History of Civilization in England, Vol. 1 of 3

by Henry Thomas Buckle

Indeed the part taken by Burke in public affairs must have been very galling to a king who thought everything good that was old, and everything right that was established.[839] For, so far was this remarkable man in advance of his contemporaries, that there are few of the great measures of the present generation which he did not anticipate, and zealously defend. Not only did he attack the absurd laws against forestalling and regrating,[840] but, by advocating the freedom of trade, he struck at the root of all similar prohibitions.[841] He supported those just claims of the Catholics,[842] which, during his lifetime, were obstinately refused; but which were conceded, many years after his death, as the only means of preserving the integrity of the empire. He supported the petition of the Dissenters, that they might be relieved from the restrictions to which, for the benefit of the Church of England, they were subjected.[843] Into other departments of politics he carried the same spirit. He opposed the cruel laws against insolvents,[844] by which, in the time of George III., our statute-book was still defaced; and he vainly attempted to soften the penal code,[845] the increasing severity of which was one of the worst features of that bad reign.[846] He wished to abolish the old plan of enlisting soldiers for life;[847] a barbarous and impolitic practice, as the English legislature began to perceive several years later.[848] He attacked the slave-trade;[849] which, being an ancient usage, the king wished to preserve, as part of the British constitution.[850] He refuted,[851] but, owing to the prejudices of the age, was unable to subvert, the dangerous power exercised by the judges, who, in criminal prosecutions for libel, confined the jury to the mere question of publication; thus taking the real issue into their own hands, and making themselves the arbiters of the fate of those who were so unfortunate as to be placed at their bar.[852] And, what many will think not the least of his merits, he was the first in that long line of financial reformers to whom we are deeply indebted.[853] Notwithstanding the difficulties thrown in his way, he carried through Parliament a series of bills, by which several useless places were entirely abolished, and, in the single office of paymaster-general, a saving effected to the country of 25,000l. a year.[854]

These things alone are sufficient to explain the animosity of a prince whose boast it was, that he would bequeath the government to his successor in the same state as that in which he had received it. There was, however, another circumstance by which the royal feelings were still further wounded. The determination of the king to oppress the Americans was so notorious that, when the war actually broke out, it was called the ‘king's war,’ and those who opposed it were regarded as the personal enemies of their sovereign.[855] In this, however, as in all other questions, the conduct of Burke was governed, not by traditions and principles, such as George III. cherished, but by large views of general expediency. Burke, in forming his opinions respecting this disgraceful contest, refused to be guided by arguments respecting the right of either party.[856] He would not enter into any discussion as to whether a mother country has the right to tax her colonies, or whether the colonies have a right to tax themselves. Such points he left to be mooted by those politicians who, pretending to be guided by principles, are, in reality, subjugated by prejudice.[857] For his own part he was content to compare the cost with the gain. It was enough for Burke that, considering the power of our American colonies, considering their distance from us, and considering the probability of their being aided by France, it was not advisable to exercise the power; and it was, therefore, idle to talk of the right. Hence he opposed the taxation of America, not because it was unprecedented, but because it was inexpedient. As a natural consequence he likewise opposed the Boston-Port Bill, and that shameful bill, to forbid all intercourse with America, which was not inaptly called the starvation plan; violent measures, by which the king hoped to curb the colonies, and break the spirit of those noble men, whom he hated even more than he feared.[858]

It is certainly no faint characteristic of those times, that a man like Burke, who dedicated to politics abilities equal to far nobler things, should, during thirty years, have received from his prince neither favour nor reward. But George III. was a king whose delight it was to raise the humble and exalt the meek. His reign, indeed, was the golden age of successful mediocrity; an age in which little men were favoured, and great men depressed; when Addington was cherished as a statesman, and Beattie pensioned as a philosopher; and when, in all the walks of public life, the first conditions of promotion were, to fawn upon ancient prejudices, and support established abuses.

This neglect of the most eminent of English politicians is highly instructive; but the circumstances which followed, though extremely painful, have a still deeper interest, and are well worth the attention of those whose habits of mind lead them to study the intellectual peculiarities of great men.

For, at this distance of time, when his nearest relations are no more, it would be affectation to deny that Burke, during the last few years of his life, fell into a state of complete hallucination. When the French Revolution broke out, his mind, already fainting under the weight of incessant labour, could not support the contemplation of an event so unprecedented, so appalling, and threatening results of such frightful magnitude. And, when the crimes of that great revolution, instead of diminishing, continued to increase, then it was that the feelings of Burke finally mastered his reason; the balance tottered; the proportions of that gigantic intellect were disturbed. From this moment, his sympathy with present suffering was so intense, that he lost all memory of the tyranny by which the sufferings were provoked. His mind, once so steady, so little swayed by prejudice and passion, reeled under the pressure of events which turned the brains of thousands.[859] And whoever will compare the spirit of his latest works with the dates of their publication, will see how this melancholy change was aggravated by that bitter bereavement, from which he never rallied, and which alone was sufficient to prostrate the understanding of one in whom the severity of the reason was so tempered, so nicely poised, by the warmth of the affections. Never, indeed, can there be forgotten those touching, those exquisite allusions to the death of that only son, who was the joy of his soul, and the pride of his heart, and to whom he fondly hoped to bequeath the inheritance of his imperishable name. Never can we forget that image of desolation under which the noble old man figured his immeasurable grief ‘I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me, have gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity, are in the place of ancestors…. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth.’[860]

It would, perhaps, be displaying a morbid curiosity, to attempt to raise the veil, and trace the decay of so mighty a mind.[861] Indeed, in all such cases, most of the evidence perishes; for those who have the best opportunities of witnessing the infirmities of a great man, are not those who most love to relate them. But it is certain, that the change was first clearly seen immediately after the breaking out of the French Revolution; that it was aggravated by the death of his son; and that it became progressively worse till death closed the scene.[862] In his Reflections on the French Revolution; in his Remarks on the Policy of the Allies: in his Letter to Elliot; in his Letter to a Noble Lord; and in his Letters on a Regicide Peace, we may note the consecutive steps of an increasing, and at length an uncontrollable, violence. To the single principle of hatred of the French Revolution, he sacrificed his oldest associations and his dearest friends. Fox, as is well known, always looked up to Burke as to a master, from whose lips he had gathered the lessons of political wisdom.[863] Burke, on his side, fully recognized the vast abilities of his friend, and loved him for that affectionate disposition, and for those winning manners, which, it has often been said, none who saw them could ever resist. But now, without the slightest pretence of a personal quarrel, this long intimacy[864] was rudely severed. Because Fox would not abandon that love of popular liberty which they had long cherished in common, Burke, publicly, and in his place in parliament, declared that their friendship was at an end; for that he would never more hold communion with a man who lent his support to the French people.[865] At the same time, and indeed the very evening on which this occurred, Burke, who had hitherto been remarkable for the courtesy of his manners,[866] deliberately insulted another of his friends, who was taking him home in his carriage; and, in a state of frantic excitement, insisted on being immediately set down, in the middle of the night, in a pouring rain, because he could not, he said, remain seated by ‘a friend to the revolutionary doctrines of the French.’[867]

Nor is it true, as some have supposed, that this mania of hostility was solely directed against the criminal part of the French people. It would be difficult, in that or in any other age, to find two men of more active, or indeed enthusiastic benevolence, than Condorcet and La Fayette. Besides this, Condorcet was one of the most profound thinkers of his time, and will be remembered as long as genius is honoured among us.[868] La Fayette was no doubt inferior to Condorcet in point of ability; but he was the intimate friend of Washington, on whose conduct he modelled his own,[869] and by whose side he had fought for the liberties of America: his integrity was, and still is, unsullied: and his character had a chivalrous and noble turn, which Burke, in his better days, would have been the first to admire.[870] Both, however, were natives of that hated country whose liberties they vainly attempted to achieve. On this account, Burke declared Condorcet to be guilty of ‘impious sophistry;’[871] to be a ‘fanatic atheist, and furious democratic republican;’[872] and to be capable of ‘the lowest, as well as the highest and most determined villainies.’[873] As to La Fayette, when an attempt was made to mitigate the cruel treatment he was receiving from the Prussian government, Burke not only opposed the motion made for that purpose in the House of Commons, but took the opportunity of grossly insulting the unfortunate captive, who was then languishing in a dungeon.[874] So dead had he become on this subject, even to the common instincts of our nature, that, in his place in parliament, he could find no better way of speaking of this injured and high-souled man, than by calling him a ruffian: ‘I would not,’ says Burke,—‘I would not debase my humanity by supporting an application in behalf of such a horrid ruffian.’[875]

As to France itself, it is ‘Cannibal Castle;’[876] it is ‘the republic of assassins;’[877] it is ‘a hell;’[878] its government is composed of ‘the dirtiest, lowest, most fraudulent, most knavish, of chicaners;’[879] its National Assembly are ‘miscreants;’[880] its people are ‘an allied army of Amazonian and male cannibal Parisians;’[881] they are ‘a nation of murderers;’[882] they are ‘the basest of mankind;’[883] they are ‘murderous atheists;’[884] they are ‘a gang of robbers;’[885] they are ‘the prostitute outcasts of mankind;’[886] they are ‘a desperate gang of plunderers, murderers, tyrants, and atheists.’[887] To make the slightest concessions to such a country in order to preserve peace, is offering victims ‘on the altars of blasphemed regicide;’[888] even to enter into negotiations is ‘exposing our lazar sores at the door of every proud servitor of the French republic, where the court-dogs will not deign to lick them.’[889] When our ambassador was actually in Paris, he ‘had the honour of passing his mornings in respectful attendance at the office of a regicide pettifogger;’[890] and we were taunted with having sent a ‘peer of the realm to the scum of the earth.’[891] ‘France has no longer a place in Europe; it is expunged from the map; its very name should be forgotten.[892] Why, then, need men travel in it? Why need our children learn its language? and why are we to endanger the morals of our ambassadors? who can hardly fail to return from such a land with their principles corrupted, and with a wish to conspire against their own country.’[893]

This is sad, indeed, from such a man as Burke once was; but what remains, shows still more clearly how the associations and composition of his mind had been altered. He who, with humanity not less than with wisdom, had strenuously laboured to prevent the American war, devoted the last few years of his life to kindle a new war, compared to which that with America was a light and trivial episode. In his calmer moments, no one would have more willingly recognized that the opinions prevalent in any country are the inevitable results of the circumstances in which that country had been placed. But now he sought to alter those opinions by force. From the beginning of the French Revolution, he insisted upon the right, and indeed upon the necessity, of compelling France to change her principles;[894] and, at a later period, he blamed the allied sovereigns for not dictating to a great people the government they ought to adopt.[895] Such was the havoc circumstances had made in his well-ordered intellect, that to this one principle he sacrificed every consideration of justice, of mercy, and of expediency. As if war, even in its mildest form, were not sufficiently hateful, he sought to give to it that character of a crusade[896] which increasing knowledge had long since banished: and loudly proclaiming that the contest was religious rather than temporal, he revived old prejudices in order to cause fresh crimes.[897] He also declared that the war should be carried on for revenge as well as for defence, and that we must never lay down our arms until we had utterly destroyed the men by whom the Revolution was brought about.[898] And, as if these things were not enough, he insisted that this, the most awful of all wars, being begun, was not to be hurried over; although it was to be carried on for revenge as well as for religion, and the resources of civilized men were to be quickened by the ferocious passions of crusaders, still it was not to be soon ended; it was to be durable; it must have permanence; it must, says Burke, in the spirit of a burning hatred, be protracted in a long war: ‘I speak it emphatically, and with a desire that it should be marked, in a long war.’[899]

It was to be a war to force a great people to change their government. It was to be a war carried on for the purpose of punishment. It was also to be a religious war. Finally, it was to be a long war. Was there ever any other man who wished to afflict the human race with such extensive, searching, and protracted calamities? Such cruel, such reckless, and yet such deliberate opinions, if they issued from a sane mind, would immortalize even the most obscure statesman, because they would load his name with imperishable infamy. For where can we find, even among the most ignorant or most sanguinary politicians, sentiments like these? Yet they proceed from one who, a very few years before, was the most eminent political philosopher England has ever possessed. To us it is only given to mourn over so noble a wreck. More than this no one should do. We may contemplate with reverence the mighty ruin; but the mysteries of its decay let no man presume to invade, unless, to use the language of the greatest of our masters, he can tell how to minister to a diseased mind, pluck the sorrows which are rooted in the memory, and raze out the troubles that are written in the brain.