supreme authority and to exercise it wisely. At any rate, Burke's most vivid descriptions of the growing wealth of America, his appeals to colonial loyalty, to English pre/cedents, to the advantages of magnanimity, to the folly of substituting arguments of geometrical accuracy'1 for reliance upon affection stimulated by common interest, were all thrown away as idle 'refining.' England stuck to its rights and the decision was made by the sword. 116. In this case, the abstract rights, against which Burke argued so consistently, were invoked on behalf of the central authority; and Burke had to argue not for the sanctity of authority, but for the necessity of limiting its claims by expediency. A very different application of these metaphysical doctrines was to come before him. He had laid down one great principle in the American controversy. When popular discontents have been very prevalent,' he says, 'it may well be affirmed and supported that there has been found something amiss in the constitution or in the conduct of governThe people have no interest in disorder. When they do wrong, it is their error and not their crime. But with the governing part of the state it is far otherwise. They certainly may act ill by design as well as by mistake.' 2 And, in confirmation of this theory, he quotes an admirable passage from Sully's memoirs, in which the great minister says that revolutions are never an effect of chance or of popular caprice. Pour la populace ce n'est jamais par envie d'attaquer qu'elle se soulève, mais par impatience de souffrir.' During the American troubles, Burke adhered steadily to this view. The French Revolution exposed the theory to a more trying test. Burke had proclaimed the responsibility of rulers to their subjects, and declared that discontent was a sufficient proof of misgovernment. The French people were about to enforce responsibility by the guillotine, and to justify their actions as a revolt against intolerable oppression. Would Burke apply the same test in this case? Would he admit that the force of the explosion testified to the severity of the previous compression? A people, he had said, was free when it thought itself free. Would that view justify the French, who showed most unmistakably that they considered themselves to be 1 Burke, iii: 112, Conciliation.' * Ib. ii. 224,' Present Discontents.' slaves? Should Burke, therefore, approve of this as of the former revolt, and agree with his political friends that a new era of liberty and happiness was dawning upon the world? The writings on the eloquence and wisdom of which his reputation chiefly rests gave an answer to these questions which scandalised many of his former friends, and have exposed him to the imputations of inconsistency, if not of political apostacy. And yet they are but expansions of the doctrines which he had previously expounded. He saw in it Out of the 117. The outbreak of the French Revolution affected Burke's imagination with extraordinary force. something strange, abnormal, and tremendous. tomb of the murdered monarchy in France,' he exclaims in one of the letters on a 'Regicide Peace,' 'has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straightforward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means; that hideous phantom overpowered those who could not believe it was possible she should at all exist, except on the principles which habit, rather than nature, had persuaded them were necessary to their own particular welfare, and to their own ordinary means of action. Burke looked upon the Revolution with that kind of shudder with which man acknowledges the presence of a being believed to be supernatural. All ordinary rules seemed to be suspended. The earth trembled, and the strongest barriers gave way. No wonder if, in presence of the spectre, Burke's whole nature, already worn by many failures, disappointments, and vexations, reeled under the excitement. Nowhere, indeed, is his intellectual power more marked than in the outpourings of his anti-revolutionary wrath. But the eloquence passes into virulence. The 'Reflections' published in 1790 are still philosophical in tone, though shot with gorgeous rhetoric; but, as the horror increases, his passion rises, till, in the letters on a 'Regicide Peace' (1796), he seems almost to be, foaming at the mouth, and to be speaking with the fury of inspiration rather than with the energy of earthly apprehension. 1 Burke, viii. 83. 6 118. In January 1791 he already regards the leaders as mere quacks and impostors,' and the people as madmen, who, 'like other madmen,' must be subdued in order to be cured.2 The Revolution, a few months later, is declared to be a foul, monstrous thing, wholly out of the course of moral nature;' it was 'generated in treachery, frauds, and falsehood, hypocrisy, and unprovoked murder.'" As he goes on he strains his whole power of invective to gratify the vehemence of his hatred. Jacobinism is incarnate evil; it is atheism by establishment; it makes a 'profane apotheosis of monsters whose vices and crimes have no parallel amongst men.' Jacobins are animated by 'determined hostility to the human race.' 5 They have deliberately established a system of manners 'the most licentious, prostitute, and abandoned that ever has been known, and at the same time the most coarse, rude, savage, and ferocious.' And, after a passage in which he labours to prove that every moral principle is intentionally violated by these monsters, the virtue of the nation designedly corrupted, family affections perverted, and marriage made more degrading than any connection which would be tolerated at a London brothel," he finds the only fitting climax to his furious invective by charging them with cannibalism. He recurs more than once to this epithet. The society thus formed resembles that of a 'den of outlaws upon a doubtful frontier; of a lewd tavern for the revels and debauches of banditti, assassins, bravoes, smugglers, and their more desperate paramours, mixed with bombastic players, the refuse and rejected offal of strolling theatres, puffing out ill-sorted verses about virtue, mixed with the licentious and blasphemous songs proper to the brutal and hardened course of life belonging to that sort of wretches.' The fall of Robespierre only added one brutal and treacherous murder the more. He would rather think less hardly of the dead ruffian than associate with the living. 'I could rather bear the stench of the gibbeted murderer than the society of the bloody felons who yet annoy the world.' One seems to see the face of the 1 Burke, vi. 10, 'To a Member of the National Assembly.' a Ib. vi. 85, 'Appeal.' ▲ Ib. viii. 171, 'Regicide Peace.' • Ib. viii. 172, ib. 6 Ib. 7 Ib. viii. 175, ib. • Ib. ix. 67, ib. orator convulsed; he pants, struggles, and gasps for utterance; and in the whirlwind of his passion, tears all propriety and common sense to rags. If words could blast, the French revolutionists would have been scorched and shrivelled by his fury. 119. Why did the wisest politician of the day thus throw the reins on the neck of his eloquence? Something must be set down to the excitement of the struggle; something to the pain inflicted by the sharp severance of all ties; much, in the later writings, to the consequences of the cruel domestic loss which shadowed his declining years with so deep a gloom. The actual atrocities of the Revolution increased his horror, but from the very first he saw the glare of hell in the light which others took to herald the dawn of the millennium. Nor, indeed, can it be doubted that Burke's antipathy to the Revolution was based upon a profound and reasoned conviction of the utter falsity of all leading principles. Good steady-going Whigs might fancy that the French were merely a set of interesting converts to the doctrines of the Petition of Right and the Revolution of 1688. Men like Priestley and Price fancied that reason was revealing itself to mankind, and dispersing the antiquated prejudices of centuries. Burke's insight was deeper and truer. He saw with the revolutionists that the phenomenon did not signify a mere adjustment of an old political balance, and the adoption of a few constitutional nostrums. A new doctrine was spreading from the schools into the mass of the people, and threatening the very foundations of the old social order. Moreover, he saw through the flimsy nature of the logic which it was supposed to embody; and recognised the emptiness of the predictions of an instant advent of peace, justice, and goodwill. He had weighed Rousseau's metaphysics and found them grievously wanting; and what to others appeared to be a startling revelation of new truths were to him a fitful rehabilitation of outworn fallacies. There was, indeed, something which he did not see; but to appreciate his error we must first do justice to the width of his view. 120. The influence of a revolution which aims at the upsetting a government may be confined to the place of its birth. A revolution which aims at propagating a new order of ideas 3 has an interest for the whole world. In the 'Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,' Burke expresses his dread of a fashion proceeding upon speculative grounds.' 'A theory concerning government,' as was now plain, might become a cause of fanaticism as much as a dogma in religion.' And in such cases, calm cannot be regained by the removal of grievances; for monarchy, not a monarch, is assailed. Rather, indeed, the principles were assailed upon which the whole social order rested. Burke would say, when war had begun, it is a religious war'2-not a war between different religious sects, but a war between all the religious sects and the enemies of all sects. He deliberately accepted the consequences and preached a crusade. We were at war with an armed doctrine; and such a war, as he rightly inferred, must be a long one. Indeed it is going on still, for Burke erred in supposing that it could be finally decided by the bayonet and the cannon. Assuming, however, that ideas could be put down by the strong hand of force, Burke's zeal was but the natural consequence of his creed. The new doctrines, as he understood them, were nothing less than the direct antithesis of all which he regarded as fundamental and sacred axioms. A passage which he quotes in the 'Reflections' from Rabaud de St. Etienne gives the essence of the revolutionary creed : Tous les établissements en France couronnent le malheur du peuple; pour les rendre heureux, il faut les renouveler, changer les idées; changer les loix; changer les mœurs; changer les hommes; changer les choses; changer les mots. . . . tout détruire; oui, tout détruire, puisque tout est à recréer.' To Burke, with whom prescription was the last word of politics; whose ideal statesman was the man who best combined the old with the new; who would guide every step by precedent, even in the destruction of abuses; who would not reform at all unless he could reform with equity; such a proposal seemed as monstrous as a plan for reforming the Church by abolishing a belief in God. Feebler elements, indeed, blend with his general argument. He verges, 1 Burke, vi. 239, and see vii. 13 ('French Affairs'), where the Revolution is compared to the Reformation. Ib. viii. 98, Regicide Peace.' 4 Ib. viii. 150, ib. 2 Ib. vii. 174, 'Policy of the Allies.' See, for example, the proposals in the speech on Conciliation with America. |