Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" / Volume 4, Part 4

by Various

for a dozen years was now finally broken, and as if the party which he had been the chief instrument in instructing, directing and keeping together must now inevitably possess power for many years to come. Yet in a few months the whole fabric had fallen, and the Whigs were thrown into opposition for the rest of the century. The story cannot be omitted in the most summary account of Burke's life. Lord Rockingham came into office on the fall of North. Burke was rewarded for services beyond price by being made paymaster of the forces, with the rank of a privy councillor. He had lost his seat for Bristol two years before, in consequence of his courageous advocacy of a measure of tolerance for the Catholics, and his still more courageous exposure of the enormities of the commercial policy of England towards Ireland. He sat during the rest of his parliamentary life (to 1794) for Malton, a pocket borough first of Lord Rockingham's, then of Lord Fitzwilliam's. Burke's first tenure of office was very brief. He had brought forward in 1780 a comprehensive scheme of economical reform, with the design of limiting the resources of jobbery and corruption which the crown was able to use to strengthen its own sinister influence in parliament. Administrative reform was, next to peace with the colonies, the part of the scheme of the new ministry to which the king most warmly objected. It was carried out with greater moderation than had been foreshadowed in opposition. But at any rate Burke's own office was not spared. While Charles Fox's father was at the pay-office (1765-1778) he realized as the interest of the cash balances which he was allowed to retain in his hands, nearly a quarter of a million of money. When Burke came to this post the salary was settled at £4000 a year. He did not enjoy the income long. In July 1782 Lord Rockingham died; Lord Shelburne took his place; Fox, who inherited from his father a belief in Lord Shelburne's duplicity, which his own experience of him as a colleague during the last three months had made stronger, declined to serve under him. Burke, though he had not encouraged Fox to take this step, still with his usual loyalty followed him out of office. This may have been a proper thing to do if their distrust of Shelburne was incurable, but the next step, coalition with Lord North against him, was not only a political blunder, but a shock to party morality, which brought speedy retribution. Either they had been wrong, and violently wrong, for a dozen years, or else Lord North was the guiltiest political instrument since Strafford. Burke attempted to defend the alliance on the ground of the substantial agreement between Fox and North in public aims. The defence is wholly untenable. The Rockingham Whigs were as substantially in agreement on public affairs with the Shelburne Whigs as they were with Lord North. The movement was one of the worst in the history of English party. It served its immediate purpose, however, for Lord Shelburne found himself (February 24, 1783) too weak to carry on the government, and was succeeded by the members of the coalition, with the duke of Portland for prime minister (April 2, 1783). Burke went back to his old post at the pay-office and was soon engaged in framing and drawing the famous India Bill. This was long supposed to be the work of Fox, who was politically responsible for it. We may be sure that neither he nor Burke would have devised any government for India which they did not honestly believe to be for the advantage both of that country and of England. But it cannot be disguised that Burke had thoroughly persuaded himself that it was indispensable in the interests of English freedom to strengthen the party hostile to the court. As we have already said, dread of the peril to the constitution from the new aims of George III. was the main inspiration of Burke's political action in home affairs for the best part of his political life. The India Bill strengthened the anti-court party by transferring the government of India to seven persons named in the bill, and neither appointed nor removable by the crown. In other words, the bill gave the government to a board chosen directly by the House of Commons; and it had the incidental advantage of conferring on the ministerial party patronage valued at £300,000 a year, which would remain for a fixed term of years out of reach of the king. In a word, judging the India Bill from a party point of view, we see that Burke was now completing the aim of his project of economic reform. That measure had weakened the influence of the crown by limiting its patronage. The measure for India weakened the influence of the crown by giving a mass of patronage to the party which the king hated. But this was not to be. The India Bill was thrown out by means of a royal intrigue in the Lords, and the ministers were instantly dismissed (December 18, 1783). Young William Pitt, then only in his twenty-fifth year, had been chancellor of the exchequer in Lord Shelburne's short ministry, and had refused to enter the coalition government from an honourable repugnance to join Lord North. He was now made prime minister. The country in the election of the next year ratified the king's judgment against the Portland combination; and the hopes which Burke had cherished for a political lifetime were irretrievably ruined.

The six years that followed the great rout of the orthodox Whigs were years of repose for the country, but it was now that Burke engaged in the most laborious and formidable enterprise of his life, the impeachment of Warren Hastings for high crimes and misdemeanours in his government of India. His interest in that country was of old date. It arose partly from the fact of William Burke's residence there, partly from his friendship with Philip Francis, but most of all, we suspect, from the effect which he observed Indian influence to have in demoralizing the House of Commons. "Take my advice for once in your life," Francis wrote to Shee; "lay aside 40,000 rupees for a seat in parliament: in this country that alone makes all the difference between somebody and nobody." The relations, moreover, between the East India Company and the government were of the most important kind, and occupied Burke's closest attention from the beginning of the American war down to his own India Bill and that of Pitt and Dundas. In February 1785 he delivered one of the most famous of all his speeches, that on the nabob of Arcot's debts. The real point of this superb declamation was Burke's conviction that ministers supported the claims of the fraudulent creditors in order to secure the corrupt advantages of a sinister parliamentary interest. His proceedings against Hastings had a deeper spring. The story of Hastings's crimes, as Macaulay says, made the blood of Burke boil in his veins. He had a native abhorrence of cruelty, of injustice, of disorder, of oppression, of tyranny, and all these things in all their degrees marked Hastings's course in India. They were, moreover, concentrated in individual cases, which exercised Burke's passionate imagination to its profoundest depths, and raised it to such a glow of fiery intensity as has never been rivalled in our history. For it endured for fourteen years, and was just as burning and as terrible when Hastings was acquitted in 1795, as in the select committee of 1781 when Hastings's enormities were first revealed. "If I were to call for a reward," wrote Burke, "it would be for the services in which for fourteen years, without intermission, I showed the most industry and had the least success, I mean in the affairs of India; they are those on which I value myself the most; most for the importance; most for the labour; most for the judgment; most for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit." Sheridan's speech in the House of Commons upon the charge relative to the begums of Oude probably excelled anything that Burke achieved, as a dazzling performance abounding in the most surprising literary and rhetorical effects. But neither Sheridan nor Fox was capable of that sustained and overflowing indignation at outraged justice and oppressed humanity, that consuming moral fire, which burst forth again and again from the chief manager of the impeachment, with such scorching might as drove even the cool and intrepid Hastings beyond all self-control, and made him cry out with protests and exclamations like a criminal writhing under the scourge. Burke, no doubt, in the course of that unparalleled trial showed some prejudice; made some minor overstatements of his case; used many intemperances; and suffered himself to be provoked into expressions of heat and impatience by the cabals of the defendant and his party, and the intolerable incompetence of the tribunal. It is one of the inscrutable perplexities of human affairs, that in the logic of practical

life, in order to reach conclusions that cover enough for truth, we are constantly driven to premises that cover too much, and that in order to secure their right weight to justice and reason good men are forced to fling the two-edged sword of passion into the same scale. But these excuses were mere trifles, and well deserve to be forgiven, when we think that though the offender was in form acquitted, yet Burke succeeded in these fourteen years of laborious effort in laying the foundations once for all of a moral, just, philanthropic and responsible public opinion in England with reference to India, and in doing so performed perhaps the most magnificent service that any statesman has ever had it in his power to render to humanity.

Burke's first decisive step against Hastings was a motion for papers in the spring of 1786; the thanks of the House of Commons to the managers of the impeachment were voted in the summer of 1794. But in those eight years some of the most astonishing events in history had changed the political face of Europe. Burke was more than sixty years old when the states-general met at Versailles in the spring of 1789. He had taken a prominent part on the side of freedom in the revolution which stripped England of her empire in the West. He had taken a prominent part on the side of justice, humanity and order in dealing with the revolution which had brought to England new empire in the East. The same vehement passion for freedom, justice, humanity and order was roused in him at a very early stage of the third great revolution in his history—the revolution which overthrew the old monarchy in France. From the first Burke looked on the events of 1789 with doubt and misgiving. He had been in France in 1773, where he had not only the famous vision of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, "glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour and joy," but had also supped and discussed with some of the destroyers, the encyclopaedists, "the sophisters, economists and calculators." His first speech on his return to England was a warning (March 17, 1773) that the props of good government were beginning to fail under the systematic attacks of unbelievers, and that principles were being propagated that would not leave to civil society any stability. The apprehension never died out in his mind; and when he knew that the principles and abstractions, the un-English dialect and destructive dialectic, of his former acquaintances were predominant in the National Assembly, his suspicion that the movement would end in disastrous miscarriage waxed into certainty.

The scene grew still more sinister in his eyes after the march of the mob from Paris to Versailles in October, and the violent transport of the king and queen from Versailles to Paris. The same hatred of lawlessness and violence which fired him with a divine rage against the Indian malefactors was aroused by the violence and lawlessness of the Parisian insurgents. The same disgust for abstractions and naked doctrines of right that had stirred him against the pretensions of the British parliament in 1774 and 1776, was revived in as lively a degree by political conceptions which he judged to be identical in the French assembly of 1789. And this anger and disgust were exasperated by the dread with which certain proceedings in England had inspired him, that the aims, principles, methods and language which he so misdoubted or abhorred in France were likely to infect the people of Great Britain.

In November 1790 the town, which had long been eagerly expecting a manifesto from Burke's pen, was electrified by the Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event. The generous Windham made an entry in his diary of his reception of the new book. "What shall be said," he added, "of the state of things, when it is remembered that the writer is a man decried, persecuted and proscribed; not being much valued even by his own party, and by half the nation considered as little better than an ingenious madman?" But the writer now ceased to be decried, persecuted and proscribed, and his book was seized as the expression of that new current of opinion in Europe which the more recent events of the Revolution had slowly set flowing. Its vogue was instant and enormous. Eleven editions were exhausted in little more than a year, and there is probably not much exaggeration in the estimate that 30,000 copies were sold before Burke's death seven years afterwards. George III. was extravagantly delighted; Stanislaus of Poland sent Burke words of thanks and high glorification and a gold medal. Catherine of Russia, the friend of Voltaire and the benefactress of Diderot, sent her congratulations to the man who denounced French philosophers as miscreants and wretches. "One wonders," Romilly said, by and by, "that Burke is not ashamed at such success." Mackintosh replied to him temperately in the Vindiciae Gallicae, and Thomas Paine replied to him less temperately but far more trenchantly and more shrewdly in the Rights of Man. Arthur Young, with whom he had corresponded years before on the mysteries of deep ploughing and fattening hogs, added a cogent polemical chapter to that ever admirable work, in which he showed that he knew as much more than Burke about the old system of France as he knew more than Burke about soils and roots. Philip Francis, to whom he had shown the proof-sheets, had tried to dissuade Burke from publishing his performance. The passage about Marie Antoinette, which has since become a stock piece in books of recitation, seemed to Francis a mere piece of foppery; for was she not a Messalina and a jade? "I know nothing of your story of Messalina," answered Burke; "am I obliged to prove judicially the virtues of all those I shall see suffering every kind of wrong and contumely and risk of life, before I endeavour to interest others in their sufferings?... Are not high rank, great splendour of descent, great personal elegance and outward accomplishments ingredients of moment in forming the interest we take in the misfortunes of men?... I tell you again that the recollection of the manner in which I saw the queen of France in 1774, and the contrast between that brilliancy, splendour and beauty, with the prostrate homage of a nation to her, and the abominable scene of 1780 which I was describing, did draw tears from me and wetted my paper. These tears came again into my eyes almost as often as I looked at the description,—they may again. You do not believe this fact, nor that these are my real feelings; but that the whole is affected, or as you express it, downright foppery. My friend, I tell you it is truth; and that it is true and will be truth when you and I are no more; and will exist as long as men with their natural feelings shall exist" (Corr. iii. 139).

Burke's conservatism was, as such a passage as this may illustrate, the result partly of strong imaginative associations clustering round the more imposing symbols of social continuity, partly of a sort of corresponding conviction in his reason that there are certain permanent elements of human nature out of which the European order had risen and which that order satisfied, and of whose immense merits, as of its mighty strength, the revolutionary party in France were most fatally ignorant. When Romilly saw Diderot in 1783, the great encyclopaedic chief assured him that submission to kings and belief in God would be at an end all over the world in a very few years. When Condorcet described the Tenth Epoch in the long development of human progress, he was sure not only that fulness of light and perfection of happiness would come to the sons of men, but that they were coming with all speed. Only those who know the incredible rashness of the revolutionary doctrine in the mouths of its most powerful professors at that time; only those who know their absorption in ends and their inconsiderateness about means, can feel how profoundly right Burke was in all this part of his contention. Napoleon, who had begun life as a disciple of Rousseau, confirmed the wisdom of the philosophy of Burke when he came to make the Concordat. That measure was in one sense the outcome of a mere sinister expediency, but that such a measure was expedient at all sufficed to prove that Burke's view of the present possibilities of social change was right, and the view of the Rousseauites and too sanguine Perfectibilitarians wrong. As we have seen, Burke's very first niece, the satire on Bolingbroke, sprang from his conviction that merely rationalistic or destructive criticism, applied to the vast complexities of man

in the social union, is either mischievous or futile, and mischievous exactly in proportion as it is not futile.

To discuss Burke's writings on the Revolution would be to write first a volume upon the abstract theory of society, and then a second volume on the history of France. But we may make one or two further remarks. One of the most common charges against Burke was that he allowed his imagination and pity to be touched only by the sorrows of kings and queens, and forgot the thousands of oppressed and famine-stricken toilers of the land. "No tears are shed for nations," cried Francis, whose sympathy for the Revolution was as passionate as Burke's execration of it. "When the provinces are scourged to the bone by a mercenary and merciless military power, and every drop of its blood and substance extorted from it by the edicts of a royal council, the case seems very tolerable to those who are not involved in it. When thousands after thousands are dragooned out of their country for the sake of their religion, or sent to row in the galleys for selling salt against law,—when the liberty of every individual is at the mercy of every prostitute, pimp or parasite that has access to power or any of its basest substitutes,—my mind, I own, is not at once prepared to be satisfied with gentle palliatives for such disorders" (Francis to Burke, November 3, 1790). This is a very terse way of putting a crucial objection to Burke's whole view of French affairs in 1789. His answer was tolerably simple. The Revolution, though it had made an end of the Bastille, did not bring the only real practical liberty, that is to say, the liberty which comes with settled courts of justice, administering settled laws, undisturbed by popular fury, independent of everything but law, and with a clear law for their direction. The people, he contended, were no worse off under the old monarchy than they will be in the long run under assemblies that are bound by the necessity of feeding one part of the community at the grievous charge of other parts, as necessitous as those who are so fed; that are obliged to flatter those who have their lives at their disposal by tolerating acts of doubtful influence on commerce and agriculture, and for the sake of precarious relief to sow the seeds of lasting want; that will be driven to be the instruments of the violence of others from a sense of their own weakness, and, by want of authority to assess equal and proportioned charges upon all, will be compelled to lay a strong hand upon the possessions of a part. As against the moderate section of the Constituent Assembly this was just.

One secret of Burke's views of the Revolution was the contempt which he had conceived for the popular leaders in the earlier stages of the movement. In spite of much excellence of intention, much heroism, much energy, it is hardly to be denied that the leaders whom that movement brought to the surface were almost without exception men of the poorest political capacity. Danton, no doubt, was abler than most of the others, yet the timidity or temerity with which he allowed himself to be vanquished by Robespierre showed that even he was not a man of commanding quality. The spectacle of men so rash, and so incapable of controlling the forces which they seemed to have presumptuously summoned, excited in Burke both indignation and contempt. And the leaders of the Constituent who came first on the stage, and hoped to make a revolution with rose-water, and hardly realized any more than Burke did how rotten was the structure which they had undertaken to build up, almost deserved his contempt, even if, as is certainly true, they did not deserve his indignation. It was only by revolutionary methods, which are in their essence and for a time as arbitrary as despotic methods, that the knot could be cut. Burke's vital error was his inability to see that a root and branch revolution was, under the conditions, inevitable. His cardinal position, from which he deduced so many important conclusions, namely, that, the parts and organs of the old constitution of France were sound, and only needed moderate invigoration, is absolutely mistaken and untenable. There was not a single chamber in the old fabric that was not crumbling and tottering. The court was frivolous, vacillating, stone deaf and stone blind; the gentry were amiable, but distinctly bent to the very last on holding to their privileges, and they were wholly devoid both of the political experience that only comes of practical responsibility for public affairs, and of the political sagacity that only comes of political experience. The parliaments or tribunals were nests of faction and of the deepest social incompetence. The very sword of the state broke short in the king's hand. If the king or queen could either have had the political genius of Frederick the Great, or could have had the good fortune to find a minister with that genius, and the good sense and good faith to trust and stand by him against mobs of aristocrats and mobs of democrats; if the army had been sound and the states-general had been convoked at Bourges or Tours instead of at Paris, then the type of French monarchy and French society might have been modernized without convulsion. But none of these conditions existed.