And with retorting scorn, his back he turned
On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.”
The efforts of Burke's single mind at this critical moment decided the course of events in England. His speeches in Parliament and the publication of his Reflections on the Revolution in France aroused a national feeling that all the efforts of the revolutionary propagandists were unable to stem; which Pitt followed rather than led; and which enabled England to carry on without flinching, to a triumphant close, the long and bloody war in national self-defence into which she was driven by the aggressive spirit of the Revolution. Pitt only gave utterance to the national feeling when he declared at the close of Burke's speech on the Army Estimates, in which he flung down the gauntlet to the Revolution, “that not only the present generation but the latest posterity would revere his name for the decided part he had that day taken.”
It was Burke's fortune to witness the temporary triumph, but not the succeeding repulse, of the first outbreak of the Revolution. He died at the full tide of its fury. Yet the tremendous blows he dealt its principles, single-handed, before all that was mortal of him was laid at rest at Beaconsfield, undoubtedly saved England from succumbing to its influence in his own day, and their conservative force is still felt in the government of that country. “This man,” said Schlegel, “has been to his own country and to all Europe—and, in a particular manner, to all Germany—a new light of political wisdom and moral experience. He corrected his age when it was at the height of its revolutionary fury; and without maintaining any system of philosophy, he seems to have seen further into the true nature of society, and to have more clearly comprehended the effect of religion in connecting individual security with national welfare, than any philosopher or any system of philosophy of any preceding age.” True words, and worthy of attention at this moment, when Germany has entered on a new and dangerous course of political action.
From the first mutterings of the revolutionary storm Burke had distrusted its character and future violence. Alarmed by what he had seen of the undisguised levity and scepticism of Parisian society during his visit to France in 1772, he had taken occasion in one of his speeches, as early as 1773, to point out “this conspiracy of atheism to the watchful eyes of European governments.” The outrages in the name of liberty which were simultaneous with its outburst determined his course, although his keen political vision had long before penetrated the hollowness of its professions. The old political gladiator, “in whose breast,” as he proudly and truly said of himself, “no anger, durable or vehement, had ever been kindled but by what he considered as tyranny”; whose potent voice had re-echoed across the Western ocean in support of the American colonist, had pleaded for the African slave and Hindoo laborer, and had instilled fresh hope, in the broken heart of the Irish “Papist,” roused himself now to his last and most powerful effort in defence of the fugitive French “aristocrat” and hunted priest.
“I have struggled,” he said, “to the best of my power against two great evils, growing out of the most sacred of all things—liberty and authority. I have struggled against the licentiousness of freedom, I have contended against the tyranny [pg 827] of power.” Nearly ten years before, in his speech on the Marriage Act, defending himself against the charges of “aristocrat” and “radical” which had been alternately levelled against him, he had predicted his course in these noble words:
“When indeed the smallest rights of the poorest people in the kingdom are in question, I would set my face against any act of pride countenanced by the highest that are in it; and if it should come to the last extremity, and a contest of blood, my course is taken. I would take my fate with the poor, and low, and feeble. But if these people come to turn their liberty into a cloak for mischievousness, and to seek a privilege of exemption, not from power, but from the rules of morality and virtuous discipline, I would join my hand to make them feel the force which a few united in a good cause have over a multitude of the profligate and ferocious.”
Burke's theory of true reform, illustrated by the honorable labors of his whole public career, was in fact so radically opposed to that of the French constitution makers that no standing-ground common to both could be found. He foresaw plainly enough what were the secret aims and aspirations of the revolutionary leaders from the first, whatever might be their humanitarian professions; that whatever their changes of leaders or watchwords, their goal would always be the same—the destruction of existing society; not reparation, but ruin. He would have seen in M. Gambetta's programme of a nouvelle couche sociale, enunciated at Grenoble in 1872, only a new reading of M. Marat's schemes of universal confiscation in 1792. Neither would have found more favor in his eyes than in those of any English reformer from S. Thomas à Becket to Hampden. He believed with Bacon that there could be no wise design of reform which did not set out with the determination “to weed, to prune, and to graft, rather than to plough up and plant all afresh.” Sixty years afterwards another writer, after an elaborate and prolonged study of the ancien régime, and a lifetime's experience of the results of the Revolution, arrived at the point from which Burke started. The writer was Alexis de Tocqueville. Those who are familiar only with the Democracy in America, the work of his inexperienced youth, would do well to read his Memoir and Letters by De Beaumont. Writing to M. Freslon in 1853, after the events of 1848-51 had pretty well cured him of liberalism, he said:
“When one examines, as I am doing at Tours, the archives of an ancient provincial government, one finds a thousand reasons for hating the ancien régime, but few for loving the Revolution; for one sees that the ancien régime was rapidly sinking under the weight of years and a gradual change of ideas and manners, so that, with a little patience and good conduct, it might have been reformed without destroying indiscriminately all that was good in it with all that was bad. It is curious to see how different was the government of 1780 from that of 1750. One does not recognize the government or the governed. The Revolution broke out not when evils were at their worst, but when reform was beginning. Halfway down the staircase we threw ourselves out of the window, in order to get sooner to the bottom” (Memoir and Remains, vol. ii. pp. 242, 243, Eng. ed.)
Burke had an invincible distrust of the crude theories and rash speculations of the doctrinaires of the Revolution. “Follow experience and common sense,” he says in a hundred different ways; “these are the arguments of statesmen! Leave the rest to the schools, where only they may be debated with—safety.” [pg 828] “In politics,” he says, “the most fallacious of all things is geometrical demonstration.” Again: “The majors make a pompous figure in the battle, but the victory of truth depends upon the little minors of circumstances.” He compares the socialist theorist ready to plunge into the volcano of revolutionary experiment to the Sicilian sophist—ardentem frigidus Ætnam insiluit. The atrocious principles of the literary and philosophical guides of the Revolution seemed to him almost more portentous than the brutalities of the mob. “Never before this time,” he says, “was a set of literary men converted into a gang of robbers and assassins. Never before did a den of bravoes and banditti assume the garb and tone of an academy of philosophers.”