be one of the first men in the country.” Burke promptly fulfilled
the prediction. He made a speech before he had been in the House two
weeks; a speech that made him at once a marked man. His health was
now firmly established; he had a commanding physique; his figure was
tall and muscular, and his bearing full of a dignity which had a touch
almost of haughtiness in it. Although his action was angular and
awkward, his extraordinary richness and fluency of utterance drew the
attention away from what he was doing to what he was saying. His voice
was harsh, and did not harmonize with the melodious measures in which
his words poured forth; but it was of unusual compass, and carried
in it a sense of confidence and power. His utterance was too rapid,
his thought bore him too impulsively forward, but the pregnant matter
he spoke “filled the town with wonder.” The House was excited by new
sensations. Members were astonished to recognize a broad philosophy
of politics running through this ardent man’s speeches. They felt the
refreshment of the wide outlook he gave them, and were conscious of
catching glimpses of excellent matter for reflection at every turn of
his hurrying thought. They wearied of it, indeed, after a while: the
pace was too hard for most of his hearers, and they finally gave over
following him when the novelty and first excitement of the exercise had
worn off. He too easily lost sight of his audience in his search for
principles, and they resented his neglect of them, his indifference
to their tastes. They felt his lofty style of reasoning as a sort of
rebuke, and deemed his discursive wisdom out of place amidst their own
thoughts of imperative personal and party interest. He had, before
very long, to accustom himself, therefore, to speak to an empty House
and subsequent generations. His opponents never, indeed, managed to
feel quite easy under his attacks: his arrows sought out their weak
places to the quick, and they winced even when they coughed or seemed
indifferent; but they comforted themselves with the thought that the
orator was also tedious and irritating to his own friends, teasing them
too with keen rebukes and vexatious admonitions. The high and wise sort
of speaking must always cause uneasiness in a political assembly. The
more equal and balanced it is, the more must both parties be threatened
with reproof.
I would not be understood as saying that Burke’s speeches were
impartial. They were not. He had preferences which amounted to
prejudices. He was always an intense party man. But then he was a
party man with a difference. He believed that the interests of England
were bound up with the fortunes of the Rockingham Wings; but he did
not separate the interests of his party and the interests of his
country. He cherished party connections because he conceived them to be
absolutely necessary for effective public service. “Where men are not
acquainted with each other’s principles,” he said, “nor experienced in
each other’s talents, nor at all practiced in their mutual habitudes
or dispositions by joint efforts in 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 a connection, the most inconsiderable
man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his
use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the
public.” “When bad men combine, the good must associate.” “It is not
enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth, that a man means
well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he
never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience,
and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to be
prejudicial to the interests of his country.... Duty demands and
requires, that what is right should not only be made known, but made
prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated.
When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his
duty with effect, it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of
his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it.” Burke
believed the Rockingham Whigs to be a combination of good men, and he
felt that he ought to sacrifice something to keep himself in their
connection. He regarded them as men who “believed private honor to
be the foundation of public trust; that friendship was no mean step
towards patriotism; that he who, in the common intercourse of life,
showed he regarded somebody besides himself, when he came to act in
a public situation, might probably consult some other interest than
his own.” He admitted that such confederacies had often “a narrow,
bigoted, and prescriptive spirit;” “but, where duty renders a critical
situation a necessary one,” he said, “it is our business to keep free
from the evils attendant upon it; and not to fly from the situation
itself. If a fortress is seated in an unwholesome air, an officer of
the garrison is obliged to be attentive to his health, but he must
not desert his station.” “A party,” he declared, “is a body of men
united for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest
upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” “Men
thinking freely, will,” he very well knew, “in particular instances,
think differently. But still as the greater part of the measures which
arise in the course of public business are related to, or dependent on,
some great, _leading, general principles in government_, a man must be
peculiarly unfortunate in the choice of his political company, if he
does not agree with them at least nine times in ten. If he does not
concur in these general principles upon which the party is founded,
and which necessarily draw on a concurrence in their application, he
ought from the beginning to have chosen some other, more conformable to
his opinions. When the question is in its nature doubtful, or not very
material, the modesty which becomes an individual, and that partiality
which becomes a well-chosen friendship, will frequently bring on an
acquiescence in the general sentiment. Thus the disagreement will
naturally be rare; it will be only enough to indulge freedom, without
violating concord, or disturbing arrangement.”
Certainly there were no party prizes for Burke. During much the greater
part of his career the party to which he adhered was in opposition; and
even when in office it had only small favors for him. Even his best
friends advised against his appointment to any of the great offices
of state, deeming him too intemperate and unpractical. And yet the
intensity of his devotion to his party never abated a jot. Assuredly
there was never a less selfish allegiance. His devotion was for the
principles of his party, as he conceived and constructed them. It was
a moral and intellectual devotion. He had embarked all his spirit’s
fortunes in the enterprise. Faults he unquestionably had, which seemed
very grave. He was passionate sometimes beyond all bounds: he seriously
frightened cautious and practical men by his haste and vehemence in
pressing his views for acceptance. He was capable of falling, upon
occasion, into a very frenzy of excitement in the midst of debate, when
he would often shock moderate men by the ungoverned license of his
language. But his friends were as much to blame for these outbreaks as
he was. They cut him to the quick by the way in which they criticised
and misunderstood him. His heart was maddened by the pain of their
neglect of his just claims to their confidence. They seemed often to
use him without trusting him, and their slights were intolerable to his
proud spirit. Practically, and upon a narrow scale of expediency, they
may have been right: perhaps he was _not_ circumspect enough to be made
a responsible head of administration. Unquestionably, too, they loved
him and meant him no unkindness. But it was none the less tragical to
treat such a man in such a fashion. They may possibly have temporarily
served their country by denying to Burke full public acknowledgment of
his great services; but they cruelly wounded a great spirit, and they
hardly served mankind.
They did Burke an injustice, moreover. They greatly underrated his
practical powers. In such offices as he was permitted to hold he showed
in actual administration the same extraordinary mastery of masses
of detail which was the foundation of his unapproachable mastery of
general principles in his thinking. His thought was always immersed
in matter, and concrete detail did not confuse him when he touched
it any more than it did when he meditated upon it. Immediate contact
with affairs always steadied his judgment. He was habitually temperate
in the conduct of business. It was only in speech and when debating
matters that stirred the depths of his nature that he gave way to
uncalculating fervor. He was intemperate in his emotions, but seldom
in his actions. He could, and did, write calm state papers in the very
midst and heat of parliamentary affairs that subjected him to the
fiercest excitements. He was eminently capable of counsel as well as of
invective.
He served his party in no servile fashion, for all he adhered to it
with such devotion. He sacrificed his intellectual independence as
little as his personality in taking intimate part in its counsels. He
gave it principles, indeed, quite as often as he accepted principles
from it. In the final efforts of his life, when he engaged every
faculty of his mind in the contest that he waged with such magnificent
wrath against the French revolutionary spirit, he gave tone to all
English thought, and direction to many of the graver issues of
international policy. Rejected oftentimes by his party, he has at
length been accepted by the world.
His habitual identification with opposition rather than with the
government gave him a certain advantage. It relaxed party discipline
and indulged his independence. It gave leave, too, to the better
efforts of his genius: for in opposition it is principles that tell,
and Burke was first and last a master of principles. Government
is a matter of practical detail, as well as of general measures;
but the criticism of government very naturally becomes a matter of
the application of general principles, as standards rather than as
practical means of policy.
Four questions absorbed the energies of Burke’s life and must always
be associated with his fame. These were, the American war for
independence; administrative reform in the English home government;
reform in the government of India; and the profound political
agitations which attended the French Revolution. Other questions he
studied, deeply pondered, and greatly illuminated, but upon these
four he expended the full strength of his magnificent powers. There
is in his treatment of these subjects a singular consistency, a very
admirable simplicity of standard. It has been said, and it is true,
that Burke had no system of political philosophy. He was afraid of
abstract system in political thought, for he perceived that questions
of government are moral questions, and that questions of morals cannot
always be squared with the rules of logic, but run through as many
ranges of variety as the circumstances of life itself. “Man acts
from adequate motives relative to his interest,” he said, “and not on
metaphysical speculations. Aristotle, the great master of reasoning,
cautions us, and with great weight and propriety, against this species
of delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments, as the most
fallacious of all sophistry.” And yet Burke unquestionably had a very
definite and determinable system of thought, which was none the less a
system for being based upon concrete, and not upon abstract premises.
It is said by some writers (even by so eminent a writer as Buckle)
that in his later years Burke’s mind lost its balance and that he
reasoned as if he were insane; and the proof assigned is, that he, a
man who loved liberty, violently condemned, not the terrors only,--that
of course,--but the very principles of the French Revolution. But to
reason thus is to convict one’s self of an utter lack of comprehension
of Burke’s mind and motives: as a very brief examination of his course
upon the four great questions I have mentioned will show.
From first to last Burke’s thought is conservative. Let his attitude
with regard to America serve as an example. He took his stand, as
everybody knows, with the colonies, against the mother country; but
his object was not revolutionary. He did not deny the legal right
of England to tax the colonies (_we_ no longer deny it ourselves),
but he wished to preserve the empire, and he saw that to insist upon
the right of taxation would be irrevocably to break up the empire,
when dealing with such a people as the Americans. He pointed out the
strong and increasing numbers of the colonists, their high spirit in
enterprise, their jealous love of liberty, and the indulgence England
had hitherto accorded them in the matter of self-government, permitting
them in effect to become an independent people in respect of all their
internal affairs; and he declared the result matter for just pride.
“Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold
them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay and
Davis’s Straits,” he exclaimed, in a famous passage of his incomparable
speech on Conciliation with America, “whilst we are looking for them
beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the
opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and
engaged under the frozen serpent of the South. Falkland Island, which
seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national
ambition, is but a stage and resting place in the progress of their
victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging
to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that
whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast
of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game
along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries.
No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance
of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm
sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of
hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent
people,--a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and
not yet hardened into the bone of manhood. When I contemplate these
things,--when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing
to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy
form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but
that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been
suffered to take her own way to perfection,--when I reflect upon these
effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the
pride of power sink, and all the presumption in the wisdom of human
contrivances melt and die away within me,--my rigor relents,--I pardon
something to the spirit of liberty.”
“I think it necessary,” he insisted, “to consider distinctly the true
nature and the peculiar circumstances of the object we have before
us: because, after all our struggle, whether we will or not, we must
govern America according to that nature and those circumstances, and
not according to our own imaginations, not according to abstract ideas
of right, by no means according to mere general theories of government,
the resort to which appears to me, in our present situation, no
better than arrant trifling.” To attempt to force such a people would
be a course of idle folly. Force, he declared, would not only be an
odious “but a feeble instrument, for preserving a people so numerous,
so active, so growing, so spirited as this, in a profitable and
subordinate connection with” England.
“First, Sir,” he cried, “permit me to observe, that the use of force
alone is but _temporary_. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not
remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed
which is perpetually to be conquered.
“My next objection is its _uncertainty_. Terror is not always the
effect of force, and an armament is not a victory. If you do not
succeed, you are without resource: for, conciliation failing, force
remains; but, force failing, no further hope of reconciliation is left.
Power and authority are sometimes bought by kindness; but they can
never be begged as alms by an impoverished and defeated violence.
“A further objection to force is, that you _impair the object_ by your
very endeavors to preserve it. The thing you fought for is not the
thing you recover, but depreciated, sunk, wasted, and consumed in the
contest. Nothing less will content me than _whole America_. I do not
choose to consume its strength along with our own; for in all parts it
is the British strength I consume.... Let me add, that I do not choose
wholly to break the American spirit; because it is the spirit that has
made the country.
“Lastly, we have no sort of _experience_ in favor of force as an
instrument in the rule of our colonies. Their growth and their utility
has been owing to methods altogether different. Our ancient indulgence
has been said to be pursued to a fault. It may be so; but we know, if
feeling is evidence, that our fault was more tolerable than our attempt
to mend it, and our sin far more salutary than our penitence.”
“Obedience is what makes government,” “freedom, and not servitude, is
the cure of anarchy,” and you cannot insist upon one rule of obedience
for Englishmen in America while you jealously maintain another for
Englishmen in England. “For, in order to prove that the Americans have
no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavoring to subvert
the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that
the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the
value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage
over them in debate, without attacking some of those principles, or
deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed
their blood.” “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.... Such
is steadfastly my opinion of the absolute necessity of keeping up the
concord of this empire by a unity of spirit, though in a diversity
of operations, that, if I were sure that the colonists had, at their
leaving this country, sealed a regular compact of servitude, that they
had solemnly abjured all the rights of citizens, that they had made a
vow to renounce all ideas of liberty for them and their posterity to
all generations, yet I should hold myself obliged to conform to the
temper I found universally prevalent in my own day, and to govern two
million of men, impatient of servitude, on the principles of freedom.
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. That point nothing else can or
ought to determine.” “All government, indeed every human benefit and
enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise
and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some
rights, that we may enjoy others; and we choose rather to be happy
citizens than subtle disputants.” “Magnanimity in politics is not
seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill
together.”
Here you have the whole spirit of the man, and in part a view of his
eminently practical system of thought. The view is completed when you
advance with him to other subjects of policy. He pressed with all his
energy for radical reforms in administration, but he earnestly opposed
every change that might touch the structure of the constitution itself.
He sought to secure the integrity of Parliament, not by changing the
system of representation, but by cutting out all roots of corruption.
He pressed forward with the most ardent in all plans of just reform,
but he held back with the most conservative from all propositions of
radical change. “To innovate is not to reform,” he declared, and there
is “a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former
alters the substance of the objects themselves, and gets rid of all
their essential good as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to
them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the
effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the
very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot certainly
be known beforehand. Reform is not a change in the substance or in
the primary modification of the object, but a direct application of a
remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all
is sure. It stops there; and if it fails, the substance which underwent
the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.” This is the
governing motive of his immense labors to accomplish radical economical
reform in the administration of the government. He was not seeking
economy merely; to husband the resources of the country was no more
than a means to an end, and that end was, to preserve the constitution
in its purity. He believed that Parliament was not truly representative
of the people because so many place-men found seats in it, and because
so many members who might have been independent were bought by the too
abundant favors of the Court. Cleanse Parliament of this corruption,
and it would be restored to something like its pristine excellence as
an instrument of liberty.
He dreaded to see the franchise extended and the House of Commons
radically made over in its constitution. It had never been intended
to be merely the people’s House. It had been intended to hold all
the elements of the state that were not to be found in the House of
Lords or the Court. He conceived it to be the essential object of the
constitution to establish a balanced and just intercourse between
the several forces of an ancient society, and it was well that that
balance should be preserved even in the House of Commons, rather than
give perilous sweep to a single set of interests. “These opposed
and conflicting interests,” he said to his French correspondent,
“which you considered as so great a blemish in your old and in our
present Constitution, interpose a salutary check to all precipitate
resolutions. They render deliberation a matter, not of choice, but
of necessity; they make all change a subject of _compromise_, which
naturally begets moderation; they produce _temperaments_, preventing
the sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations, and rendering
all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the
many, forever impracticable. Through that diversity of members and
interests, general liberty had as many securities as there are separate
views in the several orders; whilst by pressing down the whole by
the weight of a real monarchy, the separate parts would have been
prevented from warping and starting from their allotted places.” “_We_
wish,” he said, “to derive all we possess _as an inheritance from our
forefathers_. Upon that body and stock of experience we have taken
care not to inoculate any scion alien to the nature of the original
plant.” “This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of
habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost
inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers
of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom.
It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and
illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial.
It has its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its
records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil
institutions on the principle upon which Nature teaches us to revere
individual men: on account of their age, and on account of those from
whom they are descended.”