Edmund Burke, born on Jan. 12, 1729, at Dublin, Ireland, was
educated at Trinity College there, and proceeded in 1750 to the
Middle Temple, London, but forsook law for the pursuit of
literature and politics. His earliest serious work was the essay on
"The Sublime and Beautiful," published in 1756, of which the full
title is "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful." In 1761 he became private secretary to
Hamilton, the Secretary of Ireland, and four years later to the
Premier, the Marquis of Rockingham, when he also became M.P. for
Wendover, and, in 1774, for Bristol. He died on July 9, 1797.
Burke's magnificent treatise on the French Revolution, of which the
full title is "Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the
Proceedings of Certain Societies in London relative to that Event;
In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris,"
was published in 1790, and was read all over Europe, powerfully
encouraging strenuous resistance to the Revolution. It is, perhaps,
in all literature, the noblest expression of all that is noble in
conservatism. His treatise is as profound in its penetration into
political principles as it is magnificent in conception and in
language. As Burke had stood for a true liberty in America, so he
took his stand against a false liberty in Europe. But history has
not justified him so completely in the latter case as in the
former. Revolutionism was not only, or chiefly, libertinism; and
the wonderful modern France has largely disappointed his
predictions.
_I.--The Meaning of Freedom_
Dear Sir, You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness, for
my thoughts on the late proceedings in France. You will see, sir, that
though I do most heartily wish that France may be animated by a spirit
of rational liberty, it is my misfortune to entertain great doubts
concerning several material points in your late transactions. I love a
manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as anyone; but I cannot stand
forward and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human
actions and human concerns, on a simple view of the subject, as it
stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of
metaphysical abstraction.
I should, therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of
France until I was informed how it had been combined with government;
with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the
collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality
and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order; with
civil and social manners.
All these, in their way, are good things, too; and, without them,
liberty is not a benefit while it lasts, and is not likely to continue
long. The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they
please; we ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk
congratulations. It appears to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of
the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than
Europe.
All circumstances taken together, the French Revolution is the most
astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. Everything seems
out of nature in this chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of
crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this
monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions succeed, and
sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and
indignation; laughter and tears; scorn and horror.
You will observe that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right it
has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our
liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers
and to be transmitted to our posterity.
Our political system is placed in a just symmetry with the order of the
world; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding
together the great, mysterious incorporation of the human race, the
whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a
condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor
of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. We have given to
our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the
constitution of our country with our dearest domesticities; keeping
inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and
mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres,
and our altars. Always acting as if in the presence of canonised
forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and
excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.
All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a
manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our
nature rather than our speculations for the great conservatories and
magazines of our rights and privileges.
_II.--A Lost Opportunity_
You might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given
to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. You possessed in some
parts the walls, and, in all, the foundations, of a noble and venerable
castle. You might have repaired those walls, you might have built on
those old foundations. But you began ill, because you began by despising
everything that belonged to you. Respecting your forefathers, you would
have been taught to respect yourselves. By following wise examples you
would have shamed despotism from the earth by showing that freedom is
not only reconcilable, but auxiliary to law. You would have had a free
constitution. You would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and
obedient people, taught to seek the happiness that is to be found by
virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of
mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false
ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure
walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real
inequality which it never can remove, and which the order of civil life
establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an
humble state as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more
splendid but not more happy.
Compute your gains; see what is got by those extravagant and
presumptuous speculations which have taught your leaders to despise all
their predecessors and all their contemporaries, and even to despise
themselves, until the moment in which they became truly despicable. By
following those false lights, France has bought undisguised calamities
at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal
blessings. She has abandoned her interest that she might prostitute her
virtue.
All other nations have begun the fabric of a new government, or the
reformation of an old, by establishing, or by enforcing with greater
exactness, some rites or other of religion. All other people have laid
the foundations of civil freedom in severer manners, and a system of a
more austere and masculine morality. France, when she let loose the
reins of regal authority, doubled the license of a ferocious
dissoluteness in manners, and of an insolent irreligion in opinions and
practices; and has extended through all ranks of life, as if she were
communicating some privilege, or laying open some secluded benefit, all
the unhappy corruptions that usually were the disease of wealth and
power. This is one of the new principles of equality in France.
France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly disgraced the tone of
lenient counsel in the cabinets of princes, and has taught kings to
tremble at what will hereafter be called the delusive plausibilities of
moral politicians. Sovereigns will consider those who advise them to
place an unlimited confidence in their people as subverters of their
thrones. This alone is an irreparable calamity to you and to mankind.
The French have rebelled against a mild and lawful monarch with more
fury, outrage, and insult than ever any people has been known to rise
against the most illegal usurper or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their
resistance was made to concession; their revolt was from protection;
their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favours, and
immunities. They have found their punishment in their success. Laws
overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce
expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a Church
pillaged and a state unrelieved; everything human and divine sacrificed
to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence.
_III.--The Men in Power_
This unforced choice, this fond election of evil, would appear perfectly
unaccountable if we did not consider the composition of the national
assembly. If we were to know nothing of this assembly but its title and
function, no colours could paint to the imagination anything more
venerable. But no artificial institution whatever can make the men of
whom any system of authority is composed any other than God, and nature,
and education, and their habits of life have made them. Capacities
beyond these the people have not to give. Virtue and wisdom may be the
objects of their choice; but their choice confers neither the one nor
the other on those upon whom they lay their ordaining hands. They have
not the engagement of nature, they have not the promise of revelation,
for any such powers. Judge, sir, of my surprise when I found that a very
great proportion of the assembly was composed of practitioners in the
law. It was composed, not of distinguished magistrates, not of leading
advocates, not of renowned professors; the general composition was of
obscure provincial advocates, of stewards of petty local jurisdictions,
country attorneys, notaries, and the whole train of the ministers of
municipal litigation, the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of
village vexation.
From the moment I read the list I saw distinctly, and very nearly as it
happened, all that was to follow. Who could but conceive that men who
are habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active, of litigious
dispositions and unquiet minds, would easily fall back into their old
condition of low and unprofitable chicane? Who could doubt but that, at
any expense to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must
pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well? It
was inevitable; it was planted in the nature of things.
Other revolutions have been conducted by persons who, whilst they
attempted changes in the commonwealth, sanctified their ambition by
advancing the dignity of the people whose peace they troubled. Such was
our Cromwell, one of the great bad men of the old stamp. Such were your
whole race of Guises, Condes, Colignys, and Richelieus. These men, among
all their massacres, did not slay the _mind_ in their country. A
conscious dignity, a noble pride, a generous sense of glory and
emulation, was not extinguished. But your present confusion, like a
palsy, has attacked the fountain of life itself. Every person in your
country in a situation to be actuated by principles of honour is
disgraced and degraded. Property is destroyed, and rational liberty has
no existence. If this be your actual situation, as compared to the
situation to which you were called, as it were by the voice of God and
man, I cannot find it in my heart to congratulate you on the choice you
have made, or the success which has attended your endeavours.
Far am I from denying in theory, full as far as my heart from
withholding in practice, the _real_ rights of man. Government is not
made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total
independence of it, and exist in much greater clearness, and in a much
greater degree of abstract perfection; but their abstract perfection is
their practical defect. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to
provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be
provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the
want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their
passions. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their
liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.
But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and
circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be
settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss
them upon that principle. The moment you abate anything from the full
rights of men, each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial,
positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole
organisation of government becomes a consideration of convenience. This
it is which makes the constitution of a state, and the due distribution
of powers, a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill.
When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any
new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the
artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade, or negligent of their
duty. The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes, and in
proportion as they are metaphysically true they are morally and
politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of _middle_,
incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. But this
sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of
man that they have totally forgotten his nature. Without opening one new
avenue to the understanding, they have stopped up those that lead to the
heart.
_IV.--The Death of Chivalry_
As for the National Assembly, a majority, sometimes real, sometimes
pretended, captive itself, compels a captive king to issue as royal
edicts, at third hand, the polluted nonsense of their most licentious
and giddy coffee-houses. It is notorious that all their measures are
decided before they are debated. Amidst assassination, massacre, and
confiscation, perpetrated or meditated, they are forming plans for the
good order of future society. Who is it that admires, and from the heart
is attached to, national representative assemblies, but must turn with
horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and abominable
perversion of that sacred institute? Miserable king, miserable assembly!
History, who exercises her awful censure over the proceedings of all
sorts of sovereigns, will not forget how the king, and his queen, and
their infant children, who once would have been the pride and hope of a
great and generous people, were forced to abandon the sanctuary of the
most splendid palace in the world, which they left polluted by massacre
and strewn with mutilated carcases, and were made to taste, drop by
drop, more than the bitterness of death. Is this a triumph to be
consecrated at altars?
I rejoice to hear that the great lady, an object of that triumph, has
borne that day--one is interested that beings made for suffering should
suffer well--and that she bears the whole weight of her accumulated
wrongs with a serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race;
that she feels with the dignity of a Roman matron; that in the last
extremity she will save herself from the last disgrace; and that, if she
must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand. It is now sixteen years
since I saw the Queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and
surely never lighted on this orb a more delightful vision. I saw her
glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy.
Oh! what a revolution!
Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen
upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and
of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their
scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the
age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators
has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never,
never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that
proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the
heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an
exalted freedom. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that
chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired
courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it
touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all
its grossness.
If the king and queen of France and their children were to fall into our
hands by the chance of war, they would be treated with another sort of
triumphal entry into London. We formerly have had a king of France in
that situation; you have read how he was received in England. Four
hundred years have gone over us; but I believe we are not materially
changed since that period. We have not lost the generosity and dignity
of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilised
ourselves into savages.
We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like
stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds
of paper about the rights of man. We have real hearts of flesh and blood
beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with
affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to
priests, and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are
brought before our minds it is natural to be so affected; because all
other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to
vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty; and
by teaching us a servile insolence, to be our low sport for a few
holidays, to make us perfectly fit for, and justly deserving of, slavery
through the whole course of our lives.
_V.--Principles of Statesmanship_
One of the first principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are
consecrated is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it
should act as it they were the entire masters, hazarding to leave to
those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation. By this
unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and in as many
ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole continuity of
the commonwealth would be broken. Men would become little better than
the flies in summer.
First of all, the science of jurisprudence, the pride of the human
intellect, which, with all its defects, redundances, and errors, is the
collected reason of ages, combining the principles of original justice
with the infinite variety of human concerns, would be no longer studied.
No certain laws, establishing invariable grounds of hope and fear, would
keep the actions of men in a certain course.
No principles would be early worked into the habits. Who would ensure a
tender and delicate sense of honour, to beat almost with the first
pulses of the heart, when no man could know what would be the test of
honour in a nation continually varying the standard of its coin? To
avoid, therefore, the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand
times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have
consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its
defects or corruptions but with due caution; that he should never dream
of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that he should approach
to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe
and trembling solicitude. Society is indeed a contract. But it is not a
partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of
a temporary and perishable nature.
It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art, a
partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a
partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a
partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who
are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each
contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval
contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures,
connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact
sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral
natures, each in their appointed place.
These, my dear sir, are, were, and, I think, long will be, the
sentiments of not the least learned and reflecting part of this kingdom.
They conceive that He Who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue
willed also the necessary means of its perfection. He willed, therefore,
the state--He willed its connection with the source and original
archetype of all perfection. They who are convinced of His will, which
is the law of laws, and the sovereign of sovereigns, cannot think it
reprehensible that this, our corporate realty and homage, that this our
recognition of a signiory paramount--I had almost said this oblation of
the state itself--as a worthy offering on the high altar of universal
praise, should be performed with modest splendour and unassuming state.
For those purposes they think some part of the wealth of the country is
as usefully employed as it can be in fomenting the luxury of
individuals.
It is on some such principles that the majority of the people of
England, far from thinking a religious national establishment unlawful,
hardly think it lawful to be without one. The commons of Great Britain,
in the national emergencies, will never seek their resource from the
confiscation of the estates of the church and poor. Sacrilege and
proscription are not among the ways and means of our committee of
supply. There is not one public man in this kingdom, of any party or
description, who does not reprobate the dishonest, perfidious, and cruel
confiscation which the national assembly have been compelled to make of
that property which it was their first duty to protect.
But to what end should we discuss all these things? How shall we discuss
the limitations of royal power? Your king is in prison. Why speculate on
the measure and standard of liberty? I doubt very much indeed whether
France is at all ripe for liberty on any standard. Society cannot exist
unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere,
and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It
is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of
intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.