THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE
Foreign observers of our affairs looked upon the state of England
between the accession of George III. and the loss of the American
colonies (1760-76) with mixed disgust and satisfaction. Their instinct
as absolute rulers was revolted by a spectacle of unbridled faction
and raging anarchy; their envy was soothed by the growing weakness of
a power which Chatham had so short a time before left at the highest
point of grandeur and strength. Frederick the Great spoke with
contempt of the insolence of Opposition and the virulence of parties;
and vowed that, petty German prince as he was, he would not change
places with the King of England. The Emperor Joseph pronounced
positively that Great Britain was declining, that Parliament was
ruining itself, and that the colonies threatened a catastrophe.
Catherine of Russia thought that nothing would restore its ancient
vigour to the realm, short of the bracing and heroic remedy of a war.
Even at home, such shrewd and experienced onlookers as Horace Walpole
suspected that the state of the country was more serious than it had
been since the Great Rebellion, and declared it to be approaching by
fast strides to some sharp crisis. Men who remembered their Roman
history, fancied that they saw every symptom of confusion that
preceded the ruin of the Commonwealth, and began to inquire uneasily
what was the temper of the army. Men who remembered the story of the
violence and insatiable factiousness of Florence, turned again to
Macchiavelli and to Guicciardini, to trace a parallel between the
fierce city on the Arno and the fierce city on the Thames. When the
King of Sweden, in 1772, carried out a revolution, by abolishing an
oligarchic council and assuming the powers of a dictator, with the
assent of his people, there were actually serious men in England who
thought that the English, after having been guilty of every meanness
and corruption, would soon, like the Swedes, own themselves unworthy
to be free. The Duke of Richmond, who happened to have a claim to a
peerage and an estate in France, excused himself for taking so much
pains to establish his claim to them, by gravely asking who knew that
a time might not soon come when England would not be worth living in,
and when a retreat to France might be a very happy thing for a free
man to have?
The reign had begun by a furious outbreak of hatred between the
English and the Scotch. Lord Bute had been driven from office, not
merely because he was supposed to owe his power to a scandalous
friendship with the king's mother, but because he was accused of
crowding the public service with his detested countrymen from the
other side of the Tweed. He fell, less from disapproval of his policy,
than from rude prejudice against his country. The flow of angry
emotion had not subsided before the whisper of strife in the American
colonies began to trouble the air; and before that had waxed loud, the
Middlesex election had blown into a portentous hurricane. This was the
first great constitutional case after Burke came into the House of
Commons. As, moreover, it became a leading element in the crisis which
was the occasion of Burke's first remarkable essay in the literature
of politics, it is as well to go over the facts.
The Parliament to which he had first been returned, now approaching
the expiry of its legal term, was dissolved in the spring of 1768.
Wilkes, then an outlaw in Paris, returned to England, and announced
himself as a candidate for the city. When the election was over, his
name stood last on the poll. But his ancient fame as the opponent
and victim of the court five years before, was revived. After his
rejection in the city, he found himself strong enough to stand for
the county of Middlesex. Here he was returned at the head of the poll
after an excited election. Wilkes had been tried in 1764, and found
guilty by the King's Bench of republishing Number Forty-five of the
_North Briton_, and of printing and publishing the _Essay on Woman_.
He had not appeared to receive sentence, and had been outlawed in
consequence. After his election for Middlesex, he obtained a reversal
of his outlawry on a point of technical form. He then came up for
sentence under the original verdict. The court sent him to prison
for twenty-two months, and condemned him to pay a fine of a thousand
pounds.
Wilkes was in prison when the second session of the new Parliament
began. His case came before the House in November 1768, on his own
petition, accusing Lord Mansfield of altering the record at his trial.
After many acrimonious debates and examinations of Wilkes and others
at the bar of the House, at length, by 219 votes against 136, the
famous motion was passed which expelled him from the House. Another
election for Middlesex was now held, and Wilkes was returned without
opposition. The day after the return, the House of Commons resolved by
an immense majority, that having been expelled, Wilkes was incapable
of serving in that Parliament. The following month Wilkes was once
more elected. The House once more declared the election void. In April
another election took place, and this time the Government put forward
Colonel Luttrell, who vacated his seat for Bossiney for the purpose of
opposing Wilkes. There was the same result, and for the fourth time
Wilkes was at the head of the poll. The House ordered the return to be
altered, and after hearing by counsel the freeholders of Middlesex who
petitioned against the alteration, finally confirmed it (May 8, 1769)
by a majority of 221 to 152. According to Lord Temple, this was the
greatest majority ever known on the last day of a session.
The purport and significance of these arbitrary proceedings need
little interpretation. The House, according to the authorities, had a
constitutional right to expel Wilkes, though the grounds on which even
this is defended would probably be questioned if a similar case were
to arise in our own day. But a single branch of the legislature could
have no power to pass an incapacitating vote either against Wilkes or
anybody else. An Act of Parliament is the least instrument by which
such incapacity could be imposed. The House might perhaps expel
Wilkes, but it could not either legally or with regard to the less
definite limits of constitutional morality, decide whom the Middlesex
freeholders should not elect, and it could not therefore set aside
their representative, who was then free from any disabling quality.
Lord Camden did not much exaggerate, when he declared in a debate on
the subject in the House of Lords, that the judgment passed upon the
Middlesex election had given the constitution a more dangerous
wound than any which were given during the twelve years' absence
of Parliament in the reign of Charles I. The House of Commons was
usurping another form of that very dispensing power, for pretending
to which the last of the Stuart sovereigns had lost his crown. If the
House by a vote could deprive Wilkes of a right to sit, what legal or
constitutional impediment would there be in the way, if the majority
were at any time disposed to declare all their most formidable
opponents in the minority incapable of sitting?
In the same Parliament, there was another and scarcely less remarkable
case of Privilege, "that eldest son of Prerogative," as Burke truly
called it, "and inheriting all the vices of its parent." Certain
printers were accused of breach of privilege for reporting the debates
of the House (March, 1771). The messenger of the serjeant-at-arms
attempted to take one of them into custody in his own shop in the
city. A constable was standing by, designedly, it has been supposed,
and Miller, the printer, gave the messenger into his custody for an
assault. The case came on before the Lord Mayor, Alderman Wilkes,
and Alderman Oliver, the same evening, and the result was that the
messenger of the House was committed. The city doctrine was, that
if the House of Commons had a serjeant-at-arms, they had a
serjeant-at-mace. If the House of Commons could send their citizens
to Newgate, they could send its messenger to the Compter. Two other
printers were collusively arrested, brought before Wilkes and Oliver,
and at once liberated.
The Commons instantly resolved on stern measures. The Lord Mayor and
Oliver were taken and despatched to the Tower, where they lay until
the prorogation of Parliament. Wilkes stubbornly refused to pay any
attention to repeated summonses to attend at the bar of the House,
very properly insisting that he ought to be summoned to attend _in his
place_ as member for Middlesex. Besides committing Crosby and Oliver
to the Tower, the House summoned the Lord Mayor's clerk to attend with
his books, and then and there forced him to strike out the record of
the recognisances into which their messenger had entered on being
committed at the Mansion House. No Stuart ever did anything more
arbitrary and illegal. The House deliberately intended to constitute
itself, as Burke had said two years before, an arbitrary and despotic
assembly. "The distempers of monarchy were the great subjects of
apprehension and redress in the last century. In this, the distempers
of Parliament."
Burke, in a speech which he delivered in his place in 1771, warned the
House of the evils of the course upon which they were entering, and
declared those to be their mortal enemies who would persuade them to
act as if they were a self-originated magistracy, independent of the
people, and unconnected with their opinions and feelings. But these
mortal enemies of its very constitution were at this time the majority
of the House. It was to no purpose that Burke argued with more than
legal closeness that incapacitation could not be a power according to
law, inasmuch as it had neither of the two properties of law: it was
not _known_, "you yourselves not knowing upon what grounds you will
vote the incapacity of any man;" and it was not _fixed_, because
it was varied according to the occasion, exercised according to
discretion, and no man could call for it as a right. A strain of
unanswerable reasoning of this kind counted for nothing, in spite of
its being unanswerable. Despotic or oligarchic pretensions are proof
against the most formidable battery that reason and experience can
construct against them. And Wilkes's exclusion endured until this
Parliament--the Unreported Parliament, as it was called, and in many
respects the very worst that ever assembled at Westminster--was
dissolved, and a new one elected (1774), when he was once again
returned for Middlesex, and took his seat.
The London multitude had grown zealous for Wilkes, and the town had
been harassed by disorder. Of the fierce brutality of the crowd of
that age, we may form a vivid idea from the unflinching pencil of
Hogarth. Barbarous laws were cruelly administered. The common people
were turbulent, because misrule made them miserable. Wilkes had
written filthy verses, but the crowd cared no more for this than their
betters cared about the vices of Lord Sandwich. They made common cause
with one who was accidentally a more conspicuous sufferer. Wilkes was
quite right when he vowed that he was no Wilkite. The masses were
better than their leader. "Whenever the people have a feeling," Burke
once said, "they commonly are in the right: they sometimes mistake the
physician." Franklin, who was then in London, was of opinion that if
George III. had had a bad character, and John Wilkes a good one,
the latter might have turned the former out of the kingdom; for the
turbulence that began in street riots, at one time threatened to end
in revolt. The king himself was attacked with savage invective in
papers, of which it was said that no one in the previous century would
have dared to print any like them until Charles was fast locked up in
Carisbrooke Castle.
As is usual when the minds of those in power have been infected with
an arbitrary temper, the employment of military force to crush civil
disturbances became a familiar and favourite idea. The military, said
Lord Weymouth, in an elaborate letter which he addressed to the Surrey
magistrates, can never be employed to a more constitutional purpose
than in the support of the authority and dignity of the magistracy.
If the magistrate should be menaced, he is cautioned not to delay a
moment in calling for the aid of the military, and making use of them
effectually. The consequence of this bloody scroll, as Wilkes rightly
called it, was that shortly afterwards an affray occurred between the
crowd and the troops, in which some twenty people were killed and
wounded (May 10, 1768). On the following day, the Secretary of War,
Lord Barrington, wrote to the commanding officer, informing him that
the king highly approved of the conduct both of officers and men, and
wished that his gracious approbation of them should be communicated to
them.
Burke brought the matter before the House in a motion for a Committee
of Inquiry, supported by one of the most lucid and able of his minor
speeches. "If ever the time should come," he concluded, "when this
House shall be found prompt to execute and slow to inquire; ready
to punish the excesses of the people, and slow to listen to their
grievances; ready to grant supplies, and slow to examine the account;
ready to invest magistrates with large powers, and slow to inquire
into the exercise of them; ready to entertain notions of the military
power as incorporated with the constitution,--when you learn this in
the air of St. James's, then the business is done; then the House of
Commons will change that character which it receives from the people
only." It is hardly necessary to say that his motion for a Committee
was lost by the overwhelming majority of 245 against 30. The general
result of the proceedings of the Government from the accession of
George III. to the beginning of the troubles in the American colonies,
was in Burke's own words, that the Government was at once dreaded and
contemned; that the laws were despoiled of all their respected and
salutary terrors; that their inaction was a subject of ridicule, and
their exertion of abhorrence; that our dependencies had slackened
in their affections; that we knew neither how to yield, nor how to
enforce; and that disconnection and confusion, in offices, in parties,
in families, in Parliament, in the nation, prevailed beyond the
disorders of any former time.
It was in the pamphlet on the _Present Discontents_, published in
1770, that Burke dealt at large with the whole scheme of policy of
which all these irregularities were the distempered incidents. The
pamphlet was composed as a manifesto of the Rockingham section of the
Whig party, to show, as Burke wrote to his chief, how different it
was in spirit and composition from "the Bedfords, the Grenvilles, and
other knots, who are combined for no public purpose, but only as a
means of furthering with joint strength their private and individual
advantage." The pamphlet was submitted in manuscript or proof to the
heads of the party. Friendly critics excused some inelegancies which
they thought they found in occasional passages, by taking for granted,
as was true, that he had admitted insertions from other hands. Here
for the first time he exhibited, on a conspicuous scale, the strongest
qualities of his understanding. Contemporaries had an opportunity of
measuring this strength, by comparison with another performance of
similar scope. The letters of Junius had startled the world the year
before. Burke was universally suspected of being their author, and the
suspicion never wholly died out so long as he lived. There was no real
ground for it beyond the two unconnected facts, that the letters were
powerful letters, and that Burke had a powerful intellect. Dr. Johnson
admitted that he had never had a better reason for believing that
Burke was Junius, than that he knew nobody else who had the ability of
Junius. But Johnson discharged his mind of the thought, at the instant
that Burke voluntarily assured him that he neither wrote the letters
of Junius, nor knew who had written them. The subjects and aim of
those famous pieces were not very different from Burke's tract, but
any one who in our time turns from the letters to the tract, will
wonder how the author of the one could ever have been suspected of
writing the other. Junius is never more than a railer, and very
often he is third-rate even as a railer. The author of the _Present
Discontents_ speaks without bitterness even of Lord Bute and the Duke
of Grafton; he only refers to persons, when their conduct or their
situation illustrates a principle. Instead of reviling, he probes, he
reflects, he warns; and as the result of this serious method, pursued
by a man in whom close mastery of detail kept exact pace with wide
grasp of generalities, we have not the ephemeral diatribe of a
faction, but one of the monumental pieces of political literature.
The last great pamphlet in the history of English public affairs had
been Swift's tract _On the Conduct of the Allies_ (1711), in which the
writer did a more substantial service for the Tory party of his day
than Burke did for the Whig party of a later date. Swift's pamphlet is
close, strenuous, persuasive, and full of telling strokes; but nobody
need read it to-day except the historical student, or a member of the
Peace Society, in search of the most convincing exposure of the most
insane of English wars.[1] There is not a sentence in it which does
not belong exclusively to the matter in hand: not a line of that
general wisdom which is for all time. In the _Present Discontents_ the
method is just the opposite of this. The details are slurred, and they
are not literal. Burke describes with excess of elaboration how the
new system is a system of double cabinets; one put forward with
nominal powers in Parliament, the other concealed behind the throne,
and secretly dictating the policy. The reader feels that this is
worked out far too closely to be real. It is a structure of artificial
rhetoric. But we lightly pass this over, on our way to more solid
matter; to the exposition of the principles of a constitution, the
right methods of statesmanship, and the defence of party.
[Footnote 1: This was not Burke's judgment on the long war against
Louis XIV.--See _Regicide Peace_, i.]
It was Bolingbroke, and not Swift, of whom Burke was thinking, when he
sat down to the composition of his tract. The _Patriot King_ was
the fountain of the new doctrines, which Burke trained his party to
understand and to resist. If his foe was domestic, it was from a
foreign armoury that Burke derived the instruments of resistance. The
great fault of political writers is their too close adherence to the
forms of the system of state which they happen to be expounding or
examining. They stop short at the anatomy of institutions, and do not
penetrate to the secret of their functions. An illustrious author in
the middle of the eighteenth century introduced his contemporaries
to a better way. It is not too much to say that at that epoch the
strength of political speculation in this country, from Adam Smith
downwards, was drawn from France; and Burke had been led to some
of what was most characteristic in his philosophy of society by
Montesquieu's _Spirit of Laws_ (1748), the first great manual of the
historic school. We have no space here to work out the relations
between Montesquieu's principles and Burke's, but the student of the
_Esprit des Lois_ will recognise its influence in every one of Burke's
masterpieces.
So far as immediate events were concerned, Burke was quick to discern
their true interpretation. As has been already said, he attributed to
the king and his party a deliberateness of system which probably had
no real existence in their minds. The king intended to reassert the
old right of choosing his own ministers. George II. had made strenuous
but futile endeavours to the same end. His son, the father of George
III., Frederick, Prince of Wales, as every reader of Dodington's Diary
will remember, was equally bent on throwing off the yoke of the great
Whig combinations, and making his own cabinets. George III. was only
continuing the purpose of his father and his grandfather; and there is
no reason to believe that he went more elaborately to work to obtain
his ends.
It is when he leaves the artifices of a cabal, and strikes down below
the surface to the working of deep social forces, that we feel the
breadth and power of Burke's method. "I am not one of those," he
began, "who think that the people are never wrong. They have been so,
frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But
I do say that _in all disputes between them and their rulers, the
presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people_." Nay,
experience perhaps justifies him in going further. When popular
discontents are prevalent, something has generally been found amiss in
the constitution or the administration. "The people have no interest
in disorder. When they go wrong, it is their error, and not their
crime." And then he quotes the famous passage from the Memoirs of
Sully, which both practical politicians and political students
should bind about their necks, and write upon the tables of their
hearts:--"The revolutions that come to pass in great states are not
the result of chance, nor of popular caprice.... As for the populace,
it is never from a passion for attack that it rebels, but from
impatience of suffering."
What really gives its distinction to the _Present Discontents_ is not
its plea for indulgence to popular impatience, nor its plea for the
superiority of government by aristocracy, but rather the presence in
it of the thought of Montesquieu and his school, of the necessity
of studying political phenomena in relation, not merely to forms of
government and law, but in relation to whole groups of social facts
which give to law and government the spirit that makes them workable.
Connected with this, is a particularly wide interpretation and a
particularly impressive application of the maxims of expediency,
because a wide conception of the various interacting elements of
a society naturally extends the considerations which a balance of
expediencies will include. Hence, in time, there came a strong
and lofty ideal of the true statesman, his breadth of vision, his
flexibility of temper, his hardly measurable influence. These are the
principal thoughts in the _Discontents_ to which that tract owes its
permanent interest. "Whatever original energy," says Burke, in one
place, "may be supposed either in force or regulation, the operation
of both is in truth merely instrumental. Nations are governed by the
same methods, and on the same principles, by which an individual
without authority is often able to govern those who are his equals
or superiors; by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judicious
management of it.... The laws reach but a very little way. Constitute
Government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must
depend upon the exercise of powers, which are left at large to the
prudence and uprightness of ministers of state. Even all the use and
potency of the laws depends upon them. Without them, your Commonwealth
is no better than _a scheme upon paper; and not a living, active,
effective constitution_." Thus early in his public career had Burke
seized that great antithesis which he so eloquently laboured in
the long and ever memorable episode of his war against the French
Revolution: the opposition between artificial arrangements in
politics, and a living, active, effective organisation, formed by what
he calls elsewhere in the present tract the natural strength of the
kingdom, and suitable to the temper and mental habits of the people.
When he spoke of the natural strength of the kingdom, he gave no
narrow or conventional account of it. He included in the elements
of that strength, besides the great peers and the leading landed
gentlemen, the opulent merchants and manufacturers, and the
substantial yeomanry. Contrasted with the trite versions of Government
as fixed in King, Lords, and Commons, this search for the real organs
of power was going to the root of the matter in a spirit at once
thoroughly scientific and thoroughly practical. Burke had, by the
speculative training to which he had submitted himself in dealing with
Bolingbroke, prepared his mind for a complete grasp of the idea of
the body politic as a complex growth, a manifold whole, with closely
interdependent relations among its several parts and divisions. It
was this conception from which his conservatism sprang. Revolutionary
politics have one of their sources in the idea that societies are
capable of infinite and immediate modifications, without reference to
the deep-rooted conditions that have worked themselves into every part
of the social structure. The same opposition of the positive to the
doctrinaire spirit is to be observed in the remarkable vindication of
Party, which fills the last dozen pages of the pamphlet, and which
is one of the most courageous of all Burke's deliverances. Party
combination is exactly one of those contrivances which, as it might
seem, a wise man would accept for working purposes, but about which
he would take care to say as little as possible. There appears to be
something revolting to the intellectual integrity and self-respect of
the individual in the systematic surrender of his personal action,
interest, and power, to a political connection in which his own
judgment may never once be allowed to count for anything. It is like
the surrender of the right of private judgment to the authority of the
Church, but with its nakedness not concealed by a mystic doctrine.
Nothing is more easy to demolish by the bare logical reason. But Burke
cared nothing about the bare logical reason, until it had been
clothed in convenience and custom, in the affections on one side, and
experience on the other. Not content with insisting that for some
special purpose of the hour, "when bad men combine, the good must
associate," he contended boldly for the merits of fidelity to party
combination in itself. Although Burke wrote these strong pages as a
reply to Bolingbroke, who had denounced party as an evil, they remain
as the best general apology that has ever been offered for that
principle of public action, against more philosophic attacks than
Bolingbroke's. Burke admitted that when he saw a man acting a
desultory and disconnected part in public life with detriment to his
fortune, he was ready to believe such a man to be in earnest, though
not ready to believe him to be right. In any case he lamented to
see rare and valuable qualities squandered away without any public
utility. He admitted, moreover, on the other hand, that people
frequently acquired in party confederacies a narrow, bigoted, and
proscriptive spirit. "But where duty renders a critical situation
a necessary one, it is our business to keep free from the evils
attendant upon it, and not to fly from the situation itself. It is
surely no very rational account of a man that he has always acted
right, but has taken special care to act in such a manner that his
endeavours could not possibly be productive of any consequence....
When men are not acquainted with each other's, principles, nor
experienced in each other's talents, nor at all practised in their
mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts of business; no
personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest subsisting
among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part
with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy."
In terms of eloquent eulogy he praised the sacred reverence with which
the Romans used to regard the _necessitudo sortis_, or the relations
that grew up between men who had only held office together by the
casual fortune of the lot. He pointed out to emulation the Whig
junto who held so close together in the reign of Anne--Sunderland,
Godolphin, Somers, and Marlborough--who believed "that no men could
act with effect who did not act in concert; that no men could act in
concert who did not act with confidence; and that no men could act
with confidence who were not bound together by common opinions,
common affections, and common interests." In reading these energetic
passages, we have to remember two things: first, that the writer
assumes the direct object of party combination to be generous, great,
and liberal causes; and second, that when the time came, and when he
believed that his friends were espousing a wrong and pernicious cause,
Burke, like Samson bursting asunder the seven green withes, broke away
from the friendships of a life, and deliberately broke his party in
pieces.[1]
[Footnote 1: See on the same subject, _Correspondence_, ii. 276, 277.]
When Burke came to discuss the cure for the disorders of 1770, he
insisted on contenting himself with what he ought to have known to be
obviously inadequate prescriptions. And we cannot help feeling that he
never speaks of the constitution of the government of this country,
without gliding into a fallacy identical with that which he himself
described and denounced, as thinking better of the wisdom and power
of human legislation than in truth it deserved. He was uniformly
consistent in his view of the remedies which the various sections of
Opposition proposed against the existing debasement and servility of
the Lower House. The Duke of Richmond wanted universal suffrage,
equal electoral districts, and annual parliaments. Wilkes proposed
to disfranchise the rotten boroughs, to increase the county
constituencies, and to give members to rich, populous, trading
towns--a general policy which was accepted fifty-six years afterwards.
The Constitutional Society desired frequent parliaments, the
exclusion of placemen from the House, and the increase of the county
representation. Burke uniformly refused to give his countenance to any
proposals such as these, which involved a clearly organic change in
the constitution. He confessed that he had no sort of reliance
upon either a triennial parliament or a place-bill, and with that
reasonableness which as a rule was fully as remarkable in him as his
eloquence, he showed very good grounds for his want of faith in the
popular specifics. In truth, triennial or annual parliaments could
have done no good, unless the change had been accompanied by the more
important process of amputating, as Chatham called it, the rotten
boroughs. Of these the Crown could at that time reckon some seventy as
its own property. Besides those which belonged to the Crown, there was
also the immense number which belonged to the Peerage. If the king
sought to strengthen an administration, the thing needful was not to
enlist the services of able and distinguished men, but to conciliate a
duke, who brought with him the control of a given quantity of voting
power in the Lower House. All this patrician influence, which may be
found at the bottom of most of the intrigues of the period, would not
have been touched by curtailing the duration of parliaments.
What then was the remedy, or had Burke no remedy to offer for these
grave distempers of Parliament? Only the remedy of the interposition
of the body of the people itself. We must beware of interpreting this
phrase in the modern democratic sense. In 1766 he had deliberately
declared that he thought it would be more conformable to the spirit of
the constitution, "by lessening the number, to add to the weight and
independency of our voters." "Considering the immense and dangerous
charge of elections, the prostitute and daring venality, the
corruption of manners, the idleness and profligacy of the lower sort
of voters, no prudent man would propose to increase such an evil."[1]
In another place he denies that the people have either enough of
speculation in the closet, or of experience in business, to be
competent judges, not of the detail of particular measures only, but
of _general schemes of policy_.[2] On Burke's theory, the people, as a
rule, were no more concerned to interfere with Parliament, than a man
is concerned to interfere with somebody whom he has voluntarily and
deliberately made his trustee. But here, he confessed, was a shameful
and ruinous breach of trust. The ordinary rule of government was being
every day mischievously contemned and daringly set aside. Until the
confidence thus outraged should be once more restored, then the people
ought to be excited to a more strict and detailed attention to the
conduct of their representatives. The meetings of counties and
corporations ought to settle standards for judging more systematically
of the behaviour of those whom they had sent to Parliament. Frequent
and correct lists of the voters in all important questions ought to
be procured. The severest discouragement ought to be given to the
pernicious practice of affording a blind and undistinguishing support
to every administration. "Parliamentary support comes and goes with
office, totally regardless of the man or the merit." For instance,
Wilkes's annual motion to expunge the votes upon the Middlesex
election had been uniformly rejected, as often as it was made while
Lord North was in power. Lord North had no sooner given way to the
Rockingham Cabinet than the House of Commons changed its mind, and
the resolutions were expunged by a handsome majority of 115 to 47.
Administration was omnipotent in the House, because it could be a
man's most efficient friend at an election, and could most amply
reward his fidelity afterwards. Against this system Burke called on
the nation to set a stern face. Root it up, he kept crying; settle the
general course in which you desire members to go; insist that they
shall not suffer themselves to be diverted from this by the authority
of the government of the day; let lists of votes be published, so
that you may ascertain for yourselves whether your trustees have been
faithful or fraudulent; do all this, and there will be no need to
resort to those organic changes, those empirical innovations, which
may possibly cure, but are much more likely to destroy.
[Footnote 1: "Observations on State of the Nation," _Works_, i. 105,
b.]
[Footnote 2: "Speech on Duration of Parliaments."]
It is not surprising that so halting a policy should have given deep
displeasure to very many, perhaps to most, of those whose only common
bond was the loose and negative sentiment of antipathy to the court,
the ministry, and the too servile majority of the House of Commons.
The Constitutional Society was furious. Lord Chatham wrote to Lord
Rockingham that the work in which these doctrines first appeared,
must do much mischief to the common cause. But Burke's view of the
constitution was a part of his belief with which he never
paltered, and on which he surrendered his judgment to no man. "Our
constitution," in his opinion, "stands on a nice equipoise, with steep
precipices and deep waters upon all sides of it. In removing it from a
dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a risk of oversetting
it on the other."[1] This image was ever before his mind. It occurs
again in the last sentence of that great protest against all change
and movement, when he describes himself as one who, when the equipoise
of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it
upon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons
to that which may preserve its equipoise.[2] When we think of the
odious mis-government in England which the constitution permitted,
between the time when Burke wrote and the passing of Lord Sidmouth's
Six Acts fifty years later, we may be inclined to class such a
constitution among the most inadequate and mischievous political
arrangements that any free country has ever had to endure. Yet it was
this which Burke declared that he looked upon with filial reverence.
"Never will I cut it in pieces, and put it into the kettle of any
magician, in order to boil it with the puddle of their compounds into
youth and vigour; on the contrary, I will drive away such pretenders;
I will nurse its venerable age, and with lenient arts extend a
parent's breath."
[Footnote 1: _Present Discontents_.]
[Footnote 2: _Reflections on the French Revolution_.]
He was filled with the spirit, and he borrowed the arguments, which
have always marked the champion of faith and authority against the
impious assault of reason or innovation. The constitution was sacred
to him as the voice of the Church and the oracles of her saints are
sacred to the faithful. Study it, he cried, until you know how to
admire it, and if you cannot know and admire, rather believe that you
are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed upon. We
ought to understand it according to our measure and to venerate where
we are not able presently to comprehend. Well has Burke been called
the Bossuet of politics.
Although, however, Burke's unflinching reverence for the constitution,
and his reluctance to lay a finger upon it, may now seem clearly
excessive, as it did to Chatham and his son, who were great men in the
right, or to Beckford and Sawbridge, who were very little men in the
right, we can only be just to him by comparing his ideas with those
which were dominant throughout an evil reign. While he opposed more
frequent parliaments, he still upheld the doctrine that "to govern
according to the sense, and agreeably to the interests, of the people
is a great and glorious object of government." While he declared
himself against the addition of a hundred knights of the shire, he
in the very same breath protested that, though the people might be
deceived in their choice of an object, he "could scarcely conceive any
choice they could make, to be so very mischievous as the existence of
any human force capable of resisting it."[1] To us this may seem very
mild and commonplace doctrine, but it was not commonplace in an age
when Anglican divines--men like Archbishop Markham, Dr. Nowell or
Dr. Porteus--had revived the base precepts of passive obedience and
non-resistance, and when such a man as Lord Mansfield encouraged them.
And these were the kind of foundations which Burke had been laying,
while Fox was yet a Tory, while Sheridan was writing farces, and while
Grey was a schoolboy.
[Footnote 1: "To the Chairman of the Buckinghamshire Meeting," 1780.]
It is, however, almost demonstrably certain that the vindication of
the supremacy of popular interests over all other considerations would
have been bootless toil, and that the great constitutional struggle
from 1760 to 1783 would have ended otherwise than it did, but for
the failure of the war against the insurgent colonies, and the final
establishment of American Independence. It was this portentous
transaction which finally routed the arbitrary and despotic
pretensions of the House of Commons over the people, and which put an
end to the hopes entertained by the sovereign of making his personal
will supreme in the Chambers. Fox might well talk of an early Loyalist
victory in the war, as the terrible news from Long Island. The
struggle which began unsuccessfully at Brentford in Middlesex, was
continued at Boston in Massachusetts. The scene had changed, but the
conflicting principles were the same. The war of Independence was
virtually a second English civil war. The ruin of the American cause
would have been also the ruin of the constitutional cause in England;
and a patriotic Englishman may revere the memory of Patrick Henry and
George Washington not less justly than the patriotic American. Burke's
attitude in this great contest is that part of his history about the
majestic and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute.