The ethics of rhetoric

by Richard M. Weaver

In 1783, years before the impeachment of Warren Hastings, he made a long speech in Parliament attacking Fox’s East India Bill. He was by then deeply impressed by the wrongs done the Indians by British adventurers, yet it will be observed that his habitus reveals itself in the following passages. He said of the East India Company:

I do not presume to condemn those who argue a priori against the propriety of leaving such extensive political power in the hands of a company of merchants. I know much is, and much more may be, said against such a system. But, with my particular ideas and sentiments, I cannot go that way to work. I feel an insuperable reluctance in giving my hand to destroy any established institution of government, upon a theory, however plausible it may be.[44]

Then shortly he continued:

To justify us in taking the administration of their affairs out of the hands of the East India Company, as my principles, I must see several conditions. 1st, the object affected by the abuse must be great and important. 2nd, the abuse affecting the great object ought to be a great abuse. 3rd, it ought to be habitual and not accidental. 4th, it ought to be utterly incurable in the body as it now stands constituted.[45]

It is pertinent to observe that Burke’s first condition here is exactly the first condition raised with reference to the Irish Catholics and with reference to the American Colonies. It is further characteristic of his method that the passages cited above are followed immediately by a description of the extent and wealth and civilization of India, just as the plea for approaching the Colonies with reconciliation was followed by a vivid advertisement of their extent and wealth and enterprise. The argument is for justice, but it is conditioned upon a circumstance.

When Burke undertook the prosecution of Hastings in 1788, these considerations seemed far from his mind. The splendid opening charge contains arguments strictly from genus, despite the renunciation of such arguments which we see above. He attacked the charter of the East India Company by showing that it violated the idea of a charter.[46] He affirmed the natural rights of man, and held that they had been criminally denied in India.[47] He scorned the notion of geographical morality. These sound like the utterances of a man committed to abstract right. Lord Morley has some observations on Burke which may contain the explanation. His study of Burke’s career led him to feel that “direct moral or philanthropic apostleship was not his function.”[48] Of his interest in India, he remarked: “It was reverence rather than sensibility, a noble and philosophic conservatism rather than philanthropy, which raised the storm in Burke’s breast against the rapacity of English adventurers in India, and the imperial crimes of Hastings.”[49] If it is true that Burke acted out of reverence rather than out of sensibility or philanthropy, what was the reverence of? It was, likely, for storied India, for an ancient and opulent civilization which had brought religion and the arts to a high point of development while his ancestors were yet “in the woods.” There is just enough of deference for the established and going concern, for panoply, for that which has prestige, to make us feel that Burke was again impressed—with an intended consequence which was noble, of course; but it is only fair to record this component of the situation.

The noble and philosophic conservatism next translated itself into a violent opposition to the French Revolution, which was threatening to bring down a still greater structure of rights and dignities, though in this instance in the name of reform and emancipation.

The French Revolution was the touchstone of Burke. Those who have regarded his position on this event as a reversal, or a sign of fatigue and senescence, have not sufficiently analyzed his methods and his sources. Burke would have had to become a new man to take any other stand than he did on the French Revolution. It was an event perfectly suited to mark off those who argue from circumstance, for it was one of the most radical revolutions on record, and it was the work of a people fond of logical rigor and clear demonstration.

Why Burke, who had championed the Irish Catholics, the American colonists, and the Indians should have championed on this occasion the nobility and the propertied classes of Europe is easy to explain. For him Europe, with all its settlements and usages, was the circumstance; and the Revolution was the challenge to it. From first to last Burke saw the grand upheaval as a contest between inherited condition and speculative insight. The circumstance said that Europe should go on; the Revolution said that it should cease and begin anew.[50] Burke’s position was not selfish; it was prudential within the philosophy we have seen him to hold.

Actually his Reflections on the Revolution in France divides itself into two parts. The first is an attempt, made with a zeal which seems almost excessive, to prove that the British government was the product of slow accretion of precedent, that it is for that reason a beneficent and stable government, and that the British have renounced, through their choice of methods in the past, any theoretical right to change their government by revolution. The second part is a miscellany of remarks on the proceedings in France, in which many shrewd observations of human nature are mingled with eloquent appeals on behalf of the ancien régime.