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honours and popular trusts,' we may prefer the simpler explanation founded on the blunted instincts of obtuse rulers. It was doing them too much honour to attribute to them any design beyond that of crushing an antagonist by the weapons readiest at hand. The keen intelligence which thus sometimes takes the form of excessive ingenuity is more frequently revealed by passages in which profound wisdom is concentrated in a single phrase. We should not ask how we got into the American difficulty, was the cry of the hand-to-mouth politicians, but how we are to get out of it. That is to say, is Burke's comment, 'we are to consult our invention, and reject our experience.' Nobody will be argued into slavery' is another phrase from the same speech, which compresses into half-a-dozen words the confutation of the special pleading and pettifogging of antiquarian lawyers, which the so-called practical men mistook for statesmanlike reasoning. I know no method,' he says elsewhere, 'of drawing up an indictment against a whole people; ' but lawyers thought that nothing was beyond the reach of their art. His later writings are equally fertile. Art is man's nature' sums up his argument against the Rousseau school of theorists; and here is another phrase which might serve as text for a political treatise. On occasions of this nature, he says, 'I am most afraid of the weakest reasonings, because they discover the strongest passions.' Not to multiply instances, I quote one more passage of great significance in regard to Burke's method. 'From this source,' he says, speaking of history, 'much political wisdom may be learnt; that is, learnt as habit, not as a precept, and as an exercise to strengthen the mind, not as a repertory of cases and precedents for a lawyer.' 7

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95. Such sayings, which occur in profusion, illustrate the most marked peculiarity of Burke's mind-the admirable combination of the generalising faculty with a respect for concrete facts. His theorising is always checked and verified by the

test of specific instances, and yet in every special case he always sees a general principle. He explains his method himself in a speech made in 1792. The professor, he says, deals simply with general principles; a statesman applies them to varying circumstances; without 'abstract ideas' all political reasoning would be a jumble, without facts a useless frivolity.1 Burke was at one time suspected of being the author of 'Junius,' on the ground, not altogether devoid of plausibility, that he was the only living writer of the necessary capacity. Yet, if no other evidence were conclusive against the charge, the internal evidence derived from this characteristic would be convincing to those who have really studied the two writers. 'Junius' never deviates from personality into the higher regions of speculation, even when professedly advancing some general doctrine. Burke never condescends to mere personalities, even when his devotion to principles forces him to attack their assailants. He assails Hastings or the Jacobins, as embodiments of evil tendencies, with fierce animosity, it is true, but with an animosity free from any stain of personal dislike; he attacks the king's friends, but instead of fastening, like 'Junius,' on hated individuals, scrupulously avoids giving countenance even to the popular cry against Lord Bute. And yet it is so much his habit to regard principles as embodied in concrete facts, that it is by no means easy to disentangle his speculative influence from the history of his share in current events. This is the specific quality which gives a unique character to his writings, and has led to frequent misunderstandings. Goldsmith's felicitous phrase indicates the nature of the difficulty. One party complained that so great a man

To party gave up what was meant for mankind;

for they could not conceive how a philosopher could care for the intrigues of Bedfords and Grenvilles. Another complained

that

He went on refining,

And thought of convincing when they thought of dining;

for they could not conceive how any political object, except

the advancement of Bedfords or Grenvilles, could be worth serious struggle, and much less worth the devotion of a life. Burke alone felt that even the machinery of party might be used in the interest of mankind. And, therefore, if he is at times too visionary and at times too condescending to the men with whom he was unequally yoked, he contributed the most elevating influence of contemporary politics, and was the one man who accurately gauged the breadth and depth, though he may have partly misunderstood the direction, of the great political movements of his time.

96. The greatness of Burke as a thinker cannot be adequately appreciated without noticing the nobility of his moral nature. It is not from want of human feeling so much as from want of imaginative power that we are generally so dead to the sorrows and sufferings of the great mass of our fellow-creatures. Beneath the rough crust of Johnson and the versatile talent of Goldsmith lay hearts as true and tender as that of Burke. Hume possessed an intellect still more penetrative, though he had little enough of imaginative power. But Burke stands alone in his generation for the combination of width of view with deepness of sympathy. Thinking of the mass, he never forgets the individual. His habitual horizon stretches beyond the purlieus of Westminster and St. James's to include the American colonists and our Indian dependants; but the prospect, however distant, is never colourless. The wrongs of Massachusetts stirred him as deeply as the wrongs of Middlesex; and years of labour unrewarded, save by a good conscience, testified to his sympathy with a race which, to most Englishmen, were but a name, and to most Englishmen to whom they were more than a name, mere grist for the money-making mill. A noble unselfishness stamps all his efforts. I know the map of England,' he says, with admirable pride, as well as the noble lord, or any other person; and I know that the road I take is not the road to preferment.' Incomparably the greatest in intellectual power of all English politicians, the life and soul of his party for some thirty years, he was in office for a few months at the age of fifty-two when he declined the greatest part of the customary profits, and he received a pension two

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1 Burke, ii. 440, American Taxation.'

years before his death, when all ambition, and almost all hope, was dead within him. Few stories are sadder, to us who are accustomed to estimate a man's happiness by his last days, and to see good fortune only in immediate success, than the story of Burke's bereaved old age, when the son whom he loved most tenderly had died before him, and the cause to which he had devoted a life was tottering. Yet he had the right to remember that, throughout life he had, with one doubtful exception, taken the generous side. The exception -namely, his assault on the French Revolution-placed him for once on the side of the oppressors, and therefore brought him the reward denied to his earlier labours. Yet no opponent will now impute to him, even in that case, sordid motive or blunted sensibility. He had defended the Americans against the blundering tyranny of George III., and the dogged stupidity of that part of the nation of which the dull king was the fit representative. He had denounced the penal laws which nearly drove Ireland to follow the American precedent. He had laboured with surpassing industry in the ungrateful task of curbing English brutality in India. He had defended the rights of his countrymen at home as well as protested against the abuses of their power abroad. He had opposed the petty tyranny engendered by the corrupt government of a servile aristocracy; he had denounced the numerous abuses which flourished under the congenial shade of jobbery in high places. If once or twice an irritable temperament led him to sanction mere factious intrigue, his voice had always been the most powerful and the least selfish on the side of honour, justice, and mercy. It is the least of his merits that his views of political economy were as far in advance of his time as his view of wider questions of policy; but the fact deserves notice as a proof that, if an orator by temperament, he laid the foundations of his intellectual supremacy deep in the driest and most repulsive of studies.

97. Burke's judgments upon Montesquieu and Rousseau, to which I have already referred, are sufficiently indicative of the speculative tendencies of his writings from first to last. His first political publication was directed against a teaching identical with that of Rousseau. The 'Vindication of Natural Society,' published in 1756, is an ingenious imitation of

Bolingbroke, intended by the writer as a reductio ad absurdum of the anarchical principles-so Burke considered them to be— in which the friends of Bolingbroke anticipated the revolutionary school. It is, indeed, very remarkable that Burke's first efforts were directed against the very thinkers who were the objects of his dying protest; and that he detected the dangerous tendencies of doctrines which were to shake the whole world in his old age, whilst they had yet found no distinct utterance, and he was but a youthful adventurer. The argument put into the mouth of Bolingbroke is substantially that all government is bad, because resting upon arbitrary convention. War, tyranny, and corruption are caused by our revolt from the 'state of nature.' Politics, like religious dogma, should be constructed by pure a priori reasoning, instead of conforming to the teaching of experience. Some bigots and enthusiasts cherish the 'absurd and blasphemous notion' that popular prejudices should not be disturbed for fear of the consequences. If, after showing all the evils due to those prejudices, you still 'plead the necessity of political institutions, weak and wicked as they are, I can argue with equal, perhaps superior, force concerning the necessity of artificial religion.' If we would have perfect liberty, we must renounce the visions of theologians and the cunning schemes of politicians. The argument-remarkable for the skill with which the reasoning of an opponent is simulated, whilst his principles are covertly attacked 3-may be easily inverted, so as to give Burke's true meaning. He wishes to expose the mischievous and anarchical tendencies of abstract metaphysical speculation. He desires to point out that, whatever be the evils inherent in government, any government is better than none; and that the substitution of abstract speculation for experimental observation can only lead to anarchy. The excessive value which Burke attached to prejudice as prejudice, and the rightful value which he attached to methods resting on experience, are as manifest as in his later writings. The Vindication' contains the germ of the more fully de1 Burke, i. 13, Natural Society.' 2 Ib. i. 79, ib.

3 It is a curious illustration of the fidelity with which Burke represents the revolutionary arguments that Godwin, in his Political Justice,' declared that Burke has proved in good earnest what he professes to prove ironically (Political Justice, i. 13, note).