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 comprehensive, though he had little enough of imaginative power. But Burke stands alone in his generation for the combination of width of view with keenness 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 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 man 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 exceptionnamely, 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 bein 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 attacked3—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 de2 Ib. i. 79, ib. 2 Burke, i. 13, 'Natural Society.' 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). veloped doctrine of the 'Reflections,' or of the Letters on a Regicide Peace.' The principles thus early grasped guided him throughout his life, and are the backbone of his speculations on English, American, Indian, and French politics. 2 1 98. His aversion to abstract reasoning upon politics colours every page of his theoretical discussions. He is never tired of dilating upon this text. 'I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions,' he says, when speaking of the colonial troubles; 'I hate the very sound of them.' The discussion of abstract rights is 'the great Serbonian bog, 'twixt Damiata and Mount Casius old, where armies whole have sunk.' 'One sure symptom of an ill-conducted State,' he says, in the same connection, 'is the propensity of the people to resort to' theories. No constitution can be called good or bad in itself. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.' Even in the heat of his onslaught upon French revolutionists, he admits that there may be situations in which 'the purely democratic form will become necessary.' Therefore, any absolute system must be erroneous and mischievous. The men who drew the Petition of Right under Charles I.: were as familiar with theories about the right of man as Price and Sieyes; but they preferred to appeal to hereditary obligation. The doctrine that sovereignty originated from the people is a mere empty speculation, when in its proper sphere, and, therefore, asserts 'a position not denied, nor worth denying, or assenting to;' and the whole social contract theory is 'at best a confusion of judicial with civil principles.'" 6 99. When the metaphysical basis of political rights is thus summarily cleared away, the question occurs, what other foundation is to be laid? Passages may be found in Burke's writings where language is used superficially, resembling that of his antagonists. He speaks of the 'natural rights of mankind' as 'sacred things,' and even says that all power is 'a derogation from the natural equality of mankind at large,' 8 Burke, ii. 432, American Taxation.'' 2 Ib. iii. 74, 'Conciliation.' 9 and, therefore, to be used for their benefit. Elsewhere men have a natural right to the fruits of their industry, though not to a share of political power. Or, again, 'equity' is ranked with 'utility,' as the sole foundations of law, and equity 'grows out of the great rule of equality, which is founded upon our common nature, and which Philo, with propriety and beauty, calls the mother of justice.' 2 The truth of Christianity itself, he infers, is 'not so clear as this proposition, that all men, at least the majority of men in the society, ought to enjoy the common advantages of it.' 3 These transient deviations into the quasi-metaphysical language, when more closely examined, are easily intelligible. The natural equality of mankind, in Burke's mouth, is simply an expression of the axiom which must necessarily lie at the base of all utilitarian, as well as of all metaphysical, systems. He is protesting against the right of a minority to govern Ireland or India exclusively for its own interest; and to assert the rights of man in this sense is simply to lay down the principle acknowledged by all theorists, and equally evident on all methods of reasoning; that the happiness of the governed, and not the happiness of any particular class, is the legitimate end of government. As soon as the abstract theorist proceeds a step further, and would use his doctrine of equity,' or of 'natural rights,' to override the teaching of experience, he parts company with Burke. 100. His theory is admirably given in the 'Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.' The order in which we find ourselves is not, as the pseudo-Bolingbroke argues, a matter of arbitrary convention, nor is it to be condemned because it does not exhibit the mathematical symmetry of the a priori theorists. We may assume, he says, that the awful author of our being is the author of our place in the order of existence; and that, having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will, but according to his, he has, in and by that disposition, virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned to us. We have obligations to mankind at large, which are not in consequence of any special voluntary pact. They arise from the Ib. ix. 364, ib. 1 Burke, v. 121, 'Reflections.' |