# Edmund Burke: The Man and His Times

There is no man anywhere to be found in the annals of Parliament who seems more thoroughly to belong to England than does Edmund Burke, indubitable Irishman though he was. His words, now that they have cast off their brogue, ring out the authentic voice of the best political thought of the English race. “If any man ask me,” he cries, “what a free government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so,—and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of the matter.” “Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty adheres in some sensible object;106 and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness.” These sentences, taken from his writings on American affairs, might serve as a sort of motto of the practical spirit of our race in affairs of government. Look further, and you shall see how his imagination presently illuminates and suffuses his maxims of practical sagacity with a fine blaze of insight, a keen glow of feeling, in which you recognize that other masterful quality of the race, its intense and elevated conviction. “My hold on the colonies,” he declares, “is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are the ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government,—they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it once be understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation,—and the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. So long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign power of this country as the sanctuary107 of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you.” “We cannot, I fear,” he says proudly of the colonies, “we cannot falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.” Does not your blood stir at these passages? And is it not because, besides loving what is nobly written, you feel that every word strikes towards the heart of the things that have made your blood what it has proved to be in the history of our race?
These passages, it should be remembered, are taken from a speech in Parliament and from a letter written by Burke to his constituents in Bristol. He had no thought to make them permanent sentences of political philosophy. They were meant only to serve an immediate purpose in the advancement of contemporaneous policy. They were framed for the circumstances of the time. They speak out spontaneously amidst matter of the108 moment: and they could be matched everywhere throughout his pamphlets and public utterances. No other similar productions that I know of have this singular, and as it were inevitable, quality of permanency. They have emerged from the mass of political writings put forth in their time with their freshness untouched, their significance unobscured, their splendid vigor unabated. It is this that we marvel at, that they should remain modern and timely, purged of every element and seed of decay. The man who could do this must needs arrest our attention and challenge our inquiry. We wish to account for him as we should wish to penetrate the secrets of the human spirit and know the springs of genius.
Of the public life of Burke we know all that we could wish. He became so prominent a figure in the great affairs of his day that even the casual observer cannot fail to discern the main facts of his career; while the close student can follow him year by year through every step of his service. But his private life was withdrawn from general scrutiny in an unusual degree. He manifested always a marked reserve about his individual and domestic affairs, deliberately, it would seem, shielding them from impertinent inquiry. He loved the privacy of life in a great city, where one may escape109 notice in the crowd and enjoy a grateful “freedom from remark and petty censure.” “Though I have the honor to represent Bristol,” he said to Boswell, “I should not like to live there; I should be obliged to be so much upon my good behavior. In London a man may live in splendid society at one time, and in frugal retirement at another, without animadversion. There, and there alone, a man’s house is truly his castle, in which he can be in perfect safety from intrusion whenever he pleases. I never shall forget how well this was expressed to me one day by Mr. Meynell: ‘The chief advantage of London,’ he said, ‘is, that a man is always so near his burrow.’” Burke took to his burrow often enough to pique our curiosity sorely. This singular, high-minded adventurer had some queer companions, we know: questionable fellows, whose life he shared, perhaps with a certain Bohemian relish, without sharing their morals or their works. It seems as incongruous that such wisdom and public spirit as breathe through his writings should have come to his thought in such company as that an exquisite idyll like Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield” should have been conceived and written in squalid garrets. But neither Burke nor Goldsmith had been born into such comradeships or such surroundings. Doubtless, as sometimes110 happens, their minds kept their first freshness, taking no taint from the world that touched them on every hand in their manhood, after their minds had been formed. Goldsmith, as everybody knows, remained an innocent all his life, a naïf and pettish boy amidst sophisticated men; and Burke too, notwithstanding his dignity and commanding intellectual habit, shows sometimes a touch of the same simplicity, a like habit of unguarded self-revelation. ’Twas their form, no doubt, of that impulsive and ingenuous quality which we observe in all Irishmen, and which we often mistake for simplicity. ’Twas a flavor of their native soil. It was also something more and better than that, however. Not every Irishman displays such hospitality for direct and simple images of truth as these men showed, for that is characteristic only of the open and unsophisticated mind,—the mind that has kept pure and open eyes. Not that Burke always sees the truth; he is even deeply prejudiced often, and there are some things that he cannot see. But the passion that dominates him when he is wrong, as when he is right, is a natural passion, born with him, not acquired from a disingenuous world that mistakes interest for justice. His nature tells in everything. It is stock of his character which he contributes to the subjects his mind handles. He111 is trading always with the original treasure he brought over with him at the first. He has never impaired his genuineness, or damaged his principles.
Just where Burke got his generous constitution and predisposition to enlightened ways of thinking it is not easy to see. Certainly Richard Burke, his brother, the only other member of the family whose character we discern distinctly, had a quite opposite bent. The father was a steady Dublin attorney, a Protestant, and a man, so far as we know, of solid but not brilliant parts. The mother had been a Miss Nagle, of a Roman Catholic family, which had multiplied exceedingly in County Cork. Of the home and its life we know singularly little. We are told that many children were born to the good attorney, but we hear of only four of them that grew to maturity, Garret, Edmund, Richard, and a sister best known to Edmund’s biographers as Mrs. French. Edmund, the second son, was born on the twelfth of January, 1729, in the second year of the reign of George II., Robert Walpole being chief minister of the Crown. How he fared or what sort of lad he was for the first twelve years of his life we have no idea. We only know that in the year 1741, being then twelve years old, he was sent with his brothers Garret and112 Richard to the school of one Abraham Shackleton, a most capable and exemplary Quaker, at Ballytore, County Kildare, to get, in some two years’ time, what he himself always accounted the best part of his education. The character of the good master at Ballytore told upon the sensitive boy, who all his life through had an eye for such elevation and calm force of quiet rectitude as are to be seen in the best Quakers; and with Richard Shackleton, the master’s son, he formed a friendship from which no vicissitude of his subsequent career ever loosened his heart a whit. All his life long the ardent, imaginative statesman, deeply stirred as he was by the momentous agitation of affairs,—swept away as he was from other friends,—retained his love for the grave, retired, almost austere, but generous and constant man who had been his favorite schoolfellow. It is but another evidence of his unfailing regard for whatever was steady, genuine, and open to the day in character and conduct.
At fourteen he left Ballytore and was entered at Trinity College, Dublin. Those were days when youths went to college tender, before they had become too tough to take impressions readily. But Burke, even at that callow age, cannot be said to have been teachable. He learned a vast deal, indeed, but he did not learn much of it from his113 nominal masters at Trinity. Apparently Master Shackleton, at Ballytore, had enabled him to find his own mind. His four years at college were years of wide and eager reading, but not years of systematic and disciplinary study. With singular, if not exemplary, self-confidence, he took his education into his own hands. He got at the heart of books through their spirit, it would seem, rather than through their grammar. He sought them out for what they could yield him in thought, rather than for what they could yield him in the way of exact scholarship. That this boy should have had such an appetite for the world’s literature, old and new, need not surprise us. Other lads before and since have found big libraries all too small for them. What should arrest our attention is, the law of mind disclosed in the habits of such lads: the quick and various curiosity of original minds, and particularly of imaginative minds. They long for matter to expand themselves upon: they will climb any dizzy height from which an exciting prospect is promised: it is their joy by some means to see the world of men and affairs. Burke set out as a boy to see the world that is contained in books; and in his journeyings he met a man after his own heart in Cicero, the copious orator and versatile man of affairs,—the only man at all like114 Burke for richness, expansiveness, and variety of mind in all the ancient world. Cicero he conned as his master and model. And then, having had his fill for the time of discursive study and having completed also his four years of routine, he was graduated, taking his degree in the spring of 1748.
His father had entered him as a student at the Middle Temple in 1747, meaning that he should seek the prizes of his profession in England rather than in the little world at home; but he did not take up his residence in London until 1750, by which time he had attained his majority. What he did with the intervening two years, his biographers do not at all know, and it is idle to speculate, being confident, as we must, that he quite certainly did whatever he pleased. He did the same when he went up to London to live his terms at the Temple. “The law,” he declared to Parliament more than twenty years afterwards, “is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences,—a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion;” and, although himself a person “very happily born” in respect of all natural powers, he felt that the life115 of a lawyer would inevitably confine his roving mind within intolerably narrow limits. He learned the law, as he learned everything else, with an eye to discovering its points of contact with affairs, its intimate connections with the structure and functions of human society; and, studying it thus, he made his way to so many of its secrets, won so firm a mastery of its central principles, as always to command the respect and even the admiration of lawyers. But the good attorney in Dublin was sorely disappointed. This was not what he had wanted. The son in whom he had centred his hopes preferred the life of the town to systematic study in his chambers; wrote for the papers instead of devoting himself to the special profession he had been sent to master. “Of his leisure time,” said the “Annual Register” just after his death, “of his leisure time much was spent in the company of Mrs. Woffington, a celebrated actress, whose conversation was not less sought by men of wit and genius than by men of pleasure.”
We know very little about the life of Burke for the ten years, 1750–60, his first ten years in England,—except that he did not diligently apply himself to his nominal business, the study of the law; and between the years 1752 and 1757 his biographers can show hardly one authentic trace of116 his real life. They know neither his whereabouts nor his employments. Only one scrap of his correspondence remains from those years to give us any hint of the time. Even Richard Shackleton, his invariable confidant and bosom friend, hears never a word from him during that period, and is told afterwards only that his correspondent has been “sometimes in London, sometimes in remote parts of the country, sometimes in France,” and will “shortly, please God, be in America.” He disappears a poor law student, under suspicion of his father for systematic neglect of duty; when he reappears he is married to the daughter of a worthy physician and is author of two philosophical works which are attracting a great deal of attention. We have reason to believe that, in the mean time, he did as much writing as they would take for the booksellers; we know that he frequented the London theatres and several of the innumerable debating clubs with which nether London abounded, whetting his faculties, it is said, upon those of a certain redoubtable baker. He haunted the galleries and lobbies of the House of Commons. His health showed signs of breaking, and Dr. Nugent took him from his lodgings in the Temple to his own house and allowed him to fall in love with his daughter. Partly for the sake of his health, perhaps, but more117 particularly, no doubt, for the sake of satisfying an eager mind and a restless habit, he wandered off to “remote parts of the country” and to France, with one William Burke for company, a man either related to him or not related to him, he did not himself know which. In 1755, a long-suffering patience at length exhausted, his father shut the home treasury against him; and then,—’twas the next year,—he published two philosophical works and married Miss Nugent.
One might say, no doubt, that this is an intelligible enough account of a young fellow’s life between twenty and thirty: and that we can fill in the particulars for ourselves. We have known other young Irishmen of restless and volatile natures, and need make no mystery of this one. Goldsmith, too, disappeared, we remember, in that same decade, making show of studying medicine in Edinburgh, but not really studying it, and then wandering off to the Continent, and going it afoot in light-hearted, happy-go-lucky fashion through the haunts both of the gay Latin races and the sad Teutonic, greatly to the delectation, no doubt, of the natives,—for all the world loves an innocent Irishman, with his heart upon his sleeve. ’Twould all be very plain indeed if we found in Burke that light-hearted vein. But we do not.118 The fellow is sober and strenuous from the first, studying the things he was not sent to study with even too intent application, to the damage of his health, and looking through the pleasures of the town to the heart of the nation’s affairs. He was a grave youth, evidently, gratifying his mind rather than his senses in the pleasures he sought; and when he emerges from obscurity it is first to give us a touch of his quality in the matter of intellectual amusement, and then to turn at once to the serious business of the discussion of affairs to which the rest of his life was to be devoted.
The two books which he gave the world in 1756 were “A Vindication of Natural Society,” a satirical piece in the manner of Bolingbroke, and “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” which he had begun when he was nineteen and had since reconsidered and revised. Bolingbroke, not finding revealed religion to his taste, had written a “Vindication of Natural Religion” which his vigorous and elevated style and skillful dialectic had done much to make plausible. Burke put forth his “Vindication of Natural Society” as a posthumous work of the late noble lord, and so skillfully veiled the satirical character of the imitation as wholly to deceive some very grave critics, who thought they119 could discern Bolingbroke’s flavor upon the tasting. For the style, too, they took to be unmistakably Bolingbroke’s own. It had all his grandeur and air of distinction: it had his vocabulary and formal outline of phrase. The imitation was perfect. And yet if you will scrutinize it, the style is not Bolingbroke’s, except in a trick or two, but Burke’s. It seems Bolingbroke’s rather because it is cold and without Burke’s usual moral fervor than because it is rich and majestic and various. There is no great formal difference between Burke’s style and Bolingbroke’s: but there is a great moral and intellectual difference. When Burke is not in earnest there is perhaps no important difference at all. And in the “Vindication of Natural Society” Burke is not in earnest. The book is not, indeed, a parody, and its satirical quality is much too covert to make it a successful satire. Much that Burke urges against civil society he could urge in good faith, and his mind works soberly upon it. It is only the main thesis that he does not seriously mean. The rest he might have meant as Bolingbroke would have meant it.
The essay on The Sublime and Beautiful, though much admired by so great a master as Lessing, has not worn very well as philosophy. It is full, however, of acute and interesting observations, and is120 adorned in parts with touches of rich color put on with the authentic strokes of a master. We preserve it, perhaps, only because Burke wrote it; and yet when we read it we feel inclined to pronounce it worth keeping for its own sake.
Both these essays were apprentice work. Burke was trying his hand. They make us the more curious about the conditions of what must have been a notable apprenticeship. Young Burke must have gone to school to the world in a way worth knowing. But we cannot know, and that’s the end on ’t. Probably even William Burke, Edmund’s companion, could give us no very satisfactory account of the matter. The explanation lay in what he thought and not in what he did as he knocked about the world.
The company Burke kept was as singular as his talents, though scarcely so eminent. We speak of “Burke,” but the London of his day spoke of “the Burkes,” meaning William, who may or may not have been Edmund’s kinsman, Edmund himself, and Richard, Edmund’s younger brother, who had followed him to London to become, to say truth, an adventurer emphatically not of the elevated sort. Edmund was destined to become the leader of England’s thought in more than one great matter of policy, and has remained a master among all who121 think profoundly upon public affairs; but William was for long the leader and master of “the Burkes.” He was English born; had been in Westminster School; and had probably just come out from Christ Church, Oxford, when he became the companion of Edmund’s wanderings. He was a man of intellect and literary power enough to be deemed the possible author of the “Letters of Junius;” he was born moreover with an eye for the ways of the world, and could push his own fortunes with an unhesitating hand. It was he who first got public office, and it was he who formed the influential connections which got Edmund into Parliament. He himself entered the House at the same time, and remained there, a useful party member, for some eight years. He made those from whom he sought favors dislike him for his audacity in demanding the utmost, and more than the utmost, that he could possibly hope to get; but he seems to have made those whom he served love him with a very earnest attachment. He was self-seeking; but he was capable of generosity, to the point of self-sacrifice even, when he wished to help his friend. He early formed a partnership with Richard Burke in immense stock-jobbing speculations in the securities of the East India Company; but he also formed a literary partnership with Edmund in the preparation122 of a sketch of the European settlements in America, and made himself respected as a strong party writer in various pamphlets on questions of the day. He could unite the two brothers by speculating with the one and thinking with the other.
Such were “the Burkes.” Edmund’s home was always the home also of the other two, whenever they wished to make it so; the strongest personal affection, avowed always by Edmund with his characteristic generous warmth, bound the three men together; their purses they had in common. Edmund was not expected, apparently, to take part in the speculations which held William and Richard together; something held him aloof to which they consented,—some natural separateness of mind and character which they evidently accepted and respected. There can hardly be said to have been any aloofness of disposition on Edmund’s part. There is something in an Irishman,—even in an Irishman who holds himself to the strictest code of upright conduct,—which forbids his acting as moral censor upon others. He can love a man none the less for generous and manly qualities because that man does what he himself would not do. Burke, moreover, had an easy standard all his life about accepting money favors. He seems to have felt somehow that his intense and whole-hearted123 devotion to his friends justified gifts and forgiven loans of money from them. He shared the prosperity of his kinsmen without compunction, using what he got most liberally for the assistance of others; and when their fortunes came to a sudden ruin, he helped them with what he had. We ought long ago to have learned that the purest motives and the most elevated standards of conduct may go along with a singular laxness of moral detail in some men; and that such characters will often constrain us to love them to the point of justifying everything that they ever did. Edmund Burke’s close union with William and Richard does not present the least obstacle to our admiration for the noble qualities of mind and heart which he so conspicuously possessed, or make us for a moment doubt the thorough disinterestedness of his great career.
Burke’s marriage was a very happy one. Mrs. Burke’s thoroughly sweet temperament acted as a very grateful and potent charm to soothe her husband’s mind when shaken by the agitations of public affairs; her quiet capacity for domestic management relieved him of many small cares which might have added to his burdens. Her affection satisfied his ardent nature. He speaks of her in his will as “my entirely beloved and incomparable wife,” and124 every glimpse we get of their home life confirms the estimate. After his marriage the most serious part of his intellectual life begins; the commanding passion of his mind is disclosed. He turns away from philosophical amusements to public affairs. In 1757 appeared “An Account of the European Settlements in America,” which William Burke had doubtless written, but which Edmund had almost certainly radically revised; and Edmund himself published the first part of “An Abridgment of the History of England” which he never completed. In 1758, he proposed to Dodsley, the publisher, a yearly volume, to be known as the “Annual Register,” which should chronicle and discuss the affairs of England and the Continent. It was the period of the Seven Years’ War, which meant for England a sharp and glorious contest with France for the possession of America. Burke was willing to write the annals of the critical year 1758 for a hundred pounds; and so, in 1759, the first volume of the “Annual Register” appeared; and the plan then so wisely conceived has yielded its annual volume to the present day. Burke never acknowledged his connection with this great work,—he never publicly recognized anything he had done upon contract for the publishers,—but it is quite certain that for very many years his was the presiding and planning125 mind in the production of the “Register.” For the first few years of its life he probably wrote the whole of the record of events with his own hand. It was a more useful apprenticeship than that in philosophy. It gave him an intimate acquaintance with affairs which must have served as a direct preparation for the great contributions he was destined to make to the mind and policy of the Whig party.
But this, even in addition to other hack work for the booksellers, did not keep Burke out of pecuniary straits. He sought, but failed to get, an appointment as consul at Madrid, using the interest of Dr. Markham, William’s master at Westminster School; and then he engaged himself as a sort of private secretary or literary attendant to William Gerard Hamilton, whom he served, apparently to the almost entire exclusion of all other employments, for some four years, going with him for a season to Ireland, where Hamilton for a time held the appointment of Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. Hamilton is described by one of Burke’s friends as “a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, cankered-hearted, envious reptile,” and Mr. Morley says that there is “not a word too many nor too strong in the description.” At any rate, Burke’s proud spirit presently revolted from further service, and126 he threw up a pension of three hundred pounds which Hamilton had obtained for him rather than retain any connection with the man, or remain under any sort of obligation to him. In the mean time, however, his relations with Hamilton had put him in the way of meeting many public men of weight and influence, and he had gotten his first direct introduction to the world of affairs.
It was 1764 when he shook himself free from this connection. 1764 is a year to be marked in English literary annals. It was in the spring of that year that that most celebrated of literary clubs was formed at the Turk’s Head Tavern, Gerrard Street, Soho, by notable good company: Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Gibbon, Dr. Barnard, Beauclerk, Langton,—we know them all; for has not Boswell given us the freedom of the Club and made us delighted participants in its conversations and diversions? Into this company Burke was taken at once. His writings had immediately attracted the attention of such men as these, and had promptly procured him an introduction into literary society. His powers told nowhere more brilliantly than in conversation. “It is when you come close to a man in conversation,” said Dr. Johnson, “that you discover what his real abilities are. To make a127 speech in an assembly is a sort of knack. Now I honor Thurlow; Thurlow is a fine fellow, he fairly puts his mind to yours.” There can be no disputing the dictum of the greatest master of conversation: and the admirer of Burke must be willing to accept it, at any rate for the nonce, for Johnson admitted that Burke invariably put him on his mettle. “That fellow,” he exclaimed, “calls forth all my powers!” “Burke’s talk,” he said, “is the ebullition of his mind; he does not talk from a desire of distinction, but because his mind is full; he is never humdrum, never unwilling to talk, nor in haste to leave off.” The redoubtable doctor loved a worthy antagonist in the great game of conversation, and he always gave Burke his ungrudging admiration. When he lay dying, Burke visited his bedside, and, finding Johnson very weak, anxiously expressed the hope that his presence cost him no inconvenience. “I must be in a wretched state indeed,” cried the great-hearted old man, “when your company would not be a delight to me.” It was short work for Burke to get the admiration of the company at the Turk’s Head. But he did much more than that: he won their devoted affection. Goldsmith said that Burke wound his way into a subject like a serpent; but he made his way straight into the hearts of his friends.128 His powers are all of a piece: his heart is inextricably mixed up with his mind: his opinions are immediately transmuted into convictions: he does not talk for distinction, because he does not use his mind for the mere intellectual pleasure of it, but because he also deeply feels what he thinks. He speaks without calculation, almost impulsively.
That is the reason why we can be so sure of the essential purity of his nature from the character of his writings. They are not purely intellectual productions: there is no page of abstract reasoning to be found in Burke. His mind works upon concrete objects, and he speaks always with a certain passion, as if his affections were involved. He is irritated by opposition, because opposition in the field of affairs, in which his mind operates, touches some interest that is dear to him. Noble generalizations, it is true, everywhere broaden his matter: there is no more philosophical writer in English in the field of politics than Burke. But look, and you shall see that his generalizations are never derived from abstract premises. The reasoning is upon familiar matter of to-day. He is simply taking questions of the moment to the light, holding them up to be seen where great principles of conduct may shine upon them from the general experience of the race. He is not constructing129 systems of thought, but simply stripping thought of its accidental features. He is even deeply impatient of abstractions in political reasoning, so passionately is he devoted to what is practicable, and fit for wise men to do. To know such a man is to experience all the warmer forces of the mind, to feel the generous and cheering heat of character; and all noble natures will love such a man, because of kinship of quality. All noble natures that came close to Burke did love him and cherish their knowledge of him. They loaned him money without stint, and then forgave him the loans, as if it were a privilege to help him, and no way unnatural that he should never return what he received, finding his spirit made for fraternal, not for commercial relations.
It is pleasing, as it is also a little touching, to see how his companions thus freely accorded to Burke the immunities and prerogatives of a prince amongst them. No one failed to perceive how large and imperial he was, alike in natural gifts and in the wonderful range of his varied acquirements. Sir James Mackintosh, though he very earnestly combated some of Burke’s views, intensely admired his greatness. He declared that Gibbon “might have been taken from a corner of Burke’s mind without ever being missed.” “A wit130 said, of Gibbon’s ‘Autobiography’ that he did not know the difference between himself and the Roman Empire. He has narrated his ‘progressions from London to Buriton and from Buriton to London’ in the same monotonous, majestic periods that he recorded the fall of states and empires.” And we certainly feel a sense of incongruity: the two subjects, we perceive, are hardly commensurable. Perhaps in Burke’s case we should have felt differently,—we do feel differently. In that extraordinary “Letter to a Noble Lord,” in which he defends his pension so proudly against the animadversions of the Duke of Bedford, how magnificently he speaks of his services to the country; how proud and majestic a piece of autobiography it is! How insignificant does the ancient house of Bedford seem, with all its long generations, as compared with this single and now lonely man, without distinguished ancestry or hope of posterity! He speaks grandly about himself, as about everything; and yet I see no disparity between the subject and the manner!
Outside the small circle of those who knew and loved him, his generation did not wholly perceive this. There seemed a touch of pretension in this proud tone taken by a man who had never held high office or exercised great power. He had made great speeches, indeed, no one denied that; he had131 written great party pamphlets,—that everybody knew; his had been the intellectual force within the group of Whigs that followed Lord Rockingham,—that, too, the world in general perceived and acknowledged; and when he died, England knew the man who had gone to be a great man. But, for all that, his tone must, in his generation, have seemed disproportioned to the part he had played. His great authority is over us rather than over the men of his own day.
Burke had the thoughts of a great statesman, and uttered them with unapproachable nobility; but he never wielded the power of a great statesman. He was kept always in the background in active politics, in minor posts, and employed upon subordinate functions. This would be a singular circumstance, if there were any novelty in it; but the practice of keeping men of insignificant birth out of the great offices was a practice which had “broadened down from precedent to precedent” until it had become too strong for even Burke to breast or stem. Perhaps, too, there were faults of temper which rendered Burke unfit to exercise authority in directing the details, and determining the practical measures, of public policy:—but we shall look into that presently.
In July, 1765, the Marquis of Rockingham132 became prime minister of England, and Burke became his private secretary. He owed his introduction to Lord Rockingham, as usual, to the good offices of William Burke, who seems to have found means of knowing everybody it was to the interest of “the Burkes” to know. A more fortunate connection could hardly have been made. Lord Rockingham, though not a man of original powers, was a man of the greatest simplicity and nobleness of character, and, like most upright men, knew how to trust other men. He gave Burke immediate proof of his manly qualities. The scheming old Duke of Newcastle, who ought to have been a connoisseur in low men, mistook Burke for one. Shocked that this obscurely born and unknown fellow should be accorded confidential relations by Lord Rockingham, he hurried to his lordship with an assortment of hastily selected slanders against Burke. His real name, he reported, was O’Bourke; he was an Irish adventurer without character, and a rank Papist to boot; it would ruin the administration to have such a man connected with the First Lord of the Treasury. Rockingham, with great good sense and frankness, took the whole matter at once to Burke; was entirely satisfied by Burke’s denials; and admitted him immediately to intimate relations of warm personal friendship133 which only death broke off. William Burke obtained for himself an Undersecretaryship of State and arranged with Lord Verney, at that time his partner in East India speculations, that two of his lordship’s parliamentary boroughs should be put at his and Edmund’s disposal. Edmund Burke, accordingly, entered Parliament for the borough of Wendover on the 14th of January, 1766, at the age of thirty-seven, and in the first vigor of his powers.
“Now we who know Burke,” announced Dr. Johnson, “know that he will 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 too134 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 the135 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;136 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 admitted137 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,138 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 the139 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 him140 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.141 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 of142 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.143 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 to144 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 are146 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 jealously147 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 govern148 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 conservative149 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 bought150 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 few151 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.”
“When the useful parts of an old establishment152 are kept, and what is superadded is to be fitted to what is retained, a vigorous mind, steady, persevering attention, various powers of comparison and combination, and the resources of an understanding fruitful in expedients are to be exercised; they are to be exercised in a continued conflict with the combined force of opposite vices, with the obstinacy that rejects all improvement, and the levity that is fatigued and disgusted with everything of which it is in possession.... Political arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought by social means. There mind must conspire with mind. Time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at. Our patience will achieve more than our force. If I might venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion in Paris,—I mean to experience,—I should tell you that in my course I have known, and, according to my measure, have coöperated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business. By a slow, but well sustained progress, the effect of each step is watched; the good or ill success of the first gives light to us in the second; and so, from light to light,153 we are conducted with safety, through the whole series.... We are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men. From hence arises, not an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, an excellence in composition. Where the great interests of mankind are concerned through a long succession of generations, that succession ought to be admitted into some share in the counsels which are so deeply to affect them.”
It is not possible to escape deep conviction of the wisdom of these reflections. They penetrate to the heart of all practicable methods of reform. Burke was doubtless too timid, and in practical judgment often mistaken. Measures which in reality would operate only as salutary and needed reformations he feared because of the element of change that was in them. He erred when he supposed that progress can in all its stages be made without changes which seem to go even to the substance. But, right or wrong, his philosophy did not come to him of a sudden and only at the end of his life, when he found France desolated and England threatened with madness for love of revolutionary principles of change. It is the key to his thought everywhere, and through all his life.
It is the key (which many of his critics have never found) to his position with regard to the revolution in France. He was roused to that fierce energy of opposition in which so many have thought that they detected madness, not so much because of his deep disgust to see brutal and ignorant men madly despoil an ancient and honorable monarchy, as because he saw the spirit of these men cross the Channel and find lodgment in England, even among statesmen like Fox, who had been his own close friends and companions in thought and policy; not so much because he loved France as because he feared for England. For England he had Shakespeare’s love:
    “That fortress built by nature for herself
    Against infection and the hand of war;
    That happy breed of men, that little world,
    That precious stone set in the silver sea,
    Which serves it in the office of a wall,
    Or as a moat defensive to a house,
    Against the envy of less happier lands;
    That blessed plot, that earth, that realm, that England.”
T'was to keep out infection and to preserve such precious stores of manly tradition as had made that little world “the envy of less happier lands” that Burke sounded so effectually that extraordinary alarm against the revolutionary spirit that was racking France from throne to cottage. Let us155 admit, if you will, that with reference to France herself he was mistaken. Let us say that when he admired the institutions which she was then sweeping away he was yielding to sentiment, and imagining France as perfect as the beauty of the sweet queen he had seen in her radiant youth. Let us concede that he did not understand the condition of France, and therefore did not see how inevitable that terrible revolution was: that in this case, too, the wages of sin was death. He was not defending France, if you look to the bottom of it; he was defending England:—and the things he hated are truly hateful. He hated the French revolutionary philosophy and deemed it unfit for free men. And that philosophy is in fact radically evil and corrupting. No state can ever be conducted on its principles. For it holds that government is a matter of contract and deliberate arrangement, whereas in fact it is an institute of habit, bound together by innumerable threads of association, scarcely one of which has been deliberately placed. It holds that the object of government is liberty, whereas the true object of government is justice; not the advantage of one class, even though that class constitute the majority, but right equity in the adjustment of the interests of all classes. It assumes that government can be made156 over at will, but assumes it without the slightest historical foundation. For governments have never been successfully and permanently changed except by slow modification operating from generation to generation. It contradicted every principle that had been so laboriously brought to light in the slow stages of the growth of liberty in the only land in which liberty had then grown to great proportions. The history of England is a continuous thesis against revolution; and Burke would have been no true Englishman, had he not roused himself, even fanatically, if there were need, to keep such puerile doctrine out.
If you think his fierceness was madness, look how he conducted the trial against Warren Hastings during those same years: with what patience, with what steadiness in business, with what temper, with what sane and balanced attention to detail, with what statesmanlike purpose! Note, likewise, that his thesis is the same in the one undertaking as in the other. He was applying the same principles to the case of France and to the case of India that he had applied to the case of the colonies. He meant to save the empire, not by changing its constitution, as was the method in France, and so shaking every foundation in order to dislodge an abuse, but by administering it uprightly and in a157 liberal spirit. He was persuaded “that government was a practical thing, made for the happiness of mankind, and not to furnish out a spectacle of uniformity to gratify the schemes of visionary politicians. Our business,” he said, “was to rule, not to wrangle; and it would be a poor compensation that we had triumphed in a dispute, whilst we had lost an empire.” The monarchy must be saved and the constitution vindicated by keeping the empire pure in all parts, even in the remotest provinces. Hastings must be crushed in order that the world might know that no English governor could afford to be unjust. Good government, like all virtue, he deemed to be a practical habit of conduct, and not a matter of constitutional structure. It is a great ideal, a thoroughly English ideal; and it constitutes the leading thought of all Burke’s career.
In short, as I began by saying, this man, an Irishman, speaks the best English thought upon the essential questions of politics. He is thoroughly, characteristically, and to the bottom English in all his flunking. He is more liberal than Englishmen in his treatment of Irish questions, of course; for he understands them, as no Englishman of his generation did. But for all that he remains the chief spokesman for England in the utterance of158 the fundamental ideals which have governed the action of Englishmen in politics. “All the ancient, honest, juridical principles and institutions of England,” such was his idea, “are so many clogs to check and retard the headlong course of violence and oppression. They were invented for this one good purpose, that what was not just should not be convenient.” This is fundamental English doctrine. English liberty has consisted in making it unpleasant for those who were unjust, and thus getting them in the habit of being just for the sake of a modus vivendi. Burke is the apostle of the great English gospel of Expediency.
The politics of English-speaking peoples has never been speculative; it has always been profoundly practical and utilitarian. Speculative politics treats men and situations as they are supposed to be; practical politics treats them (upon no general plan, but in detail) as they are found to be at the moment of actual contact. With reference to America Burke argues: No matter what your legal right in the case, it is not expedient to treat America as you propose: a numerous and spirited people like the colonists will not submit; and your experiment will cost you your colonies. In the case of administrative reform, again, it is the higher sort of expediency he urges: If you wish159 to keep your government from revolution, keep it from corruption, and by making it pure render it permanent. To the French he says, It is not expedient to destroy thus recklessly these ancient parts of your constitution. How will you replace them? How will you conduct affairs at all after you shall have deprived yourselves of all balance and of all old counsel? It is both better and easier to reform than to tear down and reconstruct.
This is unquestionably the message of Englishmen to the world, and Burke utters it with incomparable eloquence. A man of sensitive imagination and elevated moral sense, of a wide knowledge and capacity for affairs, he stood in the midst of the English nation speaking its moral judgments upon affairs, its character in political action, its purposes of freedom, equity, wide and equal progress. It is the immortal charm of his speech and manner that gives permanence to his works. Though his life was devoted to affairs with a constant and unalterable passion, the radical features of Burke’s mind were literary. He was a man of books, without being under the dominance of what others had written. He got knowledge out of books and the abundance of matter his mind craved to work its constructive and imaginative effects upon. It is singular how devoid of all direct references to160 books his writings are. The materials of his thought never reappear in the same form in which he obtained them. They have been smelted and recoined. They have come under the drill and inspiration of a great constructive mind, have caught life and taken structure from it. Burke is not literary because he takes from books, but because he makes books, transmuting what he writes upon into literature. It is this inevitable literary quality, this sure mastery of style, that mark the man, as much as his thought itself. He is a master in the use of the great style. Every sentence, too, is steeped in the colors of an extraordinary imagination. The movement takes your breath and quickens your pulses. The glow and power of the matter rejuvenate your faculties.
And yet the thought, too, is quite as imperishable as its incomparable vehicle.
    “The deepest, plainest, highest, clearest pen;
    The voice most echoed by consenting men;
    The soul which answered best to all well said
    By others, and which most requital made;
    Tuned to the highest key of ancient Rome,
    Returning all her music with his own;
    In whom, with nature, study claimed a part,
    And yet who to himself owed all his art.”
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