The Press. — London, England, 1858-02-20 00:00:00

■ it tra u rt. History of the Life and Times of Edmund Burke. By Thomas Macknight. Vols. I. and 11. London : Chapman and Hall. ABOUT ten miles from the city of Oxford, and some two or three from the little town of Watlington, on a wide, level space hut recently inclosed, and bounded by the rising slopes of the long Chiltern Hills, stands a small and unpretending column. But the stranger, should he inquire the name of the adjoining village, would at once recognise that he stood upon historic ground. Tho village is Chal grove, and within a few yards of that unim posing monument Hampden received his mortal wound. This event is recorded on the stone in language of simple and touching dignity ; but one sentence is, in our opinion, especially significant. " Here," we are told, " fell John Hampden, fighting for the free " monarchy and ancient liberties of England." Whether it was really for these objects that Hampden died we care not now to inquire, but the words at least show for what the noblemen and gentlemen who erected this memorial believe that he ought to have died —our ancient liberties and our free monarchy ! This we are to accept as the modern Whig construction of the resistance to King Charles I. What then, it may be proper to ask, was ' our free monarchy, and what were our ancient liberties? If they are to be judged by the causes which produced the Civil War, an an• swer is not difficult. The lil , futies were free dom from arbitrary taxatio:. and arbitrary imprisonment; the 1. oloirch.s was one in which the sovereign was u , ..t the nresentative of a faction. And if they are to be judged from the general tone of the inscription we have quoted, there can be no doubt that two dif ferent things are meant by the two phrases we have quoted. It is too terse and well written for us to believe that its composers would have been guilty of a mere sounding piece of tautology; and we may therefore fairly assume that the freedom of the subject did not, in the minds of emi nent parliamentary leaders, exclude or seem inconsistent with the freedom of the sovereign. That such still continues to be the theory of the Whig party we are entitled to presume from the opinion recently put for ward by an eminent Whig statesman in his essay on Parliamentary Reform. Earl Grey anticipates with gloom the hour when Minis• tars shall be the servants of the House of Commons, and not the servants of the Crown. Those persons who suppose that Boling broke's political conduct was based on the theory of divine right and passive obedience must be wonderfully unacquainted with his writings. Regarding the monarchical form of government as a settled question in England, be casts about to find the best examples of it. His ideal was one in which the Crown should have sufficient independence to be above the necessity of truckling to any party, and the country sufficiently fortified by popular insti tutions to render a persistence in misgovern ment for any number of years impossible. Under this system the Ministers of the Crown might be chosen from the Whigs and Tories alternately, as popular feeling should require —the King exercising his more stable autho rity either to repress ebullitions of party ani mosity, to check precipitate legislation, or to carry through difficult measures. The spec tacle of a Government in which the King re signed all his authority to the chief of a faction who was notoriously corrupt and rapacious, lent additional point to his assertion of these views ; and it must have become perfectly evi• dent by the middle of the last century to all men who did not wish to see the English monarchy superseded, that decisive measures were necessary to preserve it from total col lapse. With the accession •of George 111. an oppor tunity presented itself. Inveterate evils de mand strong remedies. And we doubt if his Government went a step farther than might fairly have been expected from the vices of the preceding reigns. A strong reaction had met in, Jultnaon aid Goldsmith, Gibbon and THE PRESS, FEIm.uARY 20, 1858. Hume, men of the most coLflicting tempera ments, show how the political situation was regarded by the leading literary men of the day. The elections were all in the King's favour; and tile general feeling of the nation showed plainly enough that, having secured their "ancient liberties," they were now hear tily bent on confirming their " free monarchy." The duration of this sentiment proves that it was not one of the mere transient vicissitudes of a fickle populace. The present generation know well how deeply and widely the English people were impressed by the character of George 111. And on these great national issues the voice of the people, tested for nearly a century, must be accepted as final. The party called " the King's friends " were only under one name what Lord Grey himself desiderates under another. The class of men whom he wishes to see introduced into nu ll liatnent* might not inaptly be designated as Minister's " friends." Members chosen by no party and pledged only to support the Minister would occupy virtually the same position as men pledged only to support the King. Both are equally subject to the indignation of Par liament, since no man can plead the King's command in justification of his conduct. And though we cannot altogether approve of the " King's friends," we regard them as a necessity of the period—exceptional instru ments required by a peculiar crisis—an excu sable prop to the royal authority while re gaining its lawful strength. The loss of the American 'colonies during the first twenty years of George lll.'s !reign proves nothing against the system. It only, indeed, proves that our generals were incom petent. It is admitted that if a Clive or a Wellington had commanded in the earlier stages of the war, resistance must have been crushed. But even if it proved that Ministers were wholly in the wrong, that is merely an imputation on their personal incapacity. That they should persevere in a particular policy against so small a minority in Parliament and with so general a support out of doors, does not prove that the King was a tyrant and that they were his tools ; and should least of all be repre hended by those who have applauded Sir Robert Walpole for resisting the demands of a much more numerous opposition. If Walpole was right in resisting a large parliamentary minority with the people against him, Lord North was doubly right in resisting a small parliamentary minority with the people on his own side. George lll.'s system, therefore, if we look at it ci priori, was, redressing the balance of the Constitution—if a posteriori, it was acting as others had acted before it. Now, it is just the political situation of the day that Mr. Macknight totally fails to com prehend. He looks neither backwards nor forwards. He does not understand that George Government was a natural result of George ll.'s. He shuts his eyes to the fact that the people of England endorsed it. Ho keeps his eyes fixed on two principal figures— Edmund Burke and his antagonist of the moment. Without looking into the true nature of the struggle, he i 3 content with determining which dealt the sharpest blows ; and very frequently claims motives for his hero by which we do not believe that Burke was sincerely actuated. Burke saw how Ministers were bungling about America, and he attacked them accordingly. Bui, he used every legitimate party weapon. And the fus tian rant about corruption and tyranny in which Mr. Macknight indulges, under the idea that he is speaking the real sentiments of Burke, can only raise a smile. We have intended these remarks as a sort of commentary on the general view of the period adopted by our author. We must now proceed to examine it a little more in detail. Mr. Macknight's praises of Burke are so ex travagantly fulsome as to defeat their own end. That statesman, whose memory we venerate so much that we could wish it had been spared these gaudy and tasteless eulogies, had faults and committed errors—though so few, that nothing but this disproportionate and one sided picture of him could have caused them to be exhumed. Never was greater need of the warning given by the shepherd in Virgil : • Vide Essay,pasein. • that great c a i v n e g r it t e, t n i e le vat p i o n s e s e i e l a l t le ina d ia a l l i i n geeara f t u o tu r Aut si ultra placitum laudarit, b accare frontem' s. To man's reputation we shall endeavour briefly to point out the chief of his bi ograp h er ' s ex. aggerations—premising at the same time that it is impossible to exhaust them, and that the whole book is one huge hyperbole. And first on the subject of Burke's American policy—for the measures of the Rockingham Cabinet were virtually his—it is, to say the least of it, open to doubt whethe r Lord Chatham was not quite right in his reprobation of the Declaratory Act. That act, as our readers may remember, was passed during the short Administration of Lord Rockingham in 1766. The gist of it was to affirm that the King and Parliament of this country possessed the indefeasible right of taxing the British colonies. The Ministry did not intend to carry it into effect; but it was thought that with the repeal of the Stamp Act, another of Lord Rockingham's measures, it was desirable to couple some express reservations of the imperial right. Now it appears to us that this measure was likely to sink deeper into the minds of the Americans than even a vigorous enforcement of the obnoxious impost. Thoughtful men would be alarmed by its very moderation. They would feel that it was not an emanation of passion or tyranny, but the calm assertion of a principle by liberal and patriotic states men, from which they would never be likely to recede, and which d fortiori would always be supported by the country. If not acted upon now it would always constitute an in vincible precedent against them, and they would be far more likely to attribute its inac tivity to want of preparation for enforcing it than to any sentiment of clemency towards themselves. They would thus be supplied with two distinct motives for a determined re sistance—one the certainty that generations must now elapse before their immunity could be peacefully secured,. the other the suspicion that the present moment was as favourable for a trial of arms as was ever likely to present itself. Nor was Burke's reply to his great antagonist of less dubious soundness than the expediency of the act itself. We cannot, said Lord Chatham, tax those who are not repre sented. Neither, said Bailie, are nine-tenths of the British people represented. Now this is an argument which might pass muster in debate, but we wonder to see it gravely repro duced here. Quite a sufficient number of tax payers are represented in this country to pro tect the common interests. But we should rather say that in Chatham's sense of the word the whole nation is represented, and that Burke's argument rests only on the dexte rously equivocal use of a technical term. Ho replied to an opponent who used it of classes, by using it of numbers—an application of the word he would have been the first to repudiate in his cooler moments. Another passage in Burke's career which Mr. Macknight has belauded with his usual want of discrimination is the introduction of his Administrative Reform Bill. This was certainly a mere party movement, while some of its provisions involved the most insulting interference with the royal household. On the subject of Burke's oratory we cannot say that Mr. Macknight tires us, because he "goes on refining," for ho draws not a single distinction. All his hero's efforts are on an equally grand scale ; superlative adjectives aro applied to every speech in succession, and a better collection of English synonyms could be made out of these two volumes than any other work we know of equal bulk. Ho is never tired of insisting upon Burke's wit, which, he tells us, Dr. Johnson questioned. But, though it cannot be denied that Burke had great wit of a certain kind (witness his famous pun upon Wilkes, not recorded by Mr. Macknightd, we should doubt if it was of that sort which set the House of Commons in a roar. Cer tainly the specimens which Mr. Mackuight has selected are anything but proof that he is a competent judge upon the subject. On the other hand, he, of course, depreciates all his opponents, of which the following passage is a specimen : But even on this night Burke, as usual, had his for. Wedderburne undertook to defend Grenville, whom ia • 18 , 1