to the spirit of their
ancestors, and to an indomitable love of liberty. While preparing these
volumes his prophetic intelligence came to see the boundless resources
and the irresistible strength that the colonies were soon destined
to attain. Thus more than ten years before the troubles with America
began, Burke had filled his mind with stores of knowledge in regard
to American affairs, and had qualified himself for those marvellous
trains of reasoning with which he came forward when the Stamp Act was
proposed. The very next year after the publication of his treatise
on the American Colonies, he projected the _Annual Register_; a work
which even down to the present day has continued to give a yearly
account of the most important occurrences in all parts of the globe.
The undertaking could hardly have been successful except in the hands
of a man of extraordinary powers. The first volumes were written almost
exclusively by Burke, and the topics discussed as well as the events
described, offered the best of opportunities for the exercise of his
peculiar gifts. So great was the demand for the work that the early
volumes rapidly passed through several editions. The first article in
the first volume is devoted to the relations of the American Colonies
to the mother country; and the preëminence, thus indicated of the
American question in Burke’s mind, continued to be evident till the
outbreak of the Revolution.
Burke entered Parliament in 1765, and in January, 1766, he delivered
his maiden speech in opposition to the Stamp Act. The effort was
not simply successful,—it showed so much compass and power that
Pitt publicly complimented him as “a very able advocate.” In 1771,
he received the appointment of agent for the Colony of New York, a
position which he continued to hold till the outbreak of the war. Thus,
not only by his general attainments and abilities, but also as the
result of his special application to the subject, he brought to the
discussion of the question qualifications that were unequalled even by
those of Chatham himself.
Of the speeches delivered by Burke, in all several hundred in number,
only six of the more important ones have been preserved. These were
written out for publication by the orator himself. In point of
compass and variety of thought as well as in lofty declamation and
withering invective it is probable that the most remarkable of all his
efforts was that on the “Nabob of Arcot’s debts.” But it is marked
by the author’s greatest faults as well as by his greatest merits.
For five hours he poured out the pitiless and deluging torrents of
his denunciations; and the reader who now sits down to the task of
mastering the speech is as certain to be wearied by it as were the
members of the House of Commons when it was delivered. The speech
on “Conciliation with America” is marred by fewer blemishes, and
its positive merits are of transcendant importance. That this great
utterance exerted a vast influence on both sides of the Atlantic admits
of no doubt. It is worthy of note, however, that during the greater
part of Burke’s political life he was in the opposition, and that by
those in power, he was regarded as simply what Lord Lauderdale once
called him, “a splendid madman.” To this characterization Fox replied:
“It is difficult to say whether he is mad or inspired, but whether the
one or the other, every one must agree that he is a _prophet_.” And at
a much later period Lord Brougham observed that “All his predictions,
except one momentary expression, have been more than fulfilled.”