THE ROCKINGHAM PARTY--PARIS--ELECTION AT BRISTOL--THE AMERICAN WAR
The war with the American colonies was preceded by an interval of
stupor. The violent ferment which had been stirred in the nation by
the affairs of Wilkes and the Middlesex election, was followed, as
Burke said, by as remarkable a deadness and vapidity. In 1770 the
distracted ministry of the Duke of Grafton came to an end, and was
succeeded by that of Lord North. The king had at last triumphed. He
had secured an administration of which the fundamental principle was
that the sovereign was to be the virtual head of it, and the real
director of its counsels. Lord North's government lasted for twelve
years, and its career is for ever associated with one of the most
momentous chapters in the history of the English nation and of free
institutions.
Through this long and eventful period, Burke's was as the voice of
one crying in the wilderness. He had become important enough for the
ministry to think it worth while to take pains to discredit him. They
busily encouraged the report that he was Junius, or a close ally of
Junius. This was one of the minor vexations of Burke's middle life.
Even his friends continued to torment him for incessant disclaimers.
Burke's lofty pride made him slow to deal positively with what he
scorned as a malicious and unworthy imputation. To such a friend as
Johnson he did not, as we have seen, disdain to volunteer a denial,
but Charles Townshend was forced to write more than one importunate
letter before he could extract from Burke the definite sentence
(November 24, 1771):--"I now give you my word and honour that I am not
the author of Junius, and that I know not the author of that paper,
and I do authorise you to say so." Nor was this the only kind of
annoyance to which he was subjected. His rising fame kindled the
candour of the friends of his youth. With proverbial good-nature, they
admonished him that he did not bear instruction; that he showed such
arrogance as in a man of his condition was intolerable; that he
snapped furiously at his parliamentary foes, like a wolf who had
broken into the fold; that his speeches were useless declamations; and
that he disgraced the House by the scurrilities of the bear-garden.
These sharp chastenings of friendship Burke endured with the perfect
self-command, not of the cold and indifferent egotist, but of one who
had trained himself not to expect too much from men. He possessed the
true solace for all private chagrins in the activity and the fervour
of his public interests.
In 1772 the affairs of the East India Company and its relations with
the Government had fallen into disorder. The Opposition, though
powerless in the Houses of Parliament, were often able to thwart the
views of the ministry in the imperial board-room in Leadenhall Street.
The Duke of Richmond was as zealous and as active in his opposition
to Lord North in the business of the East Indies, as he was in the
business of the country at Westminster. A proposal was made to Burke
to go out to India at the head of a commission of three supervisors,
with authority to examine the concerns of every department, and full
powers of control over the company's servants. Though this offer was
pressed by the directors, Burke, after anxious consideration, declined
it. What his reasons were there is no evidence; we can only guess that
he thought less of his personal interests than of those of the
country and of his party. Without him the Rockingham connection
would undoubtedly have fallen to ruin, and with it the most upright,
consistent, and disinterested body of men then in public life. "You
say," the Duke of Richmond wrote to him (November 15, 1772), "the
party is an object of too much importance to go to pieces. Indeed,
Burke, you have more merit than any man in keeping us together." It
was the character of the party, almost as much as their principles,
that secured Burke's zeal and attachment; their decorum, their
constancy, their aversion to all cabals for private objects, their
indifference to office, except as an instrument of power and a means
of carrying out the policy of their convictions. They might easily
have had office if they would have come in upon the king's terms. A
year after his fall from power Lord Rockingham was summoned to the
royal closet, and pressed to resume his post. But office at any price
was not in their thoughts. They knew the penalties of their system,
and they clung to it undeterred. Their patriotism was deliberate and
considered. Chalcedon was called the city of the blind, because its
founders wilfully neglected the more glorious site of Byzantium which
lay under their eyes. "We have built our Chalcedon," said Burke, "with
the chosen part of the universe full in our prospect." They had the
faults to which an aristocratic party in opposition is naturally
liable. Burke used to reproach them with being somewhat languid,
scrupulous, and unsystematic. He could not make the Duke of Richmond
put off a large party at Goodwood for the sake of an important
division in the House of Lords; and he did not always agree with Lord
John Cavendish as to what constitutes a decent and reasonable quantity
of fox-hunting for a political leader in a crisis. But it was part of
the steadfastness of his whole life to do his best with such materials
as he could find. He did not lose patience nor abate his effort,
because his friends would miss the opportunity of a great political
stroke rather than they would miss Newmarket Races. He wrote their
protests for the House of Lords, composed petitions for county
meetings, drafted resolutions, and plied them with information, ideas,
admonitions, and exhortations. Never before nor since has our country
seen so extraordinary a union of the clever and indefatigable
party-manager, with the reflective and philosophic habits of the
speculative publicist. It is much easier to make either absolutism or
democracy attractive than aristocracy; yet we see how consistent with
his deep moral conservatism was Burke's attachment to an aristocratic
party, when we read his exhortation to the Duke of Richmond to
remember that persons in his high station in life ought to have long
views. "You people," he writes to the Duke (November 17, 1772), "of
great families and hereditary trusts and fortunes are not like such as
I am, who, whatever we may be by the rapidity of our growth, and even
by the fruit we bear, and flatter ourselves that, while we creep on
the ground, we belly into melons that are exquisite for size and
flavour, yet still we are but annual plants that perish with our
season, and leave no sort of traces behind us. You, if you are what
you ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country,
and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation. The
immediate power of a Duke of Richmond, or a Marquis of Rockingham,
is not so much of moment; but if their conduct and example hand down
their principles to their successors, then their houses become the
public repositories and office of record for the constitution.... I do
not look upon your time or lives as lost, if in this sliding away from
the genuine spirit of the country, certain parties, if possible--if
not, the heads of certain families--should make it their business by
the whole course of their lives, principally by their example,
to mould into the very vital stamina of their descendants those
principles which ought to be transmitted pure and unmixed to
posterity."
Perhaps such a passage as this ought to be described less as
reflection than as imagination--moral, historic, conservative
imagination--in which order, social continuity, and the endless
projection of past into present, and of present into future, are
clothed with the sanctity of an inner shrine. We may think that a
fox-hunting duke and a racing marquis were very poor centres
round which to group these high emotions. But Burke had no puny
sentimentalism, and none of the mere literary or romantic conservatism
of men like Chateaubriand. He lived in the real world, and not in a
false dream of some past world that had never been. He saw that the
sporting squires of his party were as much the representatives of
ancestral force and quality as in older days were long lines of
Claudii and Valerii. His conservative doctrine was a profound
instinct, in part political, but in greater part moral. The accidental
roughness of the symbol did not touch him, for the symbol was
glorified by the sincerity of his faith and the compass of his
imagination.
With these ideas strong within him, in 1773 Burke made a journey to
France. It was almost as though the solemn hierophant of some mystic
Egyptian temple should have found himself amid the brilliant chatter
of a band of reckless, keen-tongued disputants of the garden or
the porch at Athens. His only son had just finished a successful
school-course at Westminster, and was now entered a student at Christ
Church. He was still too young for the university, and Burke thought
that a year could not be more profitably spent than in forming his
tongue to foreign languages. The boy was placed at Auxerre, in the
house of the business agent of the Bishop of Auxerre. From the Bishop
he received many kindnesses, to be amply repaid in after years when
the Bishop came in his old age, an exile and a beggar, to England.
While in Paris, Burke did all that he could to instruct himself as
to what was going on in French society. If he had not the dazzling
reception which had greeted Hume in 1764, at least he had ample
opportunities of acquainting himself with the prevailing ideas of the
time in more than one of the social camps into which Paris was then
divided. Madame du Deffand tells the Duchess of Choiseul that though
he speaks French extremely ill, everybody felt that he would be
infinitely agreeable if he could more easily make himself understood.
He followed French well enough as a listener, and went every day to
the courts to hear the barristers and watch the procedure. Madame du
Deffand showed him all possible attention, and her friends eagerly
seconded her. She invited him to supper parties, where he met
the Count de Broglie, the agent of the king's secret diplomacy;
Caraccioli, successor of nimble-witted Galiani, the secretary from
Naples; and other notabilities of the high world. He supped with the
Duchess of Luxembourg, and heard a reading of La Harpe's _Barmecides_.
It was high treason in this circle to frequent the rival _salon_ of
Mademoiselle Lespinasse, but either the law was relaxed in the case
of foreigners, or else Burke kept his own counsel. Here were for the
moment the headquarters of the party of innovation, and here he saw
some of the men who were busily forging the thunderbolts. His eye was
on the alert, now as always, for anything that might light up the
sovereign problems of human government. A book by a member of this
circle had appeared six months before, which was still the talk of the
town, and against which the Government had taken the usual impotent
measures of repression. This was the _Treatise on Tactics_, by a
certain M. de Guibert, a colonel of the Corsican legion. The important
part of the work was the introduction, in which the writer examined
with what was then thought extraordinary hardihood, the social and
political causes of the decline of the military art in France. Burke
read it with keen interest and energetic approval. He was present at
the reading of a tragedy by the same author, and gave some offence to
the rival coterie by preferring Guibert's tragedy to La Harpe's. To
us, however, of a later day, Guibert is known neither for his tragedy
nor his essay on tactics, nor for a memory so rapid that he could open
a book, throw one glance like a flash of lightning on to a page, and
then instantly repeat from it half a dozen lines word for word.
He lives in literature as the inspirer of that ardent passion of
Mademoiselle Lespinasse's letters, so unique in their consuming
intensity that, as has been said, they seem to burn the page on which
they are written. It was perhaps at Mademoiselle Lespinasse's that
Burke met Diderot. The eleven volumes of the illustrative plates
of the _Encyclopaeedia_ had been given to the public twelve months
before, and its editor was just released from the giant's toil of
twenty years. Voltaire was in imperial exile at Ferney. Rousseau was
copying music in a garret in the street which is now called after his
name, but he had long ago cut himself off from society; and Burke was
not likely to take much trouble to find out a man whom he had known in
England seven years before, and against whom he had conceived a
strong and lasting antipathy, as entertaining no principle either to
influence his heart or to guide his understanding save a deranged and
eccentric vanity.
It was the fashion for English visitors to go to Versailles. They saw
the dauphin and his brothers dine in public, before a crowd of princes
of the blood, nobles, abbés, and all the miscellaneous throng of
a court. They attended mass in the chapel, where the old king,
surrounded by bishops, sat in a pew just above that of Madame du
Barri. The royal mistress astonished foreigners by hair without
powder and cheeks without rouge, the simplest toilettes, and the most
unassuming manners. Vice itself, in Burke's famous words, seemed to
lose half its evil by losing all its grossness. And there, too, Burke
had that vision to which we owe one of the most gorgeous pages in our
literature--Marie Antoinette, the young dauphiness, "decorating and
cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering
like the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy." The shadow
was rapidly stealing on. The year after Burke's visit, the scene
underwent a strange transformation. The king died; the mistress was
banished in luxurious exile; and the dauphiness became the ill-starred
Queen of France. Burke never forgot the emotions of the scene; they
awoke in his imagination sixteen years after, when all was changed,
and the awful contrast shook him with a passion that his eloquence has
made immortal.
Madame du Deffand wrote to Horace Walpole that Burke had been so well
received, that he ought to leave France excellently pleased with the
country. But it was not so. His spirit was perturbed by what he had
listened to. He came away with small esteem for that busy fermentation
of intellect in which his French friends most exulted, and for which
they looked forward to the gratitude and admiration of posterity. From
the spot on which he stood there issued two mighty streams. It was
from the ideas of the Parisian Freethinkers, whom Burke so detested,
that Jefferson, Franklin, and Henry drew those theories of human
society which were so soon to find life in American Independence. It
was from the same ideas that later on that revolutionary tide surged
forth, in which Burke saw no elements of a blessed fertility, but
only a horrid torrent of red and desolating lava. In 1773 there was
a moment of strange repose in Western Europe, the little break of
stillness that precedes the hurricane. It was indeed the eve of a
momentous epoch. Before sixteen years were over, the American Republic
had risen, like a new constellation into the firmament, and the French
monarchy, of such antiquity and fame and high pre-eminence in European
history, had been shattered to the dust. We may not agree with Burke's
appreciation of the forces that were behind these vast convulsions.
But at least he saw, and saw with eyes of passionate alarm, that
strong speculative forces were at work, which must violently prove
the very bases of the great social superstructure, and might not
improbably break them up for ever.
Almost immediately after his return from France, he sounded a
shrill note of warning. Some Methodists from Chatham had petitioned
Parliament against a bill for the relief of Dissenters from
subscription to the Articles. Burke denounced the intolerance of the
petitioners. It is not the Dissenters, he cried, whom you have to
fear, but the men who, "not contented with endeavouring to turn
your eyes from the blaze and effulgence of light, by which life and
immortality is so gloriously demonstrated by the Gospel, would even
extinguish that faint glimmering of Nature, that only comfort supplied
to ignorant man before this great illumination.... These are the
people against whom you ought to aim the shaft of the law; these are
the men to whom, arrayed in all the terrors of government, I would
say, 'You shall not degrade us into brutes.' ... The most horrid and
cruel blow that can be offered to civil society is through atheism....
The infidels are outlaws of the constitution, not of this country, but
of the human race. They are never, never to be supported, never to be
tolerated. Under the systematic attacks of these people, I see some of
the props of good government already begin to fail; I see propagated
principles which will not leave to religion even a toleration. I
see myself sinking every day under the attacks of these wretched
people."[1] To this pitch he had been excited by the vehement band of
men, who had inscribed on their standard, _Écraser l'Infâme_.
[Footnote 1: "Speech on Relief of Protestant Dissenters, 1773."]
* * * * *
The second Parliament in which Burke had a seat was dissolved suddenly
and without warning (October 1774). The attitude of America was
threatening, and it was believed the Ministers were anxious to have
the elections over before the state of things became worse. The whole
kingdom was instantly in a ferment. Couriers, chaises, post-horses,
hurried in every direction over the island, and it was noted, as a
measure of the agitation, that no fewer than sixty messengers passed
through a single turnpike on one day. Sensible observers were glad to
think that, in consequence of the rapidity of the elections, less wine
and money would be wasted than at any election for sixty years past.
Burke had a houseful of company at Beaconsfield when the news arrived.
Johnson was among them, and as the party was hastily breaking up, the
old Tory took his Whig friend kindly by the hand: "Farewell, my dear
sir," he said, "and remember that I wish you all the success that
ought to be wished to you, and can possibly be wished to you, by an
honest man."
The words were of good omen. Burke was now rewarded by the discovery
that his labours had earned for him recognition and gratitude beyond
the narrow limits of a rather exclusive party. He had before this
attracted the attention of the mercantile public. The Company of
Merchants trading to Africa voted him their thanks for his share in
supporting their establishments. The Committee of Trade at Manchester
formally returned him their grateful acknowledgments for the active
part that he had taken in the business of the Jamaica free ports.
But then Manchester returned no representative to Parliament. In two
Parliaments Burke had been elected for Wendover free of expense. Lord
Verney's circumstances were now so embarrassed, that he was obliged
to part with the four seats at his disposal to men who could pay for
them. There had been some talk of proposing Burke for Westminster,
and Wilkes, who was then omnipotent, promised him the support of
the popular party. But the patriot's memory was treacherous, and he
speedily forgot, for reasons of his own, an idea that had originated
with himself. Burke's constancy of spirit was momentarily overclouded.
"Sometimes when I am alone," he wrote to Lord Rockingham (September
15, 1774), "in spite of all my efforts, I fall into a melancholy which
is inexpressible, and to which, if I give way, I should not continue
long under it, but must totally sink. Yet I do assure you that partly,
and indeed principally, by the force of natural good spirits, and
partly by a strong sense of what I ought to do, I bear up so well that
no one who did not know them, could easily discover the state of my
mind or my circumstances. I have those that are dear to me, for whom I
must live as long as God pleases, and in what way He pleases. Whether
I ought not totally to abandon this public station for which I am so
unfit, and have of course been so unfortunate, I know not." But he
was always saved from rash retirement from public business by two
reflections. He doubted whether a man has a right to retire after he
has once gone a certain length in these things. And he remembered that
there are often obscure vexations in the most private life, which as
effectually destroy a man's peace as anything that can occur in public
contentions.
Lord Rockingham offered his influence on behalf of Burke at Malton,
one of the family boroughs in Yorkshire, and thither Burke in no high
spirits betook himself. On his way to the north he heard that he
had been nominated for Bristol, but the nomination had for certain
electioneering reasons not been approved by the party. As it happened,
Burke was no sooner chosen at Malton than, owing to an unexpected
turn of affairs at Bristol, the idea of proposing him for a candidate
revived. Messengers were sent express to his house in London, and,
not finding him there, they hastened down to Yorkshire. Burke quickly
resolved that the offer was too important to be rejected. Bristol was
the capital of the west, and it was still in wealth, population, and
mercantile activity the second city of the kingdom. To be invited to
stand for so great a constituency, without any request of his own and
free of personal expense, was a distinction which no politician could
hold lightly. Burke rose from the table where he was dining with some
of his supporters, stepped into a post-chaise at six on a Tuesday
evening, and travelled without a break until he reached Bristol on the
Thursday afternoon, having got over two hundred and seventy miles in
forty-four hours. Not only did he execute the journey without a break,
but, as he told the people of Bristol, with an exulting commemoration
of his own zeal that recalls Cicero, he did not sleep for an instant
in the interval. The poll was kept open for a month, and the contest
was the most tedious that had ever been known in the city. New freemen
were admitted down to the very last day of the election. At the end of
it, Burke was second on the poll, and was declared to be duly chosen
(November 3, 1774). There was a petition against his return, but the
election was confirmed, and he continued to sit for Bristol for six
years.
The situation of a candidate is apt to find out a man's weaker places.
Burke stood the test. He showed none of the petulant rage of those
clamorous politicians whose flight, as he said, is winged in a lower
region of the air. As the traveller stands on the noble bridge
that now spans the valley of the Avon, he may recall Burke's local
comparison of these busy, angry familiars of an election, to the gulls
that skim the mud of the river when it is exhausted of its tide. He
gave his new friends a more important lesson, when the time came for
him to thank them for the honour which they had just conferred upon
him. His colleague had opened the subject of the relations between a
member of Parliament and his constituents; and had declared that,
for his own part, he should regard the instructions of the people of
Bristol as decisive and binding. Burke in a weighty passage upheld a
manlier doctrine.
Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of
a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest
correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his
constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him;
their opinions high respect, their business unremitted attention.
It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, his
satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases,
to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion,
his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to
sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. Your
representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment;
and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to
your opinion.
My worthy colleague says, his will ought to be subservient to
yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If government were a
matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be
superior. But government and legislation are matters of reason and
judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that
in which the determination precedes the discussion, in which one
set of men deliberate and another decide, and where those who form
the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from
those who hear the arguments?... _Authoritative_ instructions,
_mandates_ issued, which the member is bound blindly and
implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to
the clearest convictions of his judgment and conscience--these are
things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise
from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our
Constitution.[1]
[Footnote 1: "Speech at the conclusion of the Poll."]
For six years the Bristol electors were content to be represented by
a man of this independence. They never, however, really acquiesced
in the principle that a member of Parliament owes as much to his own
convictions as to the will of his constituents. In 1778 a bill was
brought into Parliament, relaxing some of the restrictions imposed
upon Ireland by the atrocious fiscal policy of Great Britain. The
great mercantile centres raised a furious outcry, and Bristol was as
blind and as boisterous as Manchester and Glasgow. Burke not only
spoke and voted in favour of the commercial propositions, but urged
that the proposed removal of restrictions on Irish trade did not go
nearly far enough. There was none of that too familiar casuistry,
by which public men argue themselves out of their consciences in a
strange syllogism, that they can best serve the country in Parliament;
that to keep their seats they must follow their electors; and that
therefore, in the long run, they serve the country best by acquiescing
in ignorance and prejudice. Anybody can denounce an abuse. It needs
valour and integrity to stand forth against a wrong to which our best
friends are most ardently committed. It warms our hearts to think
of the noble courage with which Burke faced the blind and vile
selfishness of his own supporters. He reminded them that England only
consented to leave to the Irish in two or three instances the use of
the natural faculties which God had given them. He asked them whether
Ireland was united to Great Britain for no other purpose than that we
should counteract the bounty of Providence in her favour; and whether,
in proportion as that bounty had been liberal, we were to regard it as
an evil to be met with every possible corrective? In our day there is
nobody of any school who doubts that Burke's view of our trade policy
towards Ireland was accurately, absolutely, and magnificently right.
I need not repeat the arguments. They made no mark on the Bristol
merchants. Burke boldly told them that he would rather run the risk of
displeasing than of injuring them. They implored him to become their
advocate. "I should only disgrace myself," he said; "I should lose the
only thing which can make such abilities as mine of any use to the
world now or hereafter. I mean that authority which is derived from
the opinion that a member speaks the language of truth and sincerity,
and that he is not ready to take up or lay down a great political
system for the convenience of the hour; that he is in Parliament to
support his opinion of the public good, and does not form his opinion
in order to get into Parliament or to continue in it."[1]
[Footnote 1: _Two Letters to Gentlemen in Bristol_, 1778.]
A small instalment of humanity to Ireland was not more distasteful to
the electors of Bristol than a small instalment of toleration to Roman
Catholics in England. A measure was passed (1778) repealing certain
iniquitous penalties created by an Act of William the Third. It is
needless to say that this rudimentary concession to justice and sense
was supported by Burke. His voters began to believe that those were
right who had said that he had been bred at Saint Omer's, was a Papist
at heart, and a Jesuit in disguise. When the time came, _summa dies et
ineluctabile fatum_, Burke bore with dignity and temper his dismissal
from the only independent constituency that he ever represented. Years
before he had warned a young man entering public life to regard and
wish well to the common people, whom his best instincts and his
highest duties lead him to love and to serve, but to put as little
trust in them as in princes. Burke somewhere describes an honest
public life as carrying on a poor unequal conflict against the
passions and prejudices of our day, perhaps with no better weapons
than passions and prejudices of our own.
The six years during which Burke sat in Parliament for Bristol, saw
this conflict carried on under the most desperate circumstances. They
were the years of the civil war between the English at home and the
English in the American colonies. George III. and Lord North have been
made scapegoats for sins which were not exclusively, their own. They
were only the organs and representatives of all the lurking ignorance
and arbitrary humours of the entire community. Burke discloses in many
places, that for once the king and Parliament did not act without the
sympathies of the mass. In his famous speech at Bristol, in 1780, he
was rebuking the intolerance of those who bitterly taunted him for the
support of the measure for the relaxation of the Penal Code. "It is
but too true," he said in a passage worth remembering, "that the love,
and even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely rare. It is
but too true that there are many whose whole scheme of freedom is made
up of pride, perverseness, and insolence. They feel themselves in
a state of thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped and
cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent
on their mercy. The desire of having some one below them, descends
to those who are the very lowest of all; and a Protestant cobbler,
debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling Church,
feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer,
whose footman's instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain from
a gaol. This disposition is the true source of the passion which
many men, in very humble life, have taken to the American war. _Our_
subjects in America; _our_ colonies; _our_ dependents. This lust of
party power is the liberty they hunger and thirst for; and this Siren
song of ambition has charmed ears that we would have thought were
never organised to that sort of music."
This was the mental attitude of a majority of the nation, and it was
fortunate for them and for us that the yeomen and merchants on the
other side of the Atlantic had a more just and energetic appreciation
of the crisis. The insurgents, while achieving their own freedom, were
indirectly engaged in fighting the battle of the people of the mother
country as well. Burke had a vehement correspondent who wrote to
him (1777) that if the utter ruin of this country were to be the
consequence of her persisting in the claim to tax America, then he
would be the first to say, _Let her perish!_ If England prevails, said
Horace Walpole, English and American liberty is at an end; if one
fell, the other would fall with it. Burke, seeing this, "certainly
never could and never did wish," as he says of himself, "the colonists
to be subdued by arms. He was fully persuaded that if such should be
the event, they must be held in that subdued state by a great body of
standing forces, and perhaps of foreign forces. He was strongly of
opinion that such armies, first victorious over Englishmen, in a
conflict for English constitutional rights and privileges, and
afterwards habituated (though in America) to keep an English people
in a state of abject subjection, would prove fatal in the end to the
liberties of England itself."[1] The way for this remote peril was
being sedulously prepared by a widespread deterioration among popular
ideas, and a fatal relaxation of the hold which they had previously
gained in the public mind. In order to prove that the Americans had no
right to their liberties, we were every day endeavouring to subvert
the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that
the Americans ought not to be free, we were obliged to depreciate the
value of freedom itself. The material strength of the Government, and
its moral strength alike, would have been reinforced by the defeat of
the colonists, to such an extent as to have seriously delayed or even
jeopardised English progress, and therefore that of Europe too. As
events actually fell out, the ferocious administration of the law
in the last five or six years of the eighteenth century was the
retribution for the lethargy or approval with which the mass of the
English community had watched the measures of the Government against
their fellow-Englishmen in America.
[Footnote 1: _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_.]
It is not necessary here to follow Burke minutely through the
successive stages of parliamentary action in the American war. He
always defended the settlement of 1766; the Stamp Act was repealed,
and the constitutional supremacy and sovereign authority of the mother
country was preserved in a Declaratory Act. When the project of taxing
the colonies was revived, and relations with them were becoming
strained and dangerous, Burke came forward with a plan for leaving the
General Assemblies of the colonies to grant supplies and aids, instead
of giving and granting supplies in Parliament, to be raised and paid
in the colonies. Needless to say that it was rejected, and perhaps it
was not feasible. Henceforth Burke could only watch in impotence the
blunders of Government, and the disasters that befell the national
arms. But his protests against the war will last as long as our
literature.
Of all Burke's writings none are so fit to secure unqualified
and unanimous admiration as the three pieces on this momentous
struggle:--the Speech on American Taxation (April 19, 1774); the
Speech on Conciliation with America (March 22, 1775); and the Letter
to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777). Together they hardly exceed the
compass of the little volume which the reader now has in his hands. It
is no exaggeration to say that they compose the most perfect manual in
our literature, or in any literature, for one who approaches the study
of public affairs, whether for knowledge or for practice. They are an
example without fault of all the qualities which the critic, whether a
theorist or an actor, of great political situations should strive by
night and by day to possess. If the theme with which they deal were
less near than it is to our interests and affections as free citizens,
these three performances would still abound in the lessons of an
incomparable political method. If their subject were as remote as the
quarrel between the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the war between Rome
and the Allies, instead of a conflict to which the world owes the
opportunity of the most important of political experiments, we should
still have everything to learn from the author's treatment; the
vigorous grasp of masses of compressed detail, the wide illumination
from great principles of human experience, the strong and masculine
feeling for the two great political ends of Justice and Freedom, the
large and generous interpretation of expediency, the morality, the
vision, the noble temper. If ever, in the fulness of time, and surely
the fates of men and literature cannot have it otherwise, Burke
becomes one of the half-dozen names of established and universal
currency in education and in common books, rising above the
waywardness of literary caprice or intellectual fashions, as
Shakespeare and Milton and Bacon rise above it, it will be the
mastery, the elevation, the wisdom, of these far-shining discourses in
which the world will in an especial degree recognise the combination
of sovereign gifts with beneficent uses.
The pamphlet on the _Present Discontents_ is partially obscured or
muffled to the modern reader by the space which is given to the cabal
of the day. The _Reflections on the French Revolution_ over-abounds in
declamation, and--apart from its being passionately on one side, and
that perhaps the wrong one--the splendour of the eloquence is out
of proportion to the reason and the judgment. In the pieces on the
American war, on the contrary, Burke was conscious that he could trust
nothing to the sympathy or the prepossessions of his readers, and
this put him upon an unwonted persuasiveness. Here it is reason and
judgment, not declamation; lucidity, not passion; that produces
the effects of eloquence. No choler mars the page; no purple patch
distracts our minds from the penetrating force of argument; no
commonplace is dressed up into a vague sublimity. The cause of freedom
is made to wear its own proper robe of equity, self-control, and
reasonableness.
Not one, but all those great idols of the political market-place whose
worship and service has cost the race so dear, are discovered and
shown to be the foolish uncouth stocks and stones that they are. Fox
once urged members of Parliament to peruse the speech on Conciliation
again and again, to study it, to imprint it on their minds, to impress
it on their hearts. But Fox only referred to the lesson which he
thought to be contained in it, that representation is the sovereign
remedy for every evil. This is by far the least important of its
lessons. It is great in many ways. It is greatest as a remonstrance
and an answer against the thriving sophisms of barbarous national
pride, the eternal fallacies of war and conquest; and here it is
great, as all the three pieces on the subject are so, because they
expose with unanswerable force the deep-lying faults of heart and
temper, as well as of understanding, which move nations to haughty and
violent courses.
The great argument with those of the war party who pretended to a
political defence of their position, was the doctrine that the English
Government was sovereign in the colonies as at home; and in the notion
of sovereignty they found inherent the notion of an indefeasible
right to impose and exact taxes. Having satisfied themselves of the
existence of this sovereignty, and of the right which they took to be
its natural property, they saw no step between the existence of an
abstract right and the propriety of enforcing it. We have seen an
instance of a similar mode of political thinking in our own lifetime.
During the great civil war between the northern and southern states of
the American Union, people in England convinced themselves--some
after careful examination of documents, others by cursory glances at
second-hand authorities--that the south had a right to secede. The
current of opinion was precisely similar in the struggle to which the
United States owed their separate existence. Now the idea of a right
as a mysterious and reverend abstraction, to be worshipped in a state
of naked divorce from expediency and convenience, was one that Burke's
political judgment found preposterous and unendurable. He hated
the arbitrary and despotic savour which clung about the English
assumptions over the colonies. And his repulsion was heightened when
he found that these assumptions were justified, not by some permanent
advantage which their victory would procure for the mother country
or for the colonies, or which would repay the cost of gaining such a
victory; not by the assertion and demonstration of some positive duty,
but by the futile and meaningless doctrine that we had a right to do
something or other, if we liked.
The alleged compromise of the national dignity implied in a withdrawal
of the just claim of the Government, instead of convincing, only
exasperated him. "Show the thing you contend for to be reason; show it
to be common sense; show it to be the means of attaining some useful
end; and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please."[1]
The next year he took up the ground still more firmly, and explained
it still more impressively. As for the question of the right
of taxation, he exclaimed, "It is less than nothing in my
consideration.... My consideration is narrow, confined, and wholly
limited to the policy of the question. I do not examine whether the
giving away a man's money be a power excepted and reserved out of the
general trust of Government.... _The question with me is not whether
you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is
not your interest to make them happy._ It is not what a lawyer tells
me I _may_ do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I
_ought_ to do. I am not determining a point of law; I am restoring
tranquillity, and the general character and situation of a people must
determine what sort of government is fitted for them." "I am not here
going into the distinctions of rights," he cries, "not attempting
to mark their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical
distinctions. _I hate the very sound of them_. This is the true
touchstone of all theories which regard man and the affairs of man:
does it suit his nature in general?--does it suit his nature as
modified by his habits?" He could not bear to think of having
legislative or political arrangements shaped or vindicated by a
delusive geometrical accuracy of deduction, instead of being entrusted
to "the natural operation of things, which, left to themselves,
generally fall into their proper order."
[Footnote 1: "Speech on American Taxation."]
Apart from his incessant assertion of the principle that man acts from
adequate motives relative to his interests, and not on metaphysical
speculations, Burke sows, as he marches along in his stately argument,
many a germ of the modern philosophy of civilisation. He was told that
America was worth fighting for. "Certainly it is," he answered, "if
fighting a people be the best way of gaining them." Every step that
has been taken in the direction of progress, not merely in empire, but
in education, in punishment, in the treatment of the insane, has shown
the deep wisdom, so unfamiliar in that age of ferocious penalties and
brutal methods, of this truth--that "the natural effect of fidelity,
clemency, kindness in governors, is peace, good-will, order, and
esteem in the governed." Is there a single instance to the contrary?
Then there is that sure key to wise politics:--"_Nobody shall persuade
me when a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not
means of conciliation_." And that still more famous sentence, "_I
do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole
people_."
Good and observant men will feel that no misty benevolence or vague
sympathy, but the positive reality of experience, inspired such
passages as that where he says,--"Never expecting to find perfection
in men, and not looking for divine attributes in created beings, in my
commerce with my contemporaries I have found much human virtue.
The age unquestionably produces daring profligates and insidious
hypocrites? What then? Am I not to avail myself of whatever good is
to be found in the world, because of the mixture of evil that is in
it?... Those who raise suspicions of the good, on account of
the behaviour of evil men, are of the party of the latter.... A
conscientious person would rather doubt his own judgment than condemn
his species. He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to
remember that he is sure to convict only one. In truth, I should much
rather admit those whom at any time I have disrelished the most, to be
patterns of perfection, than seek a consolation to my own unworthiness
in a general communion of depravity with all about me." This is one of
those pieces of rational constancy and mental wholeness in Burke which
fill up our admiration for him--one of the manifold illustrations of
an invincible fidelity to the natural order and operation of things,
even when they seemed most hostile to all that was dear to his own
personality.