It is not purely an argument from definition, but it contains such an argument, and so contrasts with his dominant position on a subject which engaged much of his thought and seems to have filled him with sincere feeling.
We shall examine him now on another major subject to engage his statesmanship, the rebellion of the North American Colonies against Great Britain. By common admission today, Burke’s masterpiece of forensic eloquence is the speech moving his resolutions for conciliation with that disaffected part of the Empire, delivered in the House of Commons on March 22, 1775. In admiring the felicities with which this great oration undoubtedly abounds, it is easy to overlook the fact that it is from beginning to end an argument from circumstance. It is not an argument about rights or definitions, as Burke explicitly says at two or three points; it is an argument about policy as dictated by circumstances. Its burden is a plea to conciliate the colonies because they are waxing great. No subtlety of interpretation is required to establish this truth, because we can substantially establish it in the express language of Burke himself.
To see the aspect of this argument, it is useful to begin by looking at the large alternatives which the orator enumerates for Parliament in the exigency. The first of these is to change the spirit of the Colonies by rendering it more submissive. Circumventing the theory of the relationship of ruler and ruled, Burke sets aside this alternative as impractical. He admits that an effort to bring about submission would be “radical in its principle” (i.e., would have a root in principle); but he sees too many obstacles in geography, ethnology, and other circumstances to warrant the trial.
The second alternative is to prosecute the Colonists as criminal. At this point, the “magnitude of the object” again enters his equation, and he would distinguish between the indictment of a single individual and the indictment of a whole people as things different in kind. The number and vigor of the Americans constitute an embarrassing circumstance. Therefore his thought issues in the oft-quoted statement “I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.”[36] This was said, it should be recalled, despite the fact that history is replete with proceedings against rebellious subjects.[37] But Burke had been an agent for the colony of New York; he had studied the geography and history of the Colonies with his usual industry; and we may suppose him to have had a much clearer idea than his colleagues in Parliament of their power to support a conflict.
It is understandable, by this view, that his third alternative should be “to comply with the American spirit as necessary.” He told his fellow Commoners plainly that his proposal had nothing to do with the legal right of taxation. “My consideration is narrow, confined, and wholly limited to the policy of the question.”[38] This policy he later characterizes as “systematic indulgence.” The outcome of this disjunctive argument is then a measure to accommodate a circumstance. The circumstance is that America is a growing country, of awesome potentiality, whose strength, both actual and imminent, makes it advisable for the Mother Country to overlook abstract rights. In a peroration, the topic of abstract rights is assigned to those “vulgar and mechanical politicians,” who are “not fit to turn a wheel in the machine” of Empire.[39]
With this conclusion in mind, it will be instructive to see how the orator prepared the way for his proposal. The entire first part of his discourse may be described as a depiction of the circumstance which is to be his source of argument. After a circumspect beginning, in which he calls attention to the signs of rebellion and derides the notion of “paper government,” he devotes a long and brilliant passage to simple characterization of the Colonies and their inhabitants. The unavoidable effect of this passage is to impress upon his hearers the size and resources of this portion of the Empire. First he takes up the rapidly growing population, then the extensive trade, then the spirit of enterprise, and finally the personal character of the Colonists themselves. Outstanding even in this colorful passage is his account of the New England whaling industry.
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, 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 to 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 hard 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.[40]
It is the spectacle of this enterprise which induces Burke to “pardon something to the spirit of liberty.”
The long recital is closed with an appeal which may be fitly regarded as the locus classicus of the argument from circumstance. For with this impressive review of the fierce spirit of the colonists before his audience, Burke declares: “The question is, not whether the spirit deserves praise or blame, but—what, in the name of God, shall we do with it?”[41] The question then is not what is right or wrong, or what accords with our idea of justice or our scheme of duty; it is, how can we meet this circumstance? “I am not determining a point of law; I am restoring tranquillity.”[42] The circumstance becomes the cue of the policy. We must remind ourselves that our concern here is not to pass upon the merits of a particular controversy, but to note the term which Burke evidently considered most efficacious in moving his hearers. “Political reason,” he says, elsewhere, “is a computing principle.”[43] Where does political reason in this instance leave him? It leaves him inevitably in the middle, keeping the Colonies, but not as taxable parts of the Empire, allowing them to pay their own charge by voluntary grants. In Burke’s characteristic view, the theoretic relationship has been altered by the medium until the thirteen (by his count fourteen) colonies of British North America are left halfway between colonial and national status. The position of the Tories meant that either the Colonies would be colonies or they would terminate their relationship with the Empire. Burke’s case was that by concession to circumstance they could be retained in some form, and this would be a victory for policy. Philosophers of starker principle, like Tom Paine, held that a compromise of the Burkean type would have been unacceptable in the long run even to the Americans, and the subsequent crystallization of American nationality seems to support this view. But Burke thought he saw a way to preserve an institution by making way for a large corporeal fact.
It must be confessed that Burke’s interest in the affairs of India, and more specifically in the conduct of the East India Company, is not reconcilable in quite the same way with the thesis of this chapter. Certainly there is nothing in mean motives or contracted views to explain why he should have labored over a period of fourteen years to benefit a people with whom he had no contact and from whom he could expect no direct token of appreciation. But it must be emphasized that the subject of this essay is methods, and even in this famous case Burke found some opportunity to utilize his favorite source.