Book: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4

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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 [v.04
p.0832] 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.

When he dealt with the affairs of India Burke passed over the circumstances
of our acquisition of power in that continent. "There is a sacred veil to
be drawn over the beginnings of all government," he said. "The first step
to empire is revolution, by which power is conferred; the next is good
laws, good order, good institutions, to give that power stability." Exactly
on this broad principle of political force, revolution was the first step
to the assumption by the people of France of their own government. Granted
that the Revolution was inevitable and indispensable, how was the nation to
make the best of it? And how were surrounding nations to make the best of
it? This was the true point of view. But Burke never placed himself at such
a point. He never conceded the postulate, because, though he knew France
better than anybody in England except Arthur Young, he did not know her
condition well enough. "Alas!" he said, "they little know how many a weary
step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which has a
true political personality."

Burke's view of French affairs, however consistent with all his former
political conceptions, put an end to more than one of his old political
friendships. He had never been popular in the House of Commons, and the
vehemence, sometimes amounting to fury, which he had shown in the debates
on the India Bill, on the regency, on the impeachment of Hastings, had made
him unpopular even among men on his own side. In May 1789--that memorable
month of May in which the states-general marched in impressive array to
hear a sermon at the church of Notre Dame at Versailles--a vote of censure
had actually been passed on him in the House of Commons for a too severe
expression used against Hastings. Fox, who led the party, and Sheridan, who
led Fox, were the intimates of the prince of Wales; and Burke would have
been as much out of place in that circle of gamblers and profligates as
Milton would have been out of place in the court of the Restoration. The
prince, as somebody said, was like his father in having closets within
cabinets and cupboards within closets. When the debates on the regency were
at their height we have Burke's word that he was not admitted to the
private counsels of the party. Though Fox and he were on friendly terms in
society, yet Burke admits that for a considerable period before 1790 there
had been between them "distance, coolness and want of confidence, if not
total alienation on his part." The younger Whigs had begun to press for
shorter parliaments, for the ballot, for redistribution of political power.
Burke had never looked with any favour on these projects. His experience of
the sentiment of the populace in the two greatest concerns of his
life,--American affairs and Indian affairs,--had not been likely to
prepossess him in favour of the popular voice as the voice of superior
political wisdom. He did not absolutely object to some remedy in the state
of representation (_Corr._ ii. 387), still he vigorously resisted such
proposals as the duke of Richmond's in 1780 for manhood suffrage. The
general ground was this:--"The machine itself is well enough to answer any
good purpose, provided the materials were sound. But what signifies the
arrangement of rottenness?"

Bad as the parliaments of George III. were, they contained their full share
of eminent and capable men; and, what is more, their very defects were the
exact counterparts of what we now look back upon as the prevailing
stupidity in the country. [v.04 p.0833] What Burke valued was good
government. His _Report on the Causes of the Duration of Mr Hastings's
Trial_ shows how wide and sound were his views of law reform. His _Thoughts
on Scarcity_ attest his enlightenment on the central necessities of trade
and manufacture, and even furnished arguments to Cobden fifty years
afterwards. Pitt's parliaments were competent to discuss, and willing to
pass, all measures for which the average political intelligence of the
country was ripe. Burke did not believe that altered machinery was at that
time needed to improve the quality of legislation. If wiser legislation
followed the great reform of 1832, Burke would have said this was because
the political intelligence of the country had improved.

Though averse at all times to taking up parliamentary reform, he thought
all such projects downright crimes in the agitation of 1791-1792. This was
the view taken by Burke, but it was not the view of Fox, nor of Sheridan,
nor of Francis, nor of many others of his party, and difference of opinion
here was naturally followed by difference of opinion upon affairs in
France. Fox, Grey, Windham, Sheridan, Francis, Lord Fitzwilliam, and most
of the other Whig leaders, welcomed the Revolution in France. And so did
Pitt, too, for some time. "How much the greatest event it is that ever
happened in the world," cried Fox, with the exaggeration of a man ready to
dance the carmagnole, "and how much the best!" The dissension between a man
who felt so passionately as Burke, and a man who spoke so impulsively as
Charles Fox, lay in the very nature of things. Between Sheridan and Burke
there was an open breach in the House of Commons upon the Revolution so
early as February 1790, and Sheridan's influence with Fox was strong. This
divergence of opinion destroyed all the elation that Burke might well have
felt at his compliments from kings, his gold medals, his twelve editions.
But he was too fiercely in earnest in his horror of Jacobinism to allow
mere party associations to guide him. In May 1791 the thundercloud burst,
and a public rupture between Burke and Fox took place in the House of
Commons.

The scene is famous in English parliamentary annals. The minister had
introduced a measure for the division of the province of Canada and for the
establishment of a local legislature in each division. Fox in the course of
debate went out of his way to laud the Revolution, and to sneer at some of
the most effective passages in the _Reflections_. Burke was not present,
but he announced his determination to reply. On the day when the Quebec
Bill was to come on again, Fox called upon Burke, and the pair walked
together from Burke's house in Duke Street down to Westminster. The Quebec
Bill was recommitted, and Burke at once rose and soon began to talk his
usual language against the Revolution, the rights of man, and Jacobinism
whether English or French. There was a call to order. Fox, who was as sharp
and intolerant in the House as he was amiable out of it, interposed with
some words of contemptuous irony. Pitt, Grey, Lord Sheffield, all plunged
into confused and angry debate as to whether the French Revolution was a
good thing, and whether the French Revolution, good or bad, had anything to
do with the Quebec Bill. At length Fox, in seconding a motion for confining
the debate to its proper subject, burst into the fatal question beyond the
subject, taxing Burke with inconsistency, and taunting him with having
forgotten that ever-admirable saying of his own about the insurgent
colonists, that he did not know how to draw an indictment against a whole
nation. Burke replied in tones of firm self-repression; complained of the
attack that had been made upon him; reviewed Fox's charges of
inconsistency; enumerated the points on which they had disagreed, and
remarked that such disagreements had never broken their friendship. But
whatever the risk of enmity, and however bitter the loss of friendship, he
would never cease from the warning to flee from the French constitution.
"But there is no loss of friends," said Fox in an eager undertone. "Yes,"
said Burke, "there _is_ a loss of friends. I know the penalty of toy
conduct. I have done my duty at the price of my friend--our friendship is
at an end." Fox rose, but was so overcome that for some moments he could
not speak. At length, his eyes streaming with tears, and in a broken voice,
he deplored the breach of a twenty years' friendship on a political
question. Burke was inexorable. To him the political question was so vivid,
so real, so intense, as to make all personal sentiment no more than dust in
the balance. Burke confronted Jacobinism with the relentlessness of a
Jacobin. The rupture was never healed, and Fox and he had no relations with
one another henceforth beyond such formal interviews as took place in the
manager's box in Westminster Hall in connexion with the impeachment.

A few months afterwards Burke published the _Appeal from the New to the Old
Whigs_, a grave, calm and most cogent vindication of the perfect
consistency of his criticisms upon the English Revolution of 1688 and upon
the French Revolution of 1789, with the doctrines of the great Whigs who
conducted and afterwards defended in Anne's reign the transfer of the crown
from James to William and Mary. The _Appeal_ was justly accepted as a
satisfactory performance for the purpose with which it was written. Events,
however, were doing more than words could do, to confirm the public opinion
of Burke's sagacity and foresight. He had always divined by the instinct of
hatred that the French moderates must gradually be swept away by the
Jacobins, and now it was all coming true. The humiliation of the king and
queen after their capture at Varennes; the compulsory acceptance of the
constitution; the plain incompetence of the new Legislative Assembly; the
growing violence of the Parisian mob, and the ascendency of the Jacobins at
the Common Hall; the fierce day of the 20th of June (1792), when the mob
flooded the Tuileries, and the bloodier day of the loth of August, when the
Swiss guard was massacred and the royal family flung into prison; the
murders in the prisons in September; the trial and execution of the king in
January (1793); the proscription of the Girondins in June, the execution of
the queen in October--if we realize the impression likely to be made upon
the sober and homely English imagination by such a heightening of horror by
horror, we may easily understand how people came to listen to Burke's voice
as the voice of inspiration, and to look on his burning anger as the holy
fervour of a prophet of the Lord.

Fox still held to his old opinions as stoutly as he could, and condemned
and opposed the war which England had declared against the French republic.
Burke, who was profoundly incapable of the meanness of letting personal
estrangement blind his eyes to what was best for the commonwealth, kept
hoping against hope that each new trait of excess in France would at length
bring the great Whig leader to a better mind. He used to declaim by the
hour in the conclaves at Burlington House upon the necessity of securing
Fox; upon the strength which his genius would lend to the administration in
its task of grappling with the sanguinary giant; upon the impossibility, at
least, of doing either with him or without him. Fox's most important
political friends who had long wavered, at length, to Burke's great
satisfaction, went over to the side of the government. In July 1794 the
duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam, Windham and Grenville took office under
Pitt. Fox was left with a minority which was satirically said not to have
been more than enough to fill a hackney coach. "That is a calumny," said
one of the party, "we should have filled two." The war was prosecuted with
the aid of both the great parliamentary parties of the country, and with
the approval of the great bulk of the nation. Perhaps the one man in
England who in his heart approved of it less than any other was William
Pitt. The difference between Pitt and Burke was nearly as great as that
between Burke and Fox. Burke would be content with nothing short of a
crusade against France, and war to the death with her rulers. "I cannot
persuade myself," he said, "that this war bears any the least resemblance
to any that has ever existed in the world. I cannot persuade myself that
any examples or any reasonings drawn from other wars and other politics are
at all applicable to it" (_Corr._ iv. 219). Pitt, on the other hand, as
Lord Russell truly says, treated Robespierre and Carnot as he would have
treated any other French rulers, whose ambition was to be resisted, and
whose interference in the affairs of other nations was to be checked. And
he entered upon the matter [v.04 p.0834] in the spirit of a man of
business, by sending ships to seize some islands belonging to France in the
West Indies, so as to make certain of repayment of the expenses of the war.

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