Remarkable sayings then, and true of experience anterior to his time. But had Burke lived in our day, he would have witnessed with astonishment the full development of the spirit he denounced, in the terrible spectacle of an aggressive infidel philosophy, and an almost universal infidel press, sometimes truculent, sometimes frivolous, but always shamelessly boastful of its pagan principles. He would have seen a school of pseudo-philosophy professing its open design to destroy the foundations of revealed religion; filled with the spirit of the apostate Julian; as audacious and boastful as he, but destined to meet as shameful an end.
Let us compare, then, Burke's theory of true liberty, and his opinion of what France might have gained by a large and loyal measure of reform, with the desperate counsels and futile outrages which followed the surrender of the movement by the French conservatives into the hands of the Jacobins. “You would,” he says, had such a course as he recommended been pursued, “have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have shamed despotism from the earth by showing that freedom was not only reconcilable, but, as when well disciplined it is, auxiliary to law. You would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and recognize that happiness is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walks of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove.”
Burke's frequent definitions of true liberty are as beautiful as they are true. “You hope, sir,” he says, writing to De Menonville, “that I think the French deserving of liberty. I certainly do. I certainly think all men who desire it deserve it. It is not the reward of our merit or the acquisition of our industry. It is our inheritance. It is the birthright of our species. We cannot forfeit our right to it but by what forfeits our title to the privileges of our kind. I mean the abuse or oblivion of our natural faculties, and a ferocious indocility which is prompt to wrong or violence, destroys our social nature, and transforms us into something a little better than a description of wild beast. To men so degraded a state of strong restraint is a sort of necessary substitute for freedom, since, bad as it is, it may deliver them in some measure from the worst of all slavery, that is, the despotism of their own blind and brutal [pg 829] passions. You have kindly said that you began to love freedom from your intercourse with me. Permit me, then, to continue our conversation, and to tell you what that freedom is that I love. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty. It is social freedom. It is that state of things in which the liberty of no man and no body of men is in a condition to trespass on the liberty of any person or any description of persons in society. The liberty, the only liberty, I mean, is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with virtue and order, but which cannot exist without them.”
“Am I,” he asks, in answer to the shibboleth of the “rights of man,”—“am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the case of the criminals condemned to the galleys and their heroic deliverer, the knight of the 'sorrowful countenance.'”
If we turn from Burke's satire upon the revolutionary actors to his opinions on its probable onward course and changing fortunes, we shall find a series of the most remarkable political prophecies on record. At a time when Fox and the opposition hailed the Revolution as already accomplished, with nothing before it but a future of ideal progress and happiness; when Pitt and the government seemed lulled into a still more fatal inaction, Burke proclaimed in decisive tones that the contest between socialism and all constituted governments had only begun. We group together a few of these remarkable predictions, which time has so amply verified: “He proposed to prove,” he said in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, “that the present state of things in France is not a transient evil, productive, as some have too favorably supposed, of a lasting good; but that the present evil is only the means of producing future and, if that were possible, worse evils. That this is not an undigested, imperfect, and crude scheme of liberty, which may be gradually mellowed and ripened into an orderly and social freedom; but that it is so fundamentally wrong as to be incapable of correcting itself by any length of time.” Again: “We are not at the end of our struggle or near it. Let us not deceive ourselves; we are at the beginning of great troubles.” Predicting the changing features of the Revolution, he said: “In its present form it can hardly remain; but before its final settlement it may have to pass, as one of our poets says, 'through great varieties of untried being,' and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and sword.” The very spirit of the Commune is thus foreshadowed in a letter to M. de Menonville, 1790: “But if the same ends should hereafter require the same course which had been already pursued, there is no doubt but the same ferocious delight in murder and the same savage cruelty will be again renewed.” Tous les évêques a la lanterne was the watchword of both outbreaks of the Revolution.
Compare with these sayings the remarks, fifty years later, of another observer, of great acuteness, but moulded in less heroic proportions than Burke. “This day fifty-one years,” writes De Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America, “the French Revolution commenced, and, after the destruction of so many men and institutions, we may say it is still going on. Is not this reassuring to the nations that [pg 830] are only just beginning theirs?”[202] De Tocqueville, it is well known, during the early part of his career, was tainted with the prevalent liberal Catholicism of his day in France. He wished to unite the church with the Revolution—chimerical task, of which advancing years and experience convinced him of the sinful folly! Happily for himself, he died a good Catholic in the bosom of the church.
“I scarcely dare hope,” he says, “to see a regular government, strong and at the same time liberal, established in our country. This ideal was, as you know, the dream of my youth, and likewise of the portion of my mature age that has passed. Is it possible still to believe in its realization? For a long time I thought (but long before February this belief had been much shaken) that we had been making our way over a stormy sea, on which we were still tossing, but that the port was at hand. Was I not wrong? Are we not on a rolling sea that has no shore? Or is not the land so distant, so unknown, that our lives and those of our children may pass away before it is reached, or, at least, before any settlement is made upon it?... I am indeed alarmed at the state of the public mind. It is far from betokening the close of a revolution. At the time it was said, and to this day it is commonly repeated, that the insurgents of June were the dregs of the populace; that they were all outcasts of the basest description, whose only motive was lust for plunder. Such, of course, were many of them. But it is not true that they were all of this kind; would to God that they had been! Such wretches are always a small minority; they never prevail; they are imprisoned or executed, and all is over. In the insurrection of June, besides bad passions, there were, what are far more dangerous, false opinions. Many of the men who attempted to overthrow the most sacred rights were carried away by an erroneous notion of right. They sincerely believed that society was based upon injustice, and they wished to give it another foundation. [Compare Gambetta's nouvelle couche sociale.] Our bayonets and our cannon will never destroy this revolutionary fanaticism. It will create for us dangers and embarrassments without end. Finally, I begin to ask myself whether anything solid or durable can be built on the shifting basis of our society? Whether it will support even a despotism, which many people, tired of storms, would, for want of a better, hail as a haven? We did not see this great revolution in human society begin; we shall not see it end. If I had children, I should always be repeating this to them, and should tell them that in this age and in this country one ought to be fit for everything, and prepared for everything, for no one can count on the future.”[203]
A conversation apropos of a Benedictine survivor of 1789, given from Mr. Senior's Journal (Memoir, vol. ii. p. 1), illustrates the final opinion of the author of Democracy in America upon the Revolution. It took place only one year before his death:
“And what effect,” I asked, “has the contemplation of seventy years of revolution produced on him (the Benedictine)? Does he look back, like Talleyrand, to the ancien régime as a golden age?” “He admits,” said Tocqueville, “the material superiority of our own age, but he believes that intellectually and morally we are far inferior to our grandfathers. And I agree with him. These seventy years of revolution have destroyed our courage, our hopefulness, our self-reliance, our public spirit, and, as respects by far the majority of our higher classes, our passions, except the vulgarest and most selfish ones, vanity and covetousness. Even ambition seems extinct. The men who seek power seek it not for itself, not as a means of doing good to their country but as a means of getting money and flatterers.”[204]
What more remarkable testimony to Burke's prophetic vision could be offered?