The ethics of rhetoric

by Richard M. Weaver

While representing Bristol in Parliament, Burke alienated a part of his constituency by supporting Sir George Savile’s measure to ease the restraints upon Catholics. In the famous Speech to the Electors of Bristol he devoted a large portion of his time to a justification of that course, and here, it is true, he made principal use of the argument from genus (“justice”) and from consequence. The argument from circumstance is not forgotten, but is tucked away at the end to persuade the “bigoted enemies to liberty.” There, using again his criterion of the “magnitude of the object,” he said:

Gentlemen, it is possible you may not know that the people of that persuasion in Ireland amount to at least sixteen or seventeen hundred thousand souls. I do not at all exaggerate the number. A nation to be persecuted! Whilst we were masters of the sea, embodied with America and in alliance with half the powers of the continent, we might, perhaps, in that remote corner of Europe, afford to tyrannize with impunity. But there is a revolution in our affairs which makes it prudent for us to be just.[29]

During the last decade of his life, Burke wrote a series of letters upon the Catholic question and upon Irish affairs, in which, of course, this question figured largely. In 1792 came A Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, M.P., upon the propriety of admitting Catholics to the elective franchise. Here we find him taking a pragmatic view of liberality toward Catholics. He reasoned as follows regarding the restoration of the franchise:

If such means can with any probability be shown, from circumstances, rather to add strength to our mixed ecclesiastical and secular constitution, than to weaken it; surely they are means infinitely to be preferred to penalties, incapacities, and proscriptions continued from generation to generation.[30]

In this instance the consideration of magnitude took a more extended form:

How much more, certainly, ought they [the disqualifying laws] to give way, when, as in our case, they affect, not here and there, in some particular point or in their consequence, but universally, collectively and directly, the fundamental franchises of a people, equal to the whole inhabitants of several respectable kingdoms and states, equal to the subjects of the kings of Sardinia or of Denmark; equal to those of the United Netherlands, and more than are to be found in all the states of Switzerland. This way of proscribing men by whole nations, as it were, from all the benefits of the constitution to which they were born, I never can believe to be politic or expedient, much less necessary for the existence of any state or church in the world.[31]

Greatly exercised over events in France, Burke came to think of Christianity as the one force with enough cohesion to check the spread of the Revolution. Then in 1795 he wrote the Letter to William Smith, Esq. Here he described Christianity as “the grand prejudice ... which holds all the other prejudices together”;[32] and such prejudices, as he visualized them, were essential to the fabric of society. He told his correspondent candidly: “My whole politics, at present, center in one point; and to this the merit or demerit of every measure (with me) is referable; that is, what will most promote or depress the cause of Jacobinism.”[33] In a second letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, written in the same year, he could say: “In the Catholic Question I considered only one point. Was it at the time, and in the circumstances, a measure which tended to promote the concord of the citizens.”[34]

Only once did Burke approach the question of religion through what may be properly termed an argument from definition. In the last year of his life he composed A Letter on the Affairs of Ireland, one passage of which considers religion not in its bearing upon some practical measure, but with reference to its essential nature.

Let every man be as pious as he pleases, and in the way that he pleases; but it is agreeable neither to piety nor to policy to give exclusively all manner of civil privileges and advantages to a negative religion—such is the Protestant without a certain creed; and at the same time to deny those privileges to men whom we know to agree to an iota in every one positive doctrine, which all of us, who profess religion authoritatively taught in England, hold ourselves, according to our faculties, bound to believe.[35]