UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES Juss ENGLISH CLASSICS tos An Cal. BURKE E. J. PAYNE ii. ILontron HENRY FROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE AMEN CORNEE BURKE SELECT WORKS EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY E. J. PAYNE, M.A. OF LINCOLN'S INN, BARRISTER -AT -LAW, AND FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD VOL. II REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE AT THE CLARENDON PRESS M DCCCLXXXIII [All rights reserved] J>A al. V,< INTRODUCTION. THE famous letter or pamphlet contained in this volume represents the workings of an extraordinary mind at an extraor- dinary crisis : and can therefore be compared with few things that have ever been spoken or written. Composed in a literary age, it scarcely belongs to literature ; yet it is one of the greatest of literary masterpieces. It embodies nothing of history save frag- ments which have mostly lost their interest, yet no book in the world has more historical significance. It scorns and defies philosophy, but it discloses a compact and unique system of its own. It tramples on logic, yet carries home to the most logical reader a conviction that its ill-reasoning is substantially correct. No one would think of agreeing with it in the mass, yet there are parts to which every candid mind will assent. Its many true and wise sayings are mixed up with extravagant and barefaced sophistry : its argument, with every semblance of legal exact- ness, is disturbed by hasty gusts of anger, and broken by chasms which yawn in the face of the least observant reader. It is an intellectual puzzle, not too abstruse "for solution : and hence few books are better adapted to stimulate the attention and judgment, and to generate the invaluable habit of mental vigilance. To discover its defects is easy enough. No book in the world yields itself an easier prey to hostile criticism: there are thousands of school-boys, ' with liberal notions under their caps,' to whom the greatest intellect of our nation since Milton 1 , represented by the best known parts of the present work, might well seem little better than a fool. After a time, this impression disappears; eloquence and deep conviction have done their work, and the wisdom of a few pages, mostly dealing in generalities, is con- structively extended to the whole. But the reader now vacillates again: and this perpetual alternation of judgment on the part of a reader not thoroughly in earnest constitutes a main part of that fascination which Burke universally exercises. It is like the 1 So Macaulay has styled Burke. VI INTRODUCTION. fascination of jugglery: now you believe your eyes, now you distrust them : the brilliancy of the spectacle first dazzles, and then satisfies : and you care little for what lies behind. This is what the author intended : the critical faculty is disarmed, the imagination is enthralled. What did Burke propose to himself when he sat down to write this book ? The letter to Dupont is obviously a mere peg upon which to hang his argument : the book is written for the British public. He believed himself to foresee whither the revolu- tionary movement in France was tending : he saw one party in England regarding it with favour, the other with indifference : he saw clear revolutionary tendencies on all sides among the people : and not a single arm was as yet raised to avert the impending catastrophe. Burke aimed at recalling the English nation to its ancient principles, and at showing the folly and imprudence of the French political movement. Burke's in- dependence led him even to the extent of revolting from his own party. The great historical Whig party, the party of Somers, of Walpole, and of Chatham, was slowly passing through a painful transformation, which many observers mistook for dissolution. Burke found himself constrained to desert it, and that upon an occasion which afforded an opportunity of rendering it material support. From that time forward he be- came a marked man. Even for Burke the act of thinking for himself was stigmatised as a crime. While the events of the French Revolution commended themselves to the leaders of his party, he ought not to have allowed it to be seen that they aroused in him nothing but anger and scorn ; nor ought he to have appealed to the nation at large to support him in his oppo- sition. Such an appeal to the general public was characteristic of definite change of allegiance. Hence the obloquy which over- whelmed the last years of his life, raised by those who had been his associates during a career of a quarter of a century. Hence his counter-denunciation of them as ' New Whigs,' as renegades from the principles of the English Revolution, by virtue of the countenance they gave to the political changes which were taking place in France. Are Burke's opinions in the present work consistent with those contained in the first volume ? Notwithstanding that funda- mental unity which may be justly claimed for Burke's opinions, INTRODUCTION. Vll it would be idle to deny that the present treatise, like his sub- sequent writings, contains, on comparison with his earlier ones, certain very great discrepancies. They are, however, but few ; they are obvious, and lie upon the surface. It is hard for those who live a hundred years after the time to say whether such discrepancies were or were not justifiable. Scrutiny will discover that they turn mainly upon words. The House of Lords, for instance, in the first volume of these Select Works, is asserted to be a form of popular representation ; in the present, the Peers are said to hold their share in the government by original and indefeasible right. Twenty years before, Burke had said that the tithes were merely a portion of the taxation, set apart by the national will for the support of a national institution. In the present work, he argues that Church property possesses the qualities of private property. In the former volume it is asserted that all governments depend on public opinion : in the present, Burke urges that public opinion acts within much narrower limits. On the strength of such differences, it has been supposed that Burke had now either completely abandoned the political principles which had guided him through a career of twenty-five years, or else that he really was, what a Tory writer has called him, ' the most double-minded man that ever lived.' But a man who is not thus far double-minded can never be a politician, though he may be a hero and a martyr. Abstract truths, when embodied in the form of popular opinion, sometimes prove to be moral falsehoods. And popular opinion in the majority of cases proves to be a deceptive and variable force. Institutions stand or fall by their material strength and cohesion ; and though these are by no means unconnected with the arguments which are advanced for or against them, the names and qualities with which they are invested in argument are altogether a secondary consideration. The position of the Church, for instance, or the Peerage, has not been materially influenced by either way of regarding them. They have stood, as they continue to stand, because they are connected by many .ties which are strong, though subtle and complicated, with the national being. They stand, in some degree, because it is probable that the stronger half of the nation would fight for them. 'National taxation' and ' private property,' ' descendible right ' and ' popular representa- tion,' are, in point of fact, little more than ornamental antitheses. Vlll INTR OD UCTION. It is not to such obvious discrepancies that we owe the fact that the connexion between the present treatise and those con- tained in the former volume is less easily traced by points of resemblance than by points of contrast. The differencing causes lie deeper and spread wider. In the first place, Burke in the present volume is appealing to a larger public. He is appealing directly to the whole English Nation, and indirectly to every citizen of the civilised world. In his early denunciations of the French Revolution, Burke stood almost alone. At first sight he appeared to have the most cherished of English traditions against him. If there was one word which for a century had been sacred to Englishmen, it was the word Revolution. Those to whom it was an offence were almost wholly extinct : and a hundred years' prescription had sanctified the English Revolution even in the eyes of the bitterest adversaries of Whiggism. The King, around whom the discontented Whigs and the remnant of the Tories had rallied, was himself the creature of the Revolution. Now the party of Fox recognised a lawful relation between the Revolution of 1688, and that which was entering daily on some new stage of its mighty development in France. There was really but little connexion between the two. Burke never said a truer thing than that the Revolution of 1688 was 'a revolution not made, but prevented.' The vast convulsions of 1789 and the* following years were ill-understood by the Foxite Whigs. Pent in their own narrow circle, they could form no idea of a political move- ment on a bigger scale than a coalition : to them the French Revolution seemed merely an ordinary Whiggish rearrangement of affairs which would soon settle down into their places, the King, as in England, accepting a position subordinate to his ministers. Nor were Pitt and his party, with the strength of Parliament and the nation at their back, disposed to censure it. There was a double reason for favouring it, on the part of the English Premier. On the one hand, it was a surprise and a satisfaction to see the terrible monarchy of France collapse without a blow, and England's hereditary foe deprived, to all appearance, of all power of injury or retaliation. On the other, Mr. Pitt conceived that the new Government would naturally be favourable to those liberal principles of commercial intercourse which he had with so much difficulty forced on the old one. Neither side saw, as INTR OD UCTION. IX Burke saw it, the real magnitude of the political movement in France, and how deep and extensive were the interests it involved. Burke, in the unfavourable impression which he conceived of the Revolution, was outside of both parties. He could find no audience in the House of Commons, where leading politicians had long looked askance upon him. They laughed, not altogether without reason, when he told them that he looked upon France as 'not politically existing.' Discouraged in the atmosphere of Parliament, Burke resolved to appeal to the whole nation. He had in his portfolio the commencement of a letter to a young Frenchman who had solicited from him an expression of opinion, and this letter he resolved to enlarge and give to the world. He thus appealed from the narrow tribunal of the House of Commons to the Nation at large. It was the first important instance of the recognition, on the part of a great statesman, of the power of public opinion in England in its modern form. Burke here addresses his arguments to a much wider public than of old. He recognises, what is now obvious enough, that English policy rests on the opinion of a reasonable democracy. The reader, in comparing the two volumes, will notice this difference in the tribunal to which the appeal is made. Public opinion in the last twenty years had gone through rapid changes. The difference between the condition of public opinion in 1770 and in 1790 was greater than between 1790 and 1874. In 1770 it was necessary to rouse it into life: in 1790 it was already living, watching, and speaking for itself. The immorality of the politicians of the day had awakened the distrust of the people : and the people and the King were united in supporting a popular minister. There was more activity, more public spirit, and more organisation. In England, as in France, communication with the capital from the remotest parts of the kingdom had become frequent and regular. London had in 1790 no less than fourteen daily newspapers ; and many others appeared once or twice a week. No one can look over the files of these newspapers without perceiving the magnitude of the space which France at this time occupied in the eye of the English world. The rivalry of the two nations was already at its height. The Bourbon kingdoms summed up, for the Englishman, the idea of foreign Powers : and disturbances in France told on England X INTRODUCTION. with much greater effect than now. In England there pre- vailed a deceptive tranquillity. Burke and many others knew that the England of 1790 was not the England of 1770. The results of the American War were slowly convincing people that some- thing more was possible than had hitherto been practised in modern English policy. Democracy had grown from a possibility into a power. Whiggism, as a principle, had long been distrusted and discredited. With its decline had begun the discredit of all that it had idolised. The English Constitution, against which in 1770 hardly a breath had been raised, was in the succeeding twenty years exposed to general ridicule. Under a minister who proclaimed himself a Reformer, the newly awakened senti- ment for political change was extending in all directions. Seats in Parliament had always been bought and sold ; but, owing to the increased wealth of the community, prices had now undergone a preposterous advance Five thousand pounds was the average figure at which a wealthy merchant or rising lawyer had to purchase his seat from the patron of a borough. The disgraceful history of the Coalition made people call for reform in the Executive as well as the Legislative. Montesquieu had said that England must perish as soon as the Legislative power became more corrupt than the Executive ; but it now seemed as if both branches of the government were competing in a race for degradation. Corrupt as the Legislative was in its making, its material, drawn from the body of the nation, and not from a corps of professed intriguers, saved it from the moral disgrace which attended tha Executive. Many were in favour of restoring soundness to the Executive as a preliminary reform ; and many were the schemes proposed for effecting it. One very shrewd thinker, who sat in the House, proposed an annual Ministry, chosen by lot. Others proposed an elective Ministry : others wished to develop the House of Lords into something like the Grand Council of Venice. No political scheme was too absurd to lack an advocate. Universal suffrage, annual parlia- ments, and electoral districts were loudly demanded, and Dukes were counted among their warmest supporters. The people, as in the times of Charles I, called for the 'ancient Saxon con- stitution.' What it was, and what right they had to it, or how it was to be adapted to modern requirements, they did not very well know, but the lawyers were able to tell them. The INTRODUCTION. XI lawyers demonstrated how greatly the liberties of the nation had fallen off, and how grossly their nature .was misunderstood. They proved it to be the duty of the People to reclaim them, and that no obstacle stood in the way. In this cry many Whigs and Tories, members of both Houses of Parliament, were found to join. This liberal movement was not confined to England. It spread, in a greater or less degree, all over Europe, even to St. Peters- burg and Constantinople. In England, Reform was rather a cry than a political movement; but in France and Austria it was a movement as well as a cry. In the latter country, indeed, the Reform was supplied before the demand, and the Emperor Joseph was forced by an ignorant people to reverse projects in which he had vainly tried to precede his age. But the demands abroad were for organic reforms, such as had long been effected in England. England, after the reign of Charles II, is a com- pletely modern nation ; society is reorganised on the basis which still subsists. But France and Germany in 1789 were still what they had been in the Middle Ages. The icy fetters which England had long ago broken up had on the Continent hardened until nothing would break them up but a convulsion. In France this had been demonstrated by the failures of Turgot. The body of oppressive interests which time and usage had legalised was too strong to give way to a moderate pressure. A convulsion, a mighty shock, a disturbance of normal forces, was necessary : and the French people had long been collecting themselves for the task. Forty years a Revolution had been foreseen, and ten years at least it had been despaired of. But it came at last, and came unexpectedly ; the Revolution shook down the feudalism of France, and the great general of the Revolution trampled to dust the tottering relics of it in the rest of Western Europe. Conspicuous among the agencies which effected it was the new power of public opinion, which wrought an obvious effect, by means of the Gazettes of Paris, throughout the western world. Burke saw this, and to public opinion he appealed against the movement, and so far as this country was concerned, successfully. It was he whose 'shrilling trumpet' sounded the first alarm of the twenty years' European war against the French Revolution. It was hard, at such a crisis, to sever general ideas from the Xll INTRODUCTION. immediate occasion. Burke tells us less about the French Revolution than about English thought and feeling on the sub- ject of Revolutions in general. On the applicability of these general views to the occasion of their enunciation, it is not necessary for the reader to form any 'definite judgment. Pro- perly speaking, indeed, the question depends only in a small degree on grounds which demand or justify such a mode of treatment. To condemn all Revolutions is monstrous. To say categorically that the French Revolution was absolutely a good thing or a bad thing conveys no useful idea. Either may be said with some degree of truth, but neither can be said without qualifications which almost neutralise the primary thesis. No student of history by this time needs to be told that the French Revolution was, in a more or less extended sense, a very good thing. Consequently, the student is not advised to assent, further than is necessary to gain an idea of Burke's standpoint, to the summary and ignominious condemnation with which the Revo- lution is treated by Burke.f' But it must be remembered that whatever may have been its good side, it was not Burke's busi- ness to exhibit it.7]No one was better qualified than Burke to compose an apologetic for the final appeal of a people against tyranny: but nunc non erat his locus. Burke's business was not to cool the pot, but to make it boil : to raise a strong counter-cry, and make the most of the bad side of the Revolution. Burke appears here in the character of an advocate : like all advocates, he says less than he knows) It was his cue to represent the Revolution as a piece of voluntary and malicious folly ; he could not well admit that it was the result of deep-seated and irre- sistible causes. Not that the Revolution could not have been avoided every one knew that it might ; but it could only have been avoided by an equally sweeping Revolution from above. In default of this there came to pass a Revolution from below. Though the Revolution brought with it mistakes in policy, crimes, and injuries, it involved no more of each than the fair average of human affairs will allow, if we consider its character and magnitude ; and we must pay less than usual heed to Burke when he insists that these were produced wholly by the ignor- ance and wickedness of the Revolutionary leaders. The sufferers in a large measure brought them on themselves by ill-timed resistance and vacillating counsels??, INTRODUCTION. xiii From the present work the student will learn little of the history of the Revolution. It had barely begun : only two in- cidents of importance, the capture of the Bastille and the transportation from Versailles to Paris, had taken place : of that coalition of hostile elements which first gave the Revolution force and self-consciousness, there was as yet not a trace. It was not only in its beginnings, but even these beginnings were imperfectly understood. School-boys now know more of the facts of the matter than was known to Burke, and thanks to the pen of De Tocqueville, most persons of moderate literary pretensions can claim a closer familiarity with its fundamental nature. Wherein, then, consists the value of the book ? what are the merits which won for it the emphatic commendation of Dumont, the disciple and populariser of Bentham that it was probably the ' salvation of Europe ' ? How came this viru- lent and intemperate attack to have the wide and beneficial effect which attended it? What was the nature of its potent magic, which disarmed the Revolutionists of England, and ex- orcised from the thinking classes of Europe the mischievous desire of political change ? It was obvious that the movement in France was accompanied by a general distrust of the existing framework of society. Some- thing of the same kind was prevalent in England ; but it belonged to a narrower class, with narrower motives and meaner ends. From his earliest years Burke had been familiar with the idea of a nation of human savages rising in revolt against law, religion, and social order, and he believed the impulse to such a revolt to ' exist in human nature as a specific moral disease. The thing which * he greatly feared now seemed to have come suddenly upon him. Burke manifestly erred in representing such an element as the sole aliment and motive force of the French Revolution. Distrust of society was widely disseminated in England, though less widely than Burke believed, and far less widely than in France ; but Burke had no means of verifying his bodings. Jacobinism had prevailed in France, and a Revolution had followed it was coming to prevail in England, and a Revolution might be ex- pected. England had in France the highest reputation for political progress, liberty, and good government. England's liberty was bound up with the fact of her having passed through a Revolution, which, after the lapse of a century, was considered X IV INTR OD UCTION. a worthy object of commsmoration. It was represented in France that the French Revolution was proceeding on English principles. It was further understood that England sympathised with and intended to benefit by the broader and more en- lightened Revolution which was being accomplished in France. This Burke takes all pains to refute. He shows that this famous English Revolution was, in truth, a Revolution not made, but .prevented. He aims to prove by conclusive evidence that English policy, though not averse from reform, is stubbornly opposed to revolution. He shows that the main body of the' British nation, from its historical traditions, from the opinions and doctrines transmitted to it from the earliest times, from its constitution and essence, was utterly hostile to these dangerous novelties, and bound to eschew and reprobate them. Though mainly sound and homogeneous, the body politic had rotten members, and it is the utterances of these, by which the intelligent Frenchman might otherwise be pardonably misled, that Burke in the first instance applies himself to confute. The earliest title of the work (see Notes, p. 297) indicates that it was occasioned proximately not by the events in France, but by events of much less importance in England. Knowing little of Europe in general, by comparison with his intimate know- ledge of England, Burke can have been little disposed or pre- pared to rush into print, in the midst of absorbing state business at home, with a general discussion of the changes which had taken place in a foreign nation. This was not the habit of the time. In our day a man must be able to sustain an- argument on the internal politics of all nations of the earth: in that day, Englishmen chiefly regarded their own business. Had the Revo- lution been completely isolated, it_would never have occupied Burke's pen. But the Revolutionists had aiders and abettors on this side of the Channel, and they openly avowed their purpose of bringing about a catastrophe similar to that which had been brought about in France. Finally, some of these English ' sympathisers ' were persons long politically hateful to Burke and his party. Hence that strong tincture of party virulence which is perceptible throughout the work. Burke writes not as a Hallam not as a philosophical critic or a temperate judge, but in his accustomed character as an impassioned advocate and an angry debater. Indeed anything like a reserved and observant INTR OD UCTION. XV attitude, on the part of his countrymen, irritates him to fury. He bitterly attacks all who, with the steady temper of Addison's Portius, ' Can look on guilt, rebellion, fraud, and Caesar, In the calm lights of mild philosophy.' His real aim is less to attack the French than the English Revo- lutionists: not so much to asperse Sieyes and Mirabeau, as Dr. Price and Lord Stanhope. ; The work, then, professes to be a general statement, con- 'fessedly hasty and fragmentary, of the political doctrines and .sentiments of the English people. It was, on the whole, recog- nised as true. The body of the nation agreed in this fierce and eloquent denunciation. The Jacobins steadily went down in public estimation from the day of its publication. Burke's fiery philippic seemed to dry up their strength, as the sun dries up the dew. Nothing could stand, in public opinion, against Burke's imperious dilemmas. But it is the moral power of the argument, and the brilliancy with which it is enforced, which give the work its value. The topics themselves are of slighter significance. Half awed by the tones of the preacher, half by his evident earnestness and self-conviction, we are predisposed to submit to his general doctrines, although we cannot feel sure of their appli- cability to the occasion. Unfair as this denunciation was to France, we sympathise in its effects on the malcontents in Eng- land. The tone of the book was well suited to the occasion. A loud and bitter cry was to be raised the revolutionary propa- ganda was to be stayed and to this end all that could be said against it was to be clearly, sharply, emphatically, and uncom- promisingly put forth. With Hannibal at the gates, it was no time for half-opinions, for qualification, and for temporisation. No wise man could hesitate to do his best to discredit the Jacobins, without any very scrupulous regard to absolute justice. They were unjust and unscrupulous, and it was perhaps pardon- able to attack them with their own weapons. From all this we deduce the critical canon, that properly to understand Burke's book we must look on him not as a critic, but as an advocate. The book is not history, nor philosophy, but a . polemic. It is a polemic against Jacobinism, particularly English Jacobinism. What is, or rather was, Jacobinism? In the usage of the day, XVI INTRODUCTION. it was a vituperative term applied summarily to all opposition to the dominant party. He who doubted Mr. Pitt was set down as a Jacobin, much as he who doubted the Bishops was set down as an infidel. But the Jacobin proper is the revolter against the established order of society. What those who stood by this established order understood by the term is roughly expressed in Burke's phrase of Treason against property. ' You have too much, I have too little you have privileges, I have none your liberties are essentially an encroachment upon mine, or those which ought to be mine.' These formulas constitute the creed of Jacobinism in its simplest and rudest form, the sentimental antagonism of poverty against wealth. ' Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail, And say, There is no sin but to be rich : And being rich, my virtue then shall be To say, There is no vice but beggary 1 .* This creed will never lack exponents. It is founded on an ancient tale, and in a certain sense, a tale of wrong ; but whilst the human species maintains its vantage above the lower animals, it is a wrong that will never be completely righted. In Burke's view, it is of the nature and essence of property to be unequal. The degrees of social prosperity must always exhibit many shades of disparity, ' Take but degree away, untune that string,' and you destroy most things which set man above the brutes. Degree is inseparable from the maintenance of the artificial structure of civilisation. The last phrase leads us to note the fundamental fallacy of the doctrine in its next stage of philosophical or speculative Jacobinism. Civilisation, social happiness, the comfort- able arts of life, are no gift of nature to man. They are, in the strictest sense, artificial. The French philosophers, by a gross assumption, took them to be natural, and therefore a matter of common right to all. We notice here a fundamental antagonism alleged by Burke to exist between the Revolutionists and the English school of politicians. ^The former base their claims upon Right ; . Burke, following the traditions of English statesmanship, claims to base his upon La\v. It is not that Law has no basis in natural Right: it is rather that Law, having occupied as a basis a portion of 1 Shakespeare, King John, Act II. INTRODUCTION. the space naturally covered by Right, all outside it ceases to be right in the same sense in which it was so before. In other words, realised Right, in the shape of tangible and enforceable Law, is understood to be so material an advance upon abstract Right, that your acceptance of the former amounts to a re- nunciation of the latter. You cannot have both at once. Now Jacobinism may be regarded as the sentiment which leads man to repudiate Law and take his stand upon natural Right. The difficulty is that in so doing he limits himself, and seeks to reduce his fellow-men, to the right of the naked savage, for natural right cannot extend beyond the state of nature. As Jacobinism is the repudiation of Law, Burke takes his stand upon the Law ; and one of^the defects of the present work is that he carries this too far.^; It has been said of his attitude in this work that he begins like a~pettifogger and ends like a statesman. The argu- ment of the first thirty-eight pages of this volume, by which he claims to prove that Englishmen have irrevocably bargained away their liberties for ever, is unquestionably one of the weakest passages in the whole of Burke's writings. ; Hallam has proved it untenable at many points : and the refutation may, it is believed, be completely made out by reference to the notes at the end of this volume. A British statesman may, however, plead a closer relation between law and liberty than is usual in most countries, and claim to be leniently criticised for defending himself on the standpoint of the lawyer. Men of the law were the statesmen under whom the British Constitution grew into shape. Men of the law defended it from Papal aggression, a circumstance to which Burke complacently alludes (p. 104): and one of his main ideas is the thoroughly lawyer-like one that liberty can only proceed 'from precedent to precedent.' This onward progress he admitted as far as the epoch of the Revolution, but there, in a way characteristic of him, he resolved to take his stand. Magna Charta, the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights, and the Act of Settlement, were his undoubted' chain of English constitutional securities, and he declined to admit any further modification of them. So far he was in harmony with popular ideas. When he went beyond this, and declared that the Act of Settlement bound the English nation for ever, his reasoning was obviously false. The whole pro- cedure of Burke throughout this book is, as has been observed, VOL. n. b XV111 . INTRODUCTION. avowedly that of an advocate. In his apology called the 'Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,' he states as the reason that when any one of the members of a vast and balanced whole is endangered, he is the true friend to them all who supports the part attacked, ' with all the power of stating, of argument, and of colouring, which he happens to possess, and which the case de- mands. He is not to embarrass the minds of his hearers, or to incumber or overlay his speech, by bringing into view at once (as if he were reading an academic lecture) all that may and ought, when a just occasion presents itself, be said in favour of the other members. At that time they are out of court ; there is no question concerning them. Whilst he opposes his defence on the part where the attack is made, he presumes that for his regard to the just rights of all the rest, he has credit in every candid mind.' Burke's overstrained reverence for the Act of Settlement may be partly due to the general feeling of un- certainty which, during his own century, prevailed as to party principle. As early as Swift's time, parties and their creeds had become thoroughly confused and undistinguishable. But Burke demanded something positive something to which men could bind themselves by covenant. Casting a glance back upon the history of parties from Burke's time, the Revolution is the first trustworthy landmark that we meet with. In the apology from which we have just quoted, he proclaims the speeches of the managers of the impeachment of Sacheverel, as representing those who brought about the English Revolution, to be the fountains of true constitutional doctrine. After this epoch he seems to have distrusted all political creeds. There is hardly one notable political work of the day immediately preceding him to which he makes allusion, and then only in terms of censure. As an illustration at once of Burke's instinctive retreat to the shelter of legal orthodoxy, and of the charm which his pen could throw over the driest statement of first principles, let us observe how he has worked up a well-known passage of a well-known legal classic. * The design of entering into ' One of the first motives to society being the protection of civil society, and which be- our persons and security of our comes one of its fundamental property, men in civil society rules, is that no man should be have a right, and indeed are judge in his own cause. By this INTRODUCTION. XIX obliged to apply to the public each person has at once di- for redress when they are in- vested himself of the funda- jured ; for were they allowed mental right of uncovenanted to be their own carvers, or man, that is, to judge for him- to make reprisals, which they self, and to assert his own might do in a state of nature, cause. He abdicates all right such permission would intro- to be his own governor. He duce all that inconvenience inclusively, in a great measure, which the state of nature did abandons the right of self- endure, and which government defence, the first law of nature, was at first invented to pre- Men cannot enjoy the rights of vent; hence therefore they are an uncivil and of a civil state obliged to submit to the public together. That he may obtain the measure of their damages, justice he gives up his right and to have recourse to the of determining what it is, in law and the courts of justice, points the most essential to which are appointed to give him. That he may secure them redress and ease in their some liberty, he makes a sur- affairs.' (Bacon's Abridgment, render in trust of the whole art. Actions in General.) of it.' (Page 70.) The practical jurisprudence of England in Burke's time stood sadly in need of Reform. That of France was in a still worse * case. Burke fully recognised the necessity of removing the 'defects, redundancies, and errors' of the law (p. 112), though he still maintained it to be the ' collected reason of ages,' and the 'pride of the human intellect.' Whether in France 'the old _, independent judicature of the Parliaments' was worth preserving, in a reformed condition, as Burke so strongly insists, admits of doubt. Scandalous as were the delays, the useless and cumbrous processes, and the exaction which attended the management of the (English law, those who administered it were at least able/"" men, and men who had honestly risen to their places, in virtue v \ of their native and acquired qualifications. It was not so in ^ France. In France judges purchased their places and suitors purchased justice. In cases where this may not be absolutely true, justice at the hands of the ' sworn guardians of property ' was a doubtful commodity, and few will now deny that the Assembly were justified in making a clean sweep of it (see p. 144), j As to the common law which they administered, its condition will b? best gathered from the articles on the subject contained in the Encyclopedic. It is enough to say of it that it exhibited the worst characteristics of English law before the time of ba XX . INTRODUCTION. Richard II. The general system of English law he thought entitled a qualified commendation. His views on the subject were however very different from those of his contemporary, Lord Eldon. He did not systematically discountenance all en- quiry, and scout all proposed reform. He had taken the lead in 1780, in advocating reforms dealing with the Royal property, which have since been carried out with general approval. He had commenced, early in his career, a treatise advocating that reform of the Irish Penal Laws which, when carried through by his friends Savile and Dunning, produced the awful riots of 1780. His judgment on the question of how far reform was admissible, and at what point it degenerated into innovation, coincides with that of Bacon and Hale, rather than with that of Coke and Eldon. Conceiving the English nation as a four-square fabric sup- ported on the four bases of the Church, the Crown, the Nobility, and the People, it is natural to find the author insisting most on the excellences of those elements which were then assailed in France. The People, of course, needed no defence, nor was the Crown as yet overthrown. The dream of the moment was a constitutional monarchy, based on elements similar to those of the English Constitution \ Only the Church and the Aristocracy were as yet threatened : and, next to the defence of the Church, the best known section of the present treatise is that which relates to the Nobility. On this subject, independently of con- stitutional law and of theory, Burke cherished prejudices early formed and never shaken. He had lived on terms of intimacy with, and was bound by ties of mutual obligation to some of the worthiest members of the British aristocracy. It is mainly to' them personally that his panegyric is applicable. Nobility, how- ever, possessed claims which he was as eager to recognise, as an. important establishment of the common law of the country,- and as justified by universal analogy and supported by the best general theories of society. ' To be honoured, and even privi- leged, by the laws, opinions, and inveterate usages of our country,'' was with him not only a noble prize to the person who attained- it, but a politic institution for the community which conferred it. Why? Because it operated as an instinct to secure pro- 1 See vol. i. Introduction, p. xx. INTRODUCTION. perty, and to preserve communities in a settled state (p. 164). But Burke's reasoning is vitiated by a cardinal fault. It is per- vaded by his own conception of an aristocracy, derived from his own personal friends and fellow-workers. The aristocracy of [France differed from that of England as substance differs from \- shadow. In England, nobility had long implied privileges which \ . ^ are merely honorary ; in France it implied privileges substantial in themselves, and grievous to those who were excluded from them. Practically, though Burke in the duties of his advocacy *" denies the fact, the nobility were untaxed. To use a sufficiently accurate expression, the feudal system was still in operation in France. If not aggravated by natural growth during successive centuries, it exhibited a growing incompatibility with what sur- rounded it. In England it had practically been extinct for two centuries, and it was now absolutely out of mind. Barons and Commons had long made up but one People; the old families were mostly extinct, and the existing Peers were chiefly com- moners with coronets on their coats of arms. At the present moment not a single seat in the House of Peers is occupied in virtue of tenure 1 , and the Peerage, saving heraldic vanities and some legal and social courtesies, practically confers nothing but a descendible personal magistracy, exercised at considerable ex- pense and inconvenience. The status of a Peer generally involves, in addition, the maintenance of the bulk of a fortune not always large in the least remunerative of investments. The qualifi- cation for a Peerage has long been limited to a long-continued course of service to the State. Every one of these conditions was reversed in France. The nobleman was a member of a decaying privileged class, who clung to their unjust and oppres- sive privileges with the most obstinate tenacity. It was the idle noble who spent the hard earnings of the peasant. Taxation in ', England fell lightly in the extreme upon the poorer classes ; in . France they bore almost the whole burden of the national expenses. Society in France thus rested on a tottering and . artificial frame : while in England the frame had gradually and safely accommodated itself to the change of social force. But in the" method of'Burke every argument in favour of a 1 In one or two recent instances a claim to sit by tenure has been advanced and rejected. XX 11 INTRODUCTION. particular element of the State, based upon the special excellence of that element, is subordinate to his general doctrine of the nature of the State as a grand working machine. A machine, he thought, to attain the end for which it was devised, must be allowed to work fairly and continuously. To be perpetually stopping its system for the purpose of trying experiments, was an error venial only in a child. To destroy it, in order to use its parts in the construction of some other ideal machine, which might never be got to work at all, was criminal madness. The strictures of Burke with reference to this great and central point in his political philosophy are only partially applicable to the French Reformers of his day ; nor are they at any time unexcep- tionably appropriate. 'Yet they constitute a profound and neces- sary substructure in every intelligent conception of civil matters, and as such they will never cease to be worthy of the remem- brance of the most practised statesmen, as well as an indispensable part of the education of the beginner in politics. Every student must begin, if he does not end, with Conservatism ; and every Reformer must bear in mind that without a certain established base, secured by a large degree of this ofte'h-forgotten principle, his best devised scheme cannot fail to fall to the ground. The present work is the best text-book of Conservatism which has ever appeared. Burke claims for his views the support of the English nation. Political events and the popularity of his book alike proved that this was no idle boast : but it necessarily indicated nothing more than that the party of progress was in England in the minority, while in France it was in the ascendant. Burke's claim, how- ever, involves far more. It asserts that the doctrines of the revolution had long been well known in England : that the belief in the ' rights of man ' had long been exploded, and its conse- quences dismissed 'as pernicious fallacies : and that in this con- demnation the best minds in England had concurred.', To examine the justice of this claim would involve the whole political and religious history of the stirring century between the Spanish Armada and the Revolution of 1688. This is far beyond our present purpose, which may be equally well served on ground merely literary. Taking English literature as our guide, we shall find that, two hundred years before, conclusions very similar to those of Burke were formed in the minds of philosophical INTRODUCTION. Xxiii observers. The significance of those conclusions is not impaired by the historical results of th.e contest. They throw no shade upon the glorious victories of the spirit of English liberty. They rather illustrate and complement them. They rather tend to justify the partial adoption, by sober and reasonable men, when the sub- stance of English liberty began to be attacked under the Scotch kings, of ideas which were previously limited to intemperate and half-educated minds. But these ideas never penetrated the mass of English contemporary thinkers. Milton, in his proposed or- ganisation of the republic, followed Italian, not English ideas : and the honour due to Milton will not prevent our recognising the beauty and propriety of doctrines from which, under other circumstances, even he might have drawn his practical deduc- tions. That Conservatism is compatible with philosophical states- manship can be illustrated in a remarkable degree from the great work of Hooker. Hooker and Grotius allow a view of the general rights and obligations of civil society, which goes far beyond what Burke, in the present work, will admit 1 . But the great English divine, while discerning the necessity of forsaking the narrow political theories of the middle ages, forti- fied himself in his enlarged position by a clear definition of the limits of political change. In the state, Hooker saw distinctly reflected the order and discipline which he believed to have been impressed upon the natural face of the universe by an all-wise and beneficent Creator. The reign of law on earth reflected the reign of law in heaven. Hooker ridicules the turbulent wits of old, to whom, in the words of the Roman historian, quieta mo