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Reflections on the Revolution in France
2.1.0
2.1.1 It may not be unnecessary to inform the Reader, that the following Reflections had their origin in a correspondence between the Author and *4a very young gentleman at Paris, who did him the honour of desiring his opinion upon the important transactions, which then, and ever since, have so much occupied the attention of all men. *5An answer was written some time in the month of October, 1789; but it was kept back *6upon prudential considerations. That letter is alluded to in the beginning of the following sheets. It has been since forwarded to the person to whom it was addressed. The reasons for the delay in sending it were *7assigned in a short letter to the same gentleman. This produced on his part a new and pressing application for the Author's sentiments. 2.1.2 The Author began a second and more full discussion on the subject. This he had some thoughts of publishing *8early in the last spring; but the matter gaining upon him, he found that what he had undertaken not only far exceeded the measure of a letter, but that its importance required rather a more detailed consideration than at that time he had any leisure to bestow upon it. However, having thrown down his first thoughts in the form of a letter, and indeed when he sat down to write, having intended it for a private letter, he found it difficult to change the form of address, when his sentiments had grown into a greater extent, and had received another direction. A different plan, he is sensible, might be more favourable to a commodious division and distribution of his matter.
2.1.3
You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness, for my thoughts on the late proceedings in France. I will not give you reason to imagine that I think my sentiments of such value as to wish myself to be solicited about them. They are of too little consequence to be very anxiously either communicated or withheld. It was from attention to you, and to you only, that I hesitated at the time, when you first desired to receive them. In the first letter I had the honour to write to you, and which at length I send, I wrote *9neither for nor from any description of men; nor shall I in this. My errors, if any, are my own. My reputation alone is to answer for them. 2.1.4 You see, Sir, by the long letter I have transmitted to you, that, though I do most heartily wish that France may be animated by a *10spirit of rational liberty, and that I think you bound, in all honest policy, to provide *11a permanent body, in which that spirit may reside, and an effectual organ, by which it may act, it is my misfortune to entertain great doubts concerning several material points in your late transactions. 2.1.5 You imagined, when you wrote last, that I might possibly be reckoned among the approvers of certain proceedings in France, from the solemn public seal of sanction they have received from two clubs of gentlemen in London, called the Constitutional Society, and the Revolution Society. 2.1.6
I certainly have the honour to belong to *12more clubs than one, in which the constitution of this kingdom and the principles of the glorious Revolution, are held in high reverence: and I reckon myself among the most forward in my zeal for maintaining that constitution and those principles in their utmost purity and vigour. It is because I do so, that I think it necessary for me, that there should be no mistake. Those who cultivate the memory of our revolution, and those who are attached to the constitution of this kingdom, will 2.1.7 The first, calling itself *13the Constitutional Society, or Society for Constitutional Information, or by some such title, is, I believe, of seven or eight years standing. The institution of this society appears to be of a charitable, and so far of a laudable, nature: it was intended for the *14circulation, at the expence of the members, of many books, which few others would be at the expence of buying; and which might lie on the hands of the *15booksellers, to the great loss of an useful body of men. Whether the books so charitably circulated, were ever as *16charitably read, is more than I know. Possibly several of them have been exported to France; and, like goods not in request here, may with you have found a market. I have heard *17much talk of the lights to be drawn from books that are sent from hence. What improvements they have had in their passage (as it is said some liquors are *18meliorated by crossing the sea) I cannot tell: But I never heard a man of common judgment, or the least degree of information, speak a word in praise of the greater part of the publications circulated by that society; nor have their proceedings been accounted, except by some of themselves, as of any serious consequence. 2.1.8
Your National Assembly seems to entertain much the 2.1.9
In the antient principles and conduct of the club, so far at least as they were declared, I see nothing to which I could take exception. I think it very probable, that for some purpose, *21new members may have 2.1.10 For one, I should be sorry to be thought, directly or indirectly, concerned in their proceedings. I certainly take my full share, along with the rest of the world, in my individual and private capacity, in speculating on what has been done, or is doing, on the public stage; in any place antient or modern; in the republic of Rome, or the republic of Paris: but having no general apostolical mission, being a citizen of a particular state, and being bound up in a considerable degree, by its public will, I should think it, at least improper and irregular, for me to open a formal public correspondence with the actual government of a foreign nation, without the express authority of the government under which I live. 2.1.11
I should be still more unwilling to enter into that correspondence, under anything like an equivocal description, which to many, unacquainted with our usages, might make the address, in which I joined, appear as the act of persons in some sort of corporate capacity, acknowledged by the laws of this kingdom, and authorized to speak the sense of some part of it. On account of the ambiguity and uncertainty of unauthorized general descriptions, and of the deceit which may be practised under them, and not from mere formality, the house of Commons would reject the most sneaking petition for the most trifling object, under that mode of signature to which you have thrown open the folding-doors of your presence chamber, and have ushered into your National Assembly, with as much ceremony and 2.1.12
I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause, in the whole course of my public conduct. I think I envy liberty as little as they do, to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the *23nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. *24Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The 2.1.13
When I see the *29spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, *30the fixed air, is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgment until *31the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one. *32 *33Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed *34how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality and religion; with the *35solidity of 2.1.14
All these considerations however were below the transcendental dignity of the Revolution Society. Whilst I continued in the country, from whence I had the honour of writing to you, I had but an imperfect idea of their transactions. *39On my coming to town, I sent for *40an account of their proceedings, which had been published by their authority, containing a sermon of Dr. Price, with the Duke de Rochefoucault's and the Archbishop of Aix's letter, and several other documents annexed. The whole of that publication, with the manifest design of connecting the affairs of France with those of England, by drawing us into an imitation of the conduct of the National Assembly, gave me a considerable degree of uneasiness. The effect of that conduct upon the power, credit, prosperity, and tranquillity of France, became every day more evident. The form of constitution to be settled, for its future polity, became more clear. We are now in a condition to discern, with tolerable exactness, the true nature of the object held up to our imitation. If the prudence of reserve and decorum dictates silence in some 2.1.15 Solicitous chiefly for the peace of my own country, but by no means unconcerned for your's, I wish to communicate more largely, what was at first intended only for your private satisfaction. I shall still keep your affairs in my eye and continue to address myself to you. Indulging myself in the *45freedom of epistolary intercourse, I beg leave to throw out my thoughts, and express my feelings, just as they arise in my mind, with very little attention to formal method. I set out with the proceedings of the Revolution Society; but I shall not confine myself to them. Is it possible I should? It looks to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, *46perhaps of more than Europe. All circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances *47by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apparently, by the most contemptible instruments. Every thing seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind: alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.
2.1.16
2.1.17 On the forenoon of the 4th of November last, *49Doctor Richard Price, a non-conforming minister of eminence, preached at the dissenting meeting-house of the Old Jewry, to his club or society, a very extraordinary miscellaneous sermon, in which there are some good moral and religious sentiments, and not ill expressed, mixed up in a sort of porridge of various political opinions and reflections: but the revolution in France is the grand *50ingredient in the cauldron. I consider the address transmitted by the Revolution Society to the National Assembly, through Earl Stanhope, as originating in the principles of the sermon, and as a corollary from them. It was moved by the preacher of that discourse. It was passed by those who came reeking from the effect of the sermon, without any censure or qualification, expressed or implied. If, however, any of the gentlemen concerned shall wish to separate the sermon from the resolution, they know how to acknowledge the one, and to disavow the other. They may do it: I cannot. 2.1.18 For my part, I looked on that sermon as the public declaration of a man much connected with literary caballers, and intriguing philosophers; with political theologians, and theological politicians, both at home and abroad. I know they set him up as a sort of *51oracle; because, with the best intentions in the world, he naturally philippizes, and chaunts his prophetic song in exact unison with their designs. 2.1.19
2.1.20
This pulpit style, revived after so long a discontinuance, had to me the air of novelty, and of a novelty not wholly without danger. I do not charge this danger equally to every part of the discourse. *56The hint given to a noble and
Notes for this chapter
Page 85. The Revolution in France. The term "Revolution," from its application to the events of 1688, had acquired in England a sense exclusively favourable. "Revolution principles" meant the principles of English constitutional liberty. The Tories who supported the Hanoverian succession, while opposing the rest of the policy of the Whigs, called themselves "Revolution Tories." Hence the name "Revolution Society" meant much the same as "Constitutional Society." This use of the term in bonam partem, which was still in vogue, though in its decline, at the time of the French Revolution, from that time disappears from the English language. Burke was at first unwilling to apply the term to a series of events which in his opinion amounted to the total subversion of the framework of a national society, and was based on what he called "spurious Revolution principles," p. 103, l. 26: but custom soon sanctioned its use in England. In France it had been in common use for forty years, and had passed from a favourable sense to one almost legendary and heroic. Thus, on the use of it made by Barbier in 1751, M. Aubertin writes; "Voilà donc ce mot de 'révolution' qui abonde sous la plume des contemporains, et pour un temps illimité prend possession de notre histoire. Désormais, l'idée sinistre d'une catastrophe nécessaire, d'une péripétie tragique, obsède les imaginations françaises; la vie politique de notre pays sort des conditions d'un développement normal pour entrer dans les brusques mouvements et dans l'horreur mystérieuse d'un drame." L'Esprit Public au XVIIIe Siècle, p. 282. On the use of the word shortly before the event, see Mercier, New Picture of Paris, ch. 3: "Every book that bore the title of Revolution was bought up and carried away.... We were always hearing the words, 'Give me the Roman Revolutions—the Revolutions of Sweden—of Italy'; and booksellers, in order to sell their old books, printed false titles, and took the purchase on the credit merely of the label."
IBID. Eleventh Edition, 1791. Within a few months after its first publication, the work had reached this, its permanent form. Burke made some alterations in the text as it appears in the first edition, which will be noticed so far as they are material. A few short annotations, which appear in editions subsequent to the one adopted as the text, are printed with it (see note to
IBID. Argument. Burke says (p. 95, l. 24) that he writes with very little attention to formal method. This distribution of the work into sections is only approximative, and intended to assist the reader in marking the salient points, and thus more readily seizing the drift of the work. The brief headings given in this "Argument" only indicate the thread of the thought, by no means include all that hangs upon it. Those who desire a minute analysis can consult the translations of Gentz and Dupont: but such an analysis tends to impair the effect of the work, which is essentially discursive and informal.
P. 87, L. 24. a very young gentleman at Paris. M. Dupont, who afterwards translated the work into French. He became acquainted with Burke in London, and visited him at Beaconsfield.
L. 27. an answer was written, &c. See Burke's Corr. vol. iii. p. 102. This letter will be found valuable as a means of acquiring a first and general idea of Burke's views. It bears evidence of great pains taken in the composition. Sir Philip Francis, whose taste was so much offended by the "Reflections," thought this letter "in point of writing, much less exceptionable."
P. 88, L. 1. upon prudential considerations—i. e. for fear of the letter being opened, and the receiver endangered by the opinions contained in it. Cp. p. 88, l. 26.
L. 4. assigned in a short letter—which was then sent in its stead. They appear to have been afterwards incorporated in the letter itself (Corr. vol. iii. pp. 103, 104).
L. 8. early in the last spring. The "Substance of Mr. Burke's Speech in the Debate on the Army Estimates, Feb. 9, 1790," published very soon after, in which his views on French events were freely stated, was followed by Lord Stanhope's Letter in answer to it, dated Feb. 24, in which he says, "From the title of another pamphlet, which an advertisement in the papers has announced is speedily to be expected from you, it is conjectured that the Revolution Society in London was in your contemplation when you made that Speech," p. 20. Lord Stanhope was chairman of that society. The advertisement was in the London Chronicle for Feb. 16, 1790, and runs as follows: "In the Press, and will speedily be published, Reflections on certain
P. 88, L. 29. neither for nor from any description of men. Thus far the publication bears a different character to those of the Constitutional and Revolution Societies. Burke, however, claims throughout the first part of the work to be expressing the opinions of all true Englishmen (p. 179).
P. 89, L. 3. spirit of rational liberty, &c. Cp. the Letter to Depont, Corr. vol. iii. p. 105: "You hope that I think the French deserving liberty. I certainly do. I certainly think that 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 rational faculties, and a ferocious indocility which makes us prompt to wrong and violence, destroys our social nature, and transforms us into something little better than the description of wild beasts."
L. 13. more clubs than one. The allusion is especially to the Whig club "Brooks's," of which Burke became a member in 1783.
L. 33. the Constitutional Society—seven or eight years' standing. Really somewhat more, having been founded by Major Cartwright in the spring of 1780, "after whole months of strenuous exertion." It numbered among its members the Dukes of Norfolk and Richmond, the Earls of Derby, Effingham, and Selkirk, together with many other persons of rank and members of Parliament.
P. 90, L. 2. circulation of many books, &c. An apologist for the Society says that portions of the works of the old Whig authors, such as Sidney, Locke, Trenchard, Lord Somers, &c., were distributed gratis by the Society. But the chief object of the Society was to circulate the writings of Cartwright, Capel Lofft, Jebb, Northcote, Sharp, and other pamphleteers of the day. It is to these that Burke alludes l. 15, in deprecating "the greater part of the publications circulated by that Society."
L. 7. —The word is repeated, by the figure called traductio, in a contemptuous way. Burke hints that the books were not worth reading, and were in fact not read.
L. 10. much talk of the lights, &c. Cp. the French Correspondent of the St. James's Chronicle, Dec. 15, 1789: "It is you, O ye noble inhabitants of
L. 12. meliorated. Burke always uses this (the correct form) instead of the modern "ameliorate."
P. 91, L. 3. a club of Dissenters. Dr. Kippis and Dr. Rees were distinguished members. The Society was established by dissenters, but for some years then past it had numbered among its adherents many members of the Church of England. Lord Surrey, and the Dukes of Norfolk, Leeds, Richmond, and Manchester, sometimes attended their meetings, together with many members of the House of Commons.
L. 3. of what denomination, &c. In the time of Burke the lines which separated dissenting denominations from each other and from the Church were less sharply defined than now. The Unitarians were recognised by other denominations, and allowed to preach in their meeting-houses. Dr. Price was nominally an "Independent," though his doctrines were Unitarian.
L. 16. new members may have entered. It is stated by Lord Stanhope in his Life of Pitt, that this society had then been lately "new-modelled," with a view to co-operating with the French revolutionists. In this way it came to be a "Society for Revolutions," as Burke calls it at p. 110, l. 4.
P. 92, L. 24. who they are—personal abilities, &c. We trace here Burke's inflexible practice of connecting measures and opinions with the persons who support them. Cp. the Letter to Depont, p. 115: "Never wholly separate in your mind the merits of any political question from the men who are concerned in it."
P. 93, L. 8. nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Perhaps an echo of Butler:
Before one rag of form was on. —Hudibras, Part i. Canto i. l. 561.
L. 14. government, as well as liberty. Cp. note to vol. i. p. 70, l. 22. By "government," Burke means here, as often elsewhere, a state or habit of political regulation. Burke ends as well as begins the book with the distinction between true and false liberty. See p. 361.
L. 26. the scene of the criminals. See Don Quixote, Part i. ch. 22. This masterpiece seems to have been a favourite with Burke. "Blessings on his soul, that first invented sleep, said Don Sancho Panza the wise! All those blessings, and ten thousand times more, on him who found out abstraction, personification, and impersonals." Fourth Letter on Regicide Peace.
L. 27. the metaphysic knight. Burke uses with but little discrimination the forms metaphysic, metaphysical; ecclesiastic, ecclesiastical; theatric,
L. 29. spirit of liberty.... wild gas, &c. Crabbe is frequently indebted for a hint to Burke, his early patron;
That suits with all, like atmospheric air; ............. . The lighter gas, that taken in the frame The spirit heats, and sets the blood on flame,— Such is the freedom which when men approve, They know not what a dangerous thing they love. —Crabbe, Tales of the Hall.
L. 31. the fixed air. Then the scientific term for carbonic acid gas. The gas was discovered by Van Helmont. This name was given to it by Dr. Black, in 1755, on account of its property, discovered by him, of readily losing its elasticity, and fixing itself in many bodies, particularly those of a calcareous kind.
L. 32. the first effervescence. Cp. infra p. 263, l. 7. "Fixed air" is contained in great quantity in fermented liquors, to which it gives their briskness.
P. 94, L. 2. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver. The idea is adapted from Shakespeare:
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes. —Merch. of Ven., Act iv. sc. 1.
IBID. Flattery; adulation. Intended to express a difference between this vice as a private and as a public practice.
L. 5. how it had been combined with government, &c. The Second Part (p. 269 to end) is here anticipated.
L. 13. do what they please. "Mais la liberté politique ne consiste point à faire ce que l'on veut.... La liberté ne peut consister qu'à pouvoir faire ce que l'on doit vouloir." De l'Esprit des Lois, Liv. xi. ch. 3.
L. 17. liberty... is power. "On a confondu le pouvoir du peuple avec la liberté du peuple." Id. ch. 2. In France, says M. Mignet candidly, the love of liberty is equivalent to the love of power.
L. 22. those who appear the most stirring, &c. It was believed that the Duke of Orleans was the prime mover, although he did not take the most active part in the scene.
IBID. an account of these proceedings. "A Discourse on the Love of our Country, delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting House in the Old Jewry to the Society for commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain. With an Appendix containing the Report of the Committee of the Society; an
P. 95, L. 8. prudence of an higher order. Burke always recognizes a good and bad form of moral habits and feelings, without much reference to their names and common acceptations. Hence such striking expressions as "false, reptile prudence," "fortitude of rational fear," &c., abound in his writings.
L. 10. feeble enough—infancy still more feeble. Burke was too much disposed to refer the Revolution to the spirit of contemporary Jacobinism as a prime cause. Such a spirit may help, but it can never originate, much less carry into effect, similar convulsions, which always have powerful material causes. There was much Jacobinism in England; more than we can now understand. One fifth of the active political forces of this country were classed by Burke as Jacobin; but there was no such irresistible series of material causes as, in the face of material resistance, produced the explosion of 1789.
L. 12. heap mountains on mountains. Cp. Waller, On the Head of a Stag:
When mountains heap'd on mountains fail'd. The allusion is to the Titans. See Virg. Georg. i. 281.
L. 13. our neighbour's house on fire, &c.
—Hor. Ep. Lib. i. xviii. 84. See the idea developed in Burke's justification of interference in the affairs of France, grounded on the "law of civil vicinity," in the First Letter on a Regicide Peace—"Vicini vicinorum facta praesumuntur scire—this principle, which, like the rest, is as true of nations as of individual men, has bestowed on the grand vicinage of Europe a right to know, and a right to prevent, any capital innovation which may amount to the erection of a dangerous nuisance." The politicians of France had denied such a right, on the abstract principle that to every nation belongs the unmolested regulation of its domestic affairs.
L. 22. freedom of epistolary intercourse; little attention to formal method. "The arrangement of his work is as singular as the matter. Availing himself of all the privileges of epistolary effusion, in their utmost latitude and
L. 28. perhaps of more than Europe. The designs of Bonaparte, and actual events in Egypt, Syria, India, and the West Indies, justify this forecast. The Revolution forced on the independence of Spanish and Portuguese America.
L. 32. by means the most absurd, &c. Balzac (the earlier), "Aristippe": "Les grands événements ne sont pas toujours produits par de grandes causes. Les ressorts sont cachés, et les machines paraissent; et quand on vient à découvrir ces ressorts, on s'étonne de les voir et si faibles et si petits. On a honte de l'opinion qu'on en avait eue." Cp. in the beginning of the First Letter on a Regicide Peace; "It is often impossible, in these political enquiries, to find any proportion between the apparent force of any moral causes we may assign, and their known operation.... A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of nature." In that place, as here, he is considering the fact that "in that its acmé of human prosperity and greatness, in the high and palmy state of the monarchy of France, it fell to the ground without a struggle." So Dr. Johnson: "Politicians have long observed, that the greatest events may be often traced back to slender causes. Petty competition, or casual friendship, the prudence of a slave, or the garrulity of a woman, have hindered or promoted the most important schemes, and hastened or retarded the revolutions of Empire." The Rambler, No. 141.
P. 96, L. 12. Machiavelian. The old adjective, from the French form "Machiavel," then in use in England. The ch is pronounced soft. We now say "Machiavelli" and "Machiavellian," pronouncing the ch hard.
L. 15. Dr. Richard Price... minister of eminence. Now an old man and in failing health. He was a political economist of some repute, cp. p. 228, l. 31. His writings procured him the friendship of Lord Rockingham's Whig rival, Lord Shelburne, who wished him to become his private secretary, on his accession to office in 1782. By Burke and his party Lord Shelburne was bitterly detested. Shelburne's party, minus their leader, were now in power under Pitt: and hence there might be presumed by foreigners some connexion between Price and the English government. Political disappointment thus contributes to the virulence with which Burke attacks
P. 97, L. 2. oracle—philippizes. The celebrated expression of Demosthenes. Aesch. in Ctes. p. 72.
Psalm cxlix.
L. 15. your league in France. The Holy League of the Catholics. Burke may have had in mind Grey's note on Hudibras, Part i. Canto ii. l. 651.
L. 19. politics and the pulpit, &c. The common cry of professional politicians. Silence with regard to public matters neither can nor ought to be kept in the pulpits of a free nation in stirring times. "I abhorred making the pulpit a scene for the venting of passion, or the serving of interests." Burnet, Own Times, Ann. 1684. The practice was by no means confined to the Revolutionists. On the 30th of January, 1790, the Bishop of Chester had preached before the House of Peers a political diatribe full of violent invective against the French nation and the National Assembly. The House voted him thanks, and ordered the sermon to be printed. As to the introduction of politics in the pulpit, Fox agrees with Burke: "Dr. Price, in his sermon on the anniversary of the English Revolution, delivered many noble sentiments, worthy of an enlightened philosopher.... But, though I approve of his general principles, I consider his arguments as unfit for the pulpit. The clergy, in their sermons, ought no more to handle political affairs, than this House ought to discuss subjects of morality and religion." Speech on the Test Act, 1790.
L. 28. Inexperienced in all its affairs, on which they pronounce with so much confidence. "Try experiments, as sound philosophers have done, and on them raise a legislative system!" This is a specimen of the wisdom of the Rev. Robert Robinson, another of these political divines; once famous as a Baptist minister at Cambridge.
P. 98, L. 3. The hint given to a noble and reverend lay-divine. The Duke of Grafton, whom Junius and Burke had united in attacking twenty years before. He had lately written a pamphlet on the subject of the Liturgy and Subscription, entitled "Hints &c., submitted to the serious attention of the Clergy, Nobility, and Gentry, newly assembled." Price calls it "a pamphlet ascribed to a great name, and which would dignify any name." It is chiefly remarkable as having called forth Bishop Horsley's Apology for the Liturgy and Clergy of the Church of England. Mathias alludes to "the pious Grafton," and his hostility to the Church, in his "Pursuits of Literature," Dialogue iv. l. 191, where he adds a note, "See the Duke's Hints—rather broad." Again at l. 299:
A Dilettante in Divinity.
P. 98, L. 4. lay-divine. The Duke held Unitarian opinions. Besides some writings of his own, he had done service to religious enquiry by printing for popular circulation the celebrated recension of the New Testament by Griesbach.
IBID. high in office in one of our Universities. Cp. Junius, Letter xv. The Duke was Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Gray's Ode on his installation is well known. The text hints at the impropriety of such an office being held by a frequenter of the Unitarian meeting-house of Dr. Disney in Essex Street.
Discourse on the Love of our Country, Nov. 4, 1789, by Dr. Richard Price, 3d edition, p. 17 and 18.
L. 5. to other lay-divines of rank. The allusion is to the friend and patron of Price and Priestly, the Marquis of Lansdowne (Earl of Shelburne), who also held Unitarian opinions.
L. 7. Seekers. The Seekers were a Puritan sect who professed no determinate form of religion. Sir Harry Vane was at their head.
L. 8. old staple—as in Shakespeare, = material, especially used of woollen tissues. "Spun into the primitive staple of their frame," Fourth Letter on Regicide Peace. Cp. infra p. 302, l. 26.
"Those who dislike that mode of worship which is prescribed by public authority ought, if they can find no worship out of the church which they approve, to set up a separate worship for themselves; and by doing this, and giving an example of a rational and manly worship, men of weight from their rank and literature may do the greatest service to society and the world." P. 18. Dr. Price's Sermon.
L. 23. great preachers. Ps. xlviii. v. 11. The repetition of great is ironical, alluding to the rank of these lay-divines.
P. 99, L. 1. baron bold. Milton, L'Allegro, l. 119.
IBID. uniform round of its vapid dissipations. Alluding to the London season, which at this date began late in the autumn, and terminated late in the spring. Cp. Johnson's homily on the Close of the Season, Rambler No. 124 (May 25, 1751).
End of NotesBut I may say of our preacher, "*70utinam nugis tota illa dedisset tempora saevitiae." All things in this his fulminating bull are not of so innoxious a tendency. His doctrines affect our constitution in its vital parts. He tells the Revolution Society, in this political sermon, that his majesty "*71is almost the only lawful king in the world, because the only one who owes his crown to the choice of his people." As to the kings of the world, all of whom (except one) this archpontiff of the rights of men, with all the plenitude, and with more than the boldness of the papal deposing power in its *72meridian fervour of the *73twelfth century, puts into one sweeping clause of ban and anathema, and proclaims usurpers by circles of longitude and latitude, over the whole globe, it behoves them to consider how they admit into their territories these apostolic missionaries, who are to tell their subjects they are not lawful kings. That is their concern. It is ours, as a domestic interest of some moment, seriously to consider the solidity of the only principle upon which these gentlemen acknowledge a king of Great Britain to be entitled to their allegiance. 2.1.22 2.1.23
Thus these politicians proceed, whilst little notice is taken of their doctrines: but when they come to be examined upon the plain meaning of their words and the direct tendency of their doctrines, then equivocations and slippery constructions come into play. When they say the king 2.1.24
Whatever may be the success of evasion in explaining
1. "To choose our own governors." This new, and hitherto unheard-of bill of rights, though made in the name of the whole people, belongs to those gentlemen and their faction only. The body of the people of England have no share in it. They utterly disclaim it. They will resist the practical assertion of it with their *79lives and fortunes. They are bound to do so by the laws of their country, made at the time of that very Revolution, which is appealed to in favour of the fictitious rights claimed by the society which abuses its name.
2.1.25
These gentlemen of the Old Jewry, in all their reasonings on the *80Revolution of 1688, have a revolution which happened in England about forty years before, and the late French revolution, so much before their eyes, and in their hearts, that they are constantly *81confounding all the three together. It is necessary that we should separate what they 2.1.26 *82This Declaration of Right (the act of the 1st of William and Mary, sess. 2. ch. 2) is the *83corner-stone of our constitution, as reinforced, explained, improved, and in its fundamental principles for ever settled. It is called "An act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the succession of the crown." You will observe, that these rights and this succession are declared in one body, and bound indissolubly together. 2.1.27
*84A few years after this period, a second opportunity offered for asserting a right of election to the crown. On the prospect of a total failure of issue from King William, and from the Princess, afterwards Queen Anne, the consideration of the settlement of the crown, and of a further security for the liberties of the people, again came before the legislature. Did they this second time make any provision for legalizing the crown on the spurious Revolution principles of the Old Jewry? No. They followed the principles which prevailed in the Declaration of Right; indicating with more precision the persons who were to inherit in the Protestant line. This act also incorporated, by the same policy, our liberties, and an hereditary succession in the same act. Instead of a right to choose our own governors, they declared that the succession in that line (the protestant line drawn from James the First) was absolutely necessary "for 2.1.28
Unquestionably there was at the Revolution, in the person of King William, *88a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of regular hereditary succession; but it is against all genuine principles of jurisprudence to draw a principle from a law made in a special case, and regarding an individual person. *89Privilegium non transit in exemplum. If ever there was a time favourable for establishing the principle, that a king of popular choice was the only legal king, without all doubt it was at the Revolution. *90Its not being done at that time is a proof that the nation was of opinion it ought not to be done at any time. There is no person so completely ignorant of our history, as not to know, that the majority in parliament of both parties were so little disposed to any thing resembling that principle, that at first they were determined to place the vacant crown, not on the head of the prince of Orange, but *91on that of his wife Mary, daughter of King James, the *92eldest born of the issue of that king, which they acknowledged as undoubtedly his. It would be to repeat a very trite story, to recall to your memory all those circumstances which demonstrated that their accepting king William was not properly a *93choice; but, to all those who did not wish, in effect to recall King James, or to deluge their country in blood, and again to bring their religion, laws, and liberties into the peril they had just 2.1.29 In the very act, in which for a time, and in a single case, parliament departed from the strict order of inheritance, in favour of a prince, who, though not next, was however very near in the line of succession, it is curious to observe how Lord Somers, who drew the bill called the Declaration of Right, has comported himself on that delicate occasion. It is curious to observe with what address this temporary solution of continuity is kept from the eye; whilst all that could be found in this act of necessity to countenance the idea of an hereditary succession is brought forward, and fostered, and made the most of, by this great man, and by the legislature who followed him. Quitting the dry, imperative style of an act of parliament, he makes the lords and commons fall to a pious, legislative ejaculation, and declare, that they consider it "as a marvellous providence, and merciful goodness of God to this nation, to preserve their said majesties' royal persons most happily *94to reign over us on the throne of their ancestors, for which, from the bottom of their hearts, they return their humblest thanks and praises." The legislature plainly had in view the Act of Recognition of the first of Queen Elizabeth, Chap. 3d, and of that of James the First, Chap. 1st, both acts strongly declaratory of the inheritable nature of the crown; and in many parts they follow, with a nearly literal precision, the words and even the form of thanksgiving, which is found in these old declaratory statutes. 2.1.30
The two houses, in the act of king William, did not thank God that they had found a fair opportunity to assert a right to choose their own governors, much less to make an election the only lawful title to the crown. Their having been in a condition to avoid the very appearance of it, as much as possible, was by them considered as a providential 2.1.31
They knew that a doubtful title of succession would but too much resemble an election; and that an election would be utterly destructive of the "unity, peace, and tranquillity of this nation," which they thought to be considerations of some moment. To provide for these objects, and therefore to exclude for ever the Old Jewry doctrine of "a right to choose our own governors," they follow with a clause, containing a most solemn pledge, taken from the preceding act of Queen Elizabeth, as solemn a pledge as ever was or can be given in favour of an hereditary succession, and as solemn a renunciation as could be made of the principles by this society imputed to them. "The lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, do, in the name 2.1.32 So far is it from being true, that we acquired a right by the Revolution to elect our kings, that if we had possessed it before, the English nation did at that time most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, *97for themselves and for all their posterity for ever. *98These gentlemen may value themselves as much as they please on their whig principles; but I never desire to be thought a *99better whig than Lord Somers; or to understand the principles of the Revolution better than those by whom it was brought about; or to read in the declaration of right any mysteries unknown to those whose penetrating style has engraved in our ordinances, and in our hearts, the words and spirit of that immortal law. 2.1.33
It is true that, *100aided with the powers derived from force and opportunity, the nation was at that time, in some sense, free to take what course it pleased for filling the throne; but only free to do so upon the same grounds on which they might have wholly abolished their monarchy, and every other part of their constitution. However they did not think such bold changes within their commission. It is indeed *101difficult, perhaps impossible, to give limits to the mere abstract competence of the supreme power, such as was exercised by parliament at that time; but the limits of a moral competence, subjecting, even in powers more indisputably sovereign, occasional will to permanent reason, and to the steady maxims of faith, justice, and fixed fundamental policy, are perfectly intelligible, and perfectly binding upon those who exercise any authority, under any name, or under any title, in the state. The *102house of lords, for instance, is not 2.1.34
It is far from impossible to reconcile, if we do not suffer ourselves to be entangled in the *106mazes of metaphysic sophistry, the use both of a fixed rule and an occasional deviation; the sacredness of an hereditary principle of succession in our government, with a power of change in its application in cases of *107extreme emergency. Even in that extremity (if we take the measure of our rights by our exercise of them at the Revolution) the change is to be confined 2.1.35 A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risque the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve. The two principles of conservation and correction operated strongly at the two critical periods of the Restoration and Revolution, when England found itself without a king. At both those periods the nation had lost the bond of union in their antient edifice; they did not, however, dissolve the whole fabric. On the contrary, in both cases they regenerated the deficient part of the old constitution through the parts which were not impaired. They kept these old parts exactly as they were, that the part recovered might be suited to them. They acted by the ancient organized *108states in the shape of their old organization, and not by the *109organic moleculae of a disbanded people. At no time, perhaps, did the sovereign legislature manifest a more tender regard to their fundamental principle of British constitutional policy, than at the time of the Revolution, when it deviated from the direct line of hereditary succession. The crown was carried somewhat out of the line in which it had before moved; but the new line was derived from the same stock. It was still a line of hereditary descent; still an hereditary descent in the same blood, though an hereditary descent qualified with protestantism. When the legislature altered the direction, but kept the principle, they shewed that they held it inviolable. 2.1.36
On this principle, the law of inheritance had admitted some amendment in the old time, and long before the aera of the Revolution. *110Some time after the conquest great 2.1.37
The gentlemen of the Society for Revolutions see nothing in that of 1688 but the deviation from the constitution; and they *114take the deviation from the principle for the principle. They have little regard to the obvious consequences of their doctrine, though they must see, that it leaves positive authority in very few of the positive institutions of this country. When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded the aera of fictitious election can be valid. Do these theorists mean to imitate some of their predecessors, who *115dragged the bodies of our antient sovereigns out of the quiet of their tombs? Do they mean to *116attaint and disable backwards all the kings that have reigned before the Revolution, and consequently to stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual usurpation? Do they mean to invalidate, annul, or to call into question, together with the titles of the whole line of our kings, that great body of our statute law which passed under those whom they treat as usurpers? to annul laws of inestimable value to our liberties—of as great value at least as any which have passed at or since the period of the Revolution? If kings, who did not owe their crown 2.1.38
The law by which this royal family is specifically destined to the succession, is the act of the 12th and 13th of King William. The terms of this act bind "us and our heirs, and our posterity, to them, their heirs, and their posterity," being Protestants, to the end of time, in the same words as the declaration of right had bound us to the heirs of King William and Queen Mary. It therefore secures both an hereditary crown and an hereditary allegiance. On what ground, except the constitutional policy of forming an establishment to secure that kind of succession which is to preclude a choice of the people for ever, could the legislature have fastidiously rejected the fair and abundant 2.1.39
The Princess Sophia was named in the Act of Settlement of the 12th and 13th of King William, for a *120stock and root of inheritance to our kings, and not for her merits as a temporary administratrix of a power, which she might not, and in fact did not, herself ever exercise. She was adopted for one reason, and for one only, because, says the act, "the most excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and Dutchess Dowager of Hanover, *121is daughter of the most excellent Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of Bohemia, daughter of our late sovereign lord King James the First, of happy memory, and is hereby declared to be the next in succession in the Protestant line," &c. &c.; "and the crown shall continue to the heirs of her body, being Protestants." This limitation was made by parliament, that through the Princess Sophia an inheritable line, not only was to be continued in future but (what they thought very material) that through her it was to be connected with the old stock of inheritance in King James the First; in order that the monarchy might preserve an unbroken unity through all ages, and might be preserved, with safety to our religion, in the old approved mode by descent, in which, if our liberties had been once endangered, they had often, through all storms and struggles of prerogative and privilege, been preserved. They did well. No experience has taught us, that in any other course or method than that of an hereditary crown, our liberties can be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary right. An irregular, convulsive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease. But the course of succession is the 2.1.40
*122A few years ago I should be ashamed to overload a matter, so capable of supporting itself, by the then unnecessary support of any argument; but this seditious, unconstitutional doctrine is now publicly taught, avowed, and printed. The dislike I feel to revolutions, the signals for which have so often been given from pulpits; the spirit of change that is gone abroad; the total contempt which prevails with you, and may come to prevail with us, of all ancient institutions, when set in opposition to a present sense of convenience, or to the bent of a present inclination: all these considerations make it not unadviseable, in my opinion, to call back our attention to the true principles of our own domestic laws; that you, my French friend, should begin to know, and that we should continue to cherish them. We ought not, on either side of the water, to suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by the counterfeit wares which some persons, by a double Notes for this chapter
L. 22. is almost the only lawful king, &c. From the insolent form of words in which Price says he would have congratulated the king on his recovery, "in a style very different from that of most of the addresses." (p. 25), alluded to infra, p. 116.
IBID. twelfth century. Burke alludes to the pontificate of Innocent III, 1198-1216. Cp. the Abridgment of Eng. Hist. Book iii. chap. 8. "At length the sentence of excommunication was fulminated against the king (John). In the same year the same sentence was pronounced upon the Emperor Otho; and this daring pope was not afraid at once to drive to extremities the two greatest princes in Europe.... Having first released the English subjects from their oath of allegiance, by an unheard-of presumption he formally deposed John from his throne and dignity; he invited the king of France to take possession of the forfeited crown," &c.
P. 100, L. 23. gradually habituated to it. Cp. infra p. 157, l. 2.
P. 101, L. 17. at a remote period, elective. "Reges ex nobilitate... sumunt," Tacitus, Germ. c. 7. Bolingbroke, N. Bacon, &c., make much of the fact as applied to the Saxon kings, and to Stephen and John after the Conquest.
L. 29. electoral college. The collective style of the nine Electors to the Empire. "College" (collegium) is used in its technical sense in Roman law.
P. 34, Discourse on the Love of our Country, by Dr. Price.
P. 102, L. 20. lives and fortunes. A very ancient formula, the original words of which survive in the German "Mit Gut und Blut." So the 8th section of the Bill of Rights: "That they will stand to, maintain, and defend their said Majesties.... with their lives and estates, against all persons whatsoever," &c. This will explain the reference in the next sentence. The expression recalls the once common "life and property addresses" from public bodies to the crown.
L. 26. Revolution of 1688. It must be confessed that the argument which Burke here begins, and sustains with much force and ingenuity through twenty pages, is a complete failure. Mr. Hallam has refuted it at almost every point. It must be remembered that Burke is writing not as a judge, or a philosophical historian, but as an advocate. He conceived that the constitution would be endangered by the tenets of the Society, if they came into general credit, and made up his mind to lend the whole weight of his authority and his skill as a debater to support the opposite views (cp. the concluding paragraph of the work).
L. 29. confounding all the three together. Burke, using the expression of Sir Joseph Jekyl, says, that the Revolution of 1688 "was, in truth and in substance, a revolution not made, but prevented." In the Revolution of "forty years before," which good sense and good faith on the part of one man might have prevented, the letter of our liberties was insisted on quite as strictly as by the Old Whigs, or by Burke.
P. 103, L. 11. Declaration of Right. Commonly called the Bill of Rights. It is printed in the Appendix to Professor Stubbs's Select Charters, p. 505.
L. 19. A few years after this period. 12 & 13 Will. III. cap. 2. By this Act the Crown was settled, after the death of William III and Anne without issue, upon the Princess Sophia, youngest daughter of Elizabeth Queen of Bohemia (daughter of James I.), and the heirs of her body, being protestants. Burke does not mention the Act 6 Anne, cap. 7, which asserts the right of the legislature to regulate the descent of the Crown, and makes it treasonable to maintain the contrary.
P. 104, L. 5. gypsey predictions—i. e. ignorant, random utterances. Burke called the republican nomenclature of the months "gipsey jargon."
L. 7. case of necessity—rule of law. Cp. in the Fragment of Speech on the Acts of Uniformity; "When tyranny is extreme, and abuses of government intolerable, men resort to the rights of nature to shake it off. When they have done so, the very same principle of necessity of human affairs, to establish some other authority, which shall preserve the order of this new institution, must be obeyed, until they grow intolerable; and you shall not be suffered to plead original liberty against such an institution. See Holland, Switzerland."
L. 10. a small and temporary deviation—regular hereditary succession. This is hardly worthy of Burke. Hallam most truly says: "Our new line of sovereigns scarcely ventured to hear of their hereditary right.... This was the greatest change that affected our monarchy by the fall of the House of Stuart. The laws were not so materially altered as the spirit and sentiments of the people. Hence those who look only at the former have been prone to underrate the magnitude of this revolution. The fundamental maxims of the constitution, both as they regard the king and the subject, may seem nearly the same; but the disposition with which they were received and interpreted was entirely different." The truth of this last statement is undeniable.
L. 14. Privilegium non transit in exemplum. A maxim of the Civil law. "Privilegium" is used in the technical sense of an enactment that has for its object particular persons, as distinguished from a public measure. "C'est un grand mal," says Pascal, "de suivre l'exception au lieu de la règle. Il faut être sévère et contraire à l'exception."
L. 17. its not being done at that time, &c. "The Commons," says Hallam, "did not deny that the case was one of election, though they refused to allow that the monarchy was thus rendered perpetually elective."
L. 24. on that of his wife. By which, as Bentinck said, the prince would have become "his wife's gentleman-usher."
IBID. eldest born of the issue.... acknowledged as undoubtedly his. The allusion is to the reported spuriousness of the prince born in 1688. Until that unfortunate event, which precipitated the Revolution, the Princess was heir presumptive to the crown. In acquiescing in the Revolution, the
L. 29. choice... act of necessity. If this were really said in seriousness, it is a sophism which could scarcely mystify an intelligent schoolboy. Two very different things are indicated by the term "choice."
P. 105, L. 15. to reign over us, &c. The best comment on this is, that it required a distinct Act of Parliament (2 W. and M. ch. 6) to enable the queen to exercise the regal power during the king's absence from England.
1st Mary, Sess. 3. ch. 1.
P. 106, L. 10. repeating as from a rubric. A process which always commanded Burke's respect, in matters of the constitution. Cp. vol. i. p. 267, l. 26, &c.
L. 31. limitation of the crown. In the technical sense, alluding to the succession being made conditional on the profession of Protestantism (see § 9 of the Declaration).
P. 107, L. 3. for themselves and for all their posterity for ever. It is impossible to defend Burke in this literal reading of the Declaration, in which he follows the genuine Tory Swift (Examiner, No. 16). This paper of Swift's will illustrate the difference between real Toryism and the Whig-Toryism of Bolingbroke. The words "for ever," copied from the Act of 1st Elizabeth, are mere surplusage, as in the expression "heirs for ever," in relation to private property. The right of Parliament to regulate the succession to the crown was too well established to make it worth while to have recourse to this verbal quibble. "The Parliament," says Sir Thomas Smith (Secretary of State temp. Elizabeth), "giveth form of succession to the Crown. To be short, all that ever the people of Rome might do either in centuriatis comitiis or tribunitiis, the same may be done by the Parliament of England." Commonwealth of England, p. 77, Ed. 1633. Priestley remarked that Burke had rendered himself, by denying this competency in Parliament, liable to the charge of high treason under an act framed by his own idol, Lord Somers: and Lord Stanhope declared his intention of impeaching him for it. The right of binding posterity was denied, on general grounds, by Locke, Treatise Concerning Government, Book ii. ch. viii. 116, to whom Swift alludes in the Examiner: "Lawyers may explain this, or call them words of form, as they please; and reasoners may argue that such an obligation is against the nature of government: but a plain reader, &c."
L. 4. The question as to a power of a people to bind their posterity is argued and settled according to Burke's opinion in a well-known passage in Absalom and Achitophel.
L. 6. better Whig than Lord Somers, &c. Note, vol. i. p. 148, l. 34. See Burke's panegyric upon the "Old Whigs"; "They were not umbratiles doctores, men who had studied a free constitution only in its anatomy, and upon dead systems. They knew it alive, and in action." Burke really
L. 12. aided with the powers. Burke generally uses with to express the instrument. We now say "by the powers." Cp. p. 115, l. 10, &c.
L. 18. difficult... to give limits to the mere abstract competence of the supreme power. The distinction between abstract and moral competence had an important place in Burke's reasoning on the American question. Perimus licitis. Cp. vol. i. p. 254, and see note.
L. 27. house of lords—not morally competent, &c. "The legislative can have no power to transfer their authority of making laws, and place it in other hands."—"The house of lords is not morally competent to dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the legislature of the kingdom." These passages are quoted, the former from Locke, the latter from Bushel, by Grattan, in his Speech against the Union, Feb. 8, 1810. The argument is merely an idle non possumus; and on Grattan's deduction from it, the verdict of succeeding generations has been against it.
L. 34. constitution—constituent parts. The old "constitutional" doctrine is here very clearly stated. Had Burke lived a century later, he would have seen that it completely failed when it came to be generally applied. No principle is now better established than the unity and indivisibility of national sovereignty.
P. 108, L. 10. not changing the substance—describing the persons—same force—equal authority. Burke does not add force to his subtleties by this parody of the Athanasian Creed. Yet he cautions his readers, a few lines further, against getting "entangled in the mazes of metaphysic sophistry"!
L. 14. communi sponsione reipublicae. The Editor does not call to mind the phrase as a quotation. It was possibly invented by Burke, to express his meaning with the more weight.
L. 19. mazes of metaphysic sophistry. See note to vol. i. p. 215, l. 11. The outcry against "metaphysic sophistry" was no invention of Burke's. It is a favourite topic with Bolingbroke and other politicians who opposed the philosophical Whiggism of the School of Locke.
L. 23. extreme emergency. Mr. Hallam says most truly that this view, which "imagines some extreme cases of intolerable tyranny, some, as it were, lunacy of despotism, as the only plea and palliation of resistance," is merely a "pretended modification of the slavish principles of absolute obedience."
P. 109, L. 10. states. i. e. the Lords and Commons; the English Parliament in its original form being an imitation of the States-General of France. Our Liturgy until lately spoke of "the Three Estates of the Realm of
Pleas'd highly those infernal States, and joy Sparkl'd in all their eyes. —Par. Lost, ii. 386.
L. 11. organic moleculae of a disbanded people. The idea is fully explained in the First Letter on Regicide Peace; "The body politic of France existed in the majesty of its throne, in the dignity of its nobility, in the honour of its gentry, in the sanctity of its clergy, in the reverence of its magistracy, in the weight and consideration due to its landed property in the several bailliages, in the respect due to its moveable substance represented by the corporations of the kingdom. All these particular moleculae united form the great mass of what is truly the body politic in all countries."
L. 25. Some time after the conquest, &c. "Five kings out of the seven that followed William the Conqueror were usurpers, according at least to modern notions" (Hallam). The facts seem to be as follows. Even in private succession, the descent of an inheritance as between the brother and the son of the owner was settled by no certain rule of law in the time of Glanvil. The system of Tanistry, which prevailed in Ireland down to the time of James I., and under which the land descended to the "eldest and most worthy" of the same blood, who was commonly ascertained by election, was thus partially in force. No better mode, says Mr. Hallam, could have been devised for securing a perpetual supply of civil quarrels. The principle of inheritance per stirpem which sound policy gradually established in private possessions, was extended by the lawyers about the middle of the 13th century to the Crown. Edward I. was proclaimed immediately upon his father's death, though absent in Sicily. Something however of the old principle may be traced in this proclamation, issued in his name by the guardians of the realm, where he asserts the Crown of England "to have devolved upon him by hereditary succession and the will of his nobles." These last words were omitted in the proclamation of Edward II.; since whose time the Crown has been absolutely hereditary. The question was thus settled at the period when the English constitution, according to Professor Stubbs, took its definite and permanent form. For illustrations of the question from ancient history see Grotius de Jure Bell. et Pac., Lib. ii. ch. 7, § 24.
L. 27. the heir per capita—the heir per stirpes. The distinction is produced by taking two different points of view; the one regarding the crown as the right of the reigning family, the other as the right of the reigning person. In the first case, when the reigning member of the family died, the whole of the members of the family (capita) re-entered into the family rights, and the crown fell to the "eldest and most worthy." In the second case, the crown descended to the legal heir or representative of the reigning person (per stirpem). By the heir per capita, Burke means the "eldest and most worthy" of the same blood. Elsewhere, following the
L. 30. the inheritable principle survived, &c. Burke says of the kings before the Conquest, "Very frequent examples occur where the son of a deceased king, if under age, was entirely passed over, and his uncle or some remoter relation raised to the Crown; but there is not a single instance where the election has carried it out of the blood" (Abr. Eng. Hist., Bk. ii. ch. 7).
L. 32. multosque per annos, &c. Virg. Georg. iv. 208. The quotation had been used as a motto to No. 72 of the Spectator, and in the Dedication to Bolingbroke's Dissertation on Parties.
P. 110, L. 6. take the deviation... for the principle. It was not in Burke's plan here to argue against the elective principle; but in the Annual Register for 1763, on the occasion of the then impending elections of a King of Poland and a King of the Romans, he says; "Those two elective sovereignties not only occasion many mischiefs to those who live under them, but have frequently involved a great part of Europe in blood and confusion. Indeed, these existing examples prove, beyond all speculation, the infinite superiority, in every respect, of hereditary monarchy; since it is evident, that the method of election constantly produces all those intestine divisions, to which, by its nature, it appears so liable, and also fails in that which is one of its principal objects, and which might be expected from it, the securing government for many successions in the hands of persons of extraordinary merit and uncommon capacity. We find by experience, that those kingdoms, where the throne is an inheritance, have had, in their series of succession, full as many able princes to govern them, as either Poland or Germany, which are elective."
L. 14. dragged the bodies of our antient sovereigns out of the quiet of their tombs. The allusion is to the outrages committed by the Roundhead troopers in Winchester Cathedral. There may also be an allusion to the plundering of the Abbey of Faversham, at the dissolution of monasteries, when the remains of King Stephen were disinterred and thrown into the Swale, for the sake of the leaden coffin. Cp. in the Draft of Letter to Markham (1770); "My passions are not to be roused, either on the side of partiality, or on that of hatred, by those who lie in their cold lead, quiet and innoxious, in the chapel of Henry, or the churches of Windsor Castle or La Trappe—quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina."
L. 26. Statute de tallagio non concedendo—(Anno 1297). Not originally a statute, though referred to as such in the preamble to the Petition of Right, and decided by the judges in 1637 to be a Statute. See Stubbs' Select Charters, p. 487. Cp. vol. i. p. 237, l. 33.
P. 111, L. 5. The law, &c. Burke, as we might expect, turns to the Act of Settlement without saying a word of the cause which led to its being passed, namely, the failure of issue, not of Queen Mary, but of William himself. The final limitation of the Bill of Rights was to William's own heirs: so that if after Mary's death he had married some one else, and had a son, the crown would have passed completely out of the English royal family.
L. 27. Stock and root of inheritance—temporary administratrix of a power. This shifts the argument to a different position. The doctrines of the Revolution Society obviously referred to the latter ground of choice. But Burke would scarcely have maintained that the merit of William as an administrator did not weigh with the English nation, when they associated him with Mary on the throne.
L. 32. is daughter, &c. Others however, nearer in blood, but of the Catholic faith, were passed over: especially those of the Palatine family, whose ancestors having been strong assertors of the Protestant religion, it was thought likely that some of them might return to it.
P. 112, L. 34. A few years ago, &c. Burke commands more attention when he confesses his reason for all this deliberate mystification. No sophistry was ever too gross for the public ear; but the occasion which turned Burke for the time into a Tory casuist must have appeared to him critical indeed.
P. 113, L. 14. export to you in illicit bottoms. The allusion is to the Act of Navigation. See vol. i. p. 179, and note. "Bottom" (Dutch Bodem) is the old technical term for a ship. It is still used in such mercantile phrases as "foreign bottoms," and survives in the term "bottomry," applied to the advance of money on the security of the ship for the purposes of the voyage.
End of NotesThe people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried; nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial. They look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their rights, not as among their wrongs; as a benefit, not as a grievance; as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of servitude. They look on the frame of their commonwealth, such as it stands, to be of inestimable value; and they conceive the undisturbed succession of the crown to be a *124pledge of the stability and perpetuity of all the other members of our constitution. 2.1.42
2.1.43 The second claim of the Revolution Society is "a right of cashiering their governors for misconduct." Perhaps the apprehensions our ancestors entertained of forming such a precedent as that "of cashiering for misconduct," was the cause that the declaration of the act which implied the abdication of King James, was, if it had any fault, rather too guarded, and too circumstantial.*6 But all this guard, and all this accumulation of circumstances, serves to shew the spirit of caution which predominated in the national councils, in a situation in which men irritated by oppression, and elevated by a triumph over it, are apt to abandon themselves to violent and extreme courses: it shews the anxiety of the great men who influenced the conduct of affairs at that great event, to make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions. 2.1.44
2.1.45 Dr. Price, in this sermon,*7 condemns very properly the practice of gross, adulatory addresses to kings. Instead of this fulsome style, he proposes that his majesty should be told, on occasions of congratulation, that "he is to consider himself as *134more properly the servant than the sovereign of his people." For a compliment, this new form of address does not seem to be very soothing. Those who are servants, in name, as well as in effect, do not like to be told of their situation, their duty, and their obligations. The slave, in the old play, tells his master, "*135Haec commemoratio est quasi exprobratio." It is not pleasant as compliment; it is not wholesome as instruction. After all, if the king were to bring himself to echo this new kind of address, to adopt it in terms, and even to take the appellation of Servant of the People as his royal style, how either he or we should be much mended by it, I cannot imagine. I have seen very assuming letters, signed, "Your most obedient, humble servant." The proudest domination that ever was endured on earth took a title of still greater humility than that which is now proposed for sovereigns by the Apostle of Liberty. Kings and nations were trampled upon by the foot of one calling himself "the Servant of Servants"; and mandates for deposing sovereigns were sealed with the signet of "the Fisherman." 2.1.46
2.1.47
*136Kings, in one sense, are undoubtedly the servants of the people, because their power has no other rational end than that of the general advantage; but it is not true that they are, in the ordinary sense (by our constitution, at least) any thing like servants; the essence of whose situation is to obey the commands of some other, and to be removeable at pleasure. But the king of Great Britain obeys no other person; all other persons are individually, and collectively too, under him, and owe to him a legal obedience. The law, which knows neither to flatter nor to insult, calls this high magistrate, not our servant, as this humble Divine calls him, but "our sovereign Lord the King"; and we, on our parts, have learned to *137speak only the primitive language of the law, and not the confused jargon of their Babylonian pulpits. 2.1.48 As he is not to obey us, but as we are to obey the law in him, our constitution has made no sort of provision towards rendering him, as a servant, in any degree responsible. Our constitution knows nothing of a magistrate like *138the Justicia of Arragon; nor of any court legally appointed, nor of any process legally settled for submitting the king to the responsibility belonging to all servants. In this he is not distinguished from the commons and the lords; who, in their several public capacities, can never be called to an account for their conduct; although the Revolution Society chooses to assert, in direct opposition to one of the wisest and most beautiful parts of our constitution, that "a king is no more than the first servant of the public, created by it, and responsible to it." 2.1.49
2.1.50
The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentlemen talk so much at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be performed without force. It then becomes a case of war, and not of constitution. *141Laws are commanded to hold their tongues amongst arms; and tribunals fall to the ground with the peace they are no longer able to uphold. The Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can be just. "*142Justa bella quibus necessaria." The question of dethroning, or, if these gentlemen like the phrase better, "cashiering" kings, will always be, as it has always been, an extraordinary question of state, and wholly out of the law; a question (like all other questions of state) of dispositions, and of means, and of probable consequences, rather than of positive rights. As it was not made for common abuses, so it is not to be agitated by common minds. The speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end, and resistance must begin, is *143faint, obscure, and not easily definable. It is not a single act, or a single event, which determines it. Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past. When things are in that lamentable condition, the nature of the disease is to indicate the remedy to those whom nature has qualified to
2.1.51
*145The third head of right, asserted by the pulpit of the Old Jewry, namely, the "right to form a government for ourselves," has, at least, as little countenance from any thing done at the Revolution, either in precedent or principle, as the two first of their claims. The Revolution was made to preserve our antient indisputable laws and liberties, and that antient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty. If you are desirous of knowing the spirit of our constitution, and the policy which predominated in that great period which has secured it to this hour, pray look for both in our histories, in our records, in our acts of parliament, and journals of parliament, and not in the sermons of the Old Jewry, and the after-dinner toasts of the Revolution Society. In the former you will find other ideas and another language. Such a claim is as ill-suited to our temper and wishes as it is unsupported by any appearance of authority. The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant. All the reformations we have hitherto made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity; and I hope, nay 2.1.52 Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta. You will see that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the great men who follow him, to Blackstone,*8 are industrious to prove the pedigree of our liberties. *146They endeavour to prove, that the antient charter, the Magna Charta of King John, was connected with another positive charter from Henry I. and that both the one and the other were nothing more than a re-affirmance of the still more antient standing law of the kingdom. In the matter of fact, for the greater part, these authors appear to be in the right; perhaps not always: but if the lawyers mistake in some particulars, it proves my position still the more strongly; because it demonstrates the powerful prepossession towards antiquity, with which the minds of all our lawyers and legislators, and of all the people whom they wish to influence, have been always filled; and the stationary policy of this kingdom in considering their most sacred rights and franchises as an inheritance. 2.1.53
In the famous law of the 3rd of Charles I. called the Petition of Right, the parliament says to the king, "Your subjects have inherited this freedom," claiming their franchises, not on abstract principles as the "*147rights of men," but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers. Selden, and the *148other profoundly learned men, who drew this petition of right, were as well acquainted, at least, with all the *149general theories concerning the "rights of men," as any of the discoursers in our pulpits, or on your tribune; full as well as Dr. Price, or as the Abbé Sieyes. But, for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which superseded their theoretic science, they preferred this positive, 2.1.54 The same policy pervades all the laws which have since been made for the preservation of our liberties. In the 1st of William and Mary, in the famous statute, called the Declaration of Right, the two houses utter not a syllable of "a right to frame a government for themselves." You will see, that their whole care was to secure the religion, laws, and liberties, that had been long possessed, and had been lately endangered. "Taking*9 into their most serious consideration the best means for making such an establishment, that their religion, laws, and liberties might not be in danger of being again subverted," they auspicate all their proceedings, by stating as some of those best means, "in the first place" to do "as their ancestors in like cases have usually done for vindicating their antient rights and liberties, to declare"; and then they pray the king and queen, "that it may be declared and enacted, that all and singular the rights and liberties asserted and declared are the true antient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom." 2.1.55 *150You will observe, that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the *151uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an *152entailed inheritance *153derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves an *154unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and *155an house of commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors. 2.1.56
2.1.57 Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes *166a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of *167their age; and on account of those from whom they are descended. All your sophisters cannot produce any thing better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges. 2.1.58
2.1.59
You had all these advantages in your antient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil 2.1.60
Compute your gains: see what is got by those extravagant and presumptuous speculations which have taught your Notes for this chapter
L. 27. pledge of the stability and perpetuity, &c. The following passage is proper to be quoted here, as being a complete expression of the idea in the text, and at the same time the one which was selected by De Quincey as the most characteristic passage in the works of Burke, from the literary point of view. It is also a necessary illustration to the argument at p. 141, ll. 23-35.
Accolet; imperiumque pater Romanus habebit. —Letter to a Noble Lord, p. 53.
P. 114, L. 1. It is common for them to dispute, &c. But cp. Hallam, Const. Hist. chap. xiv. "Since the extinction of the House of Stuart's pretensions, and other events of the last half century, we have seen those exploded doctrines of indefeasible hereditary right revived under another name, and some have been willing to misrepresent the transactions of the Revolution and the Act of Settlement as if they did not absolutely amount to a deposition of the reigning sovereign, and an election of a new dynasty by the representatives of the nation in parliament." Mr. Hallam wished to be understood as explicitly affirming (in contradiction of Burke) what had been already stated by Paley (see Princ. of Moral and Political Philos. p. 411), that the great advantage of the Revolution was what many regarded as its reproach, and more as its misfortune—that it broke the line of succession. After stating precisely the votes, and pointing out the impossibility of reconciling them with such a construction as Burke's, he goes on to say—"It was only by recurring to a kind of paramount, and what I may call hyper-constitutional law, a mixture of force and regard to the national good, which is the best sanction of what is done in revolutions, that the vote of the Commons could be defended. They proceeded not by the stated rules of the English government, but by the general rights of mankind. They looked not so much to Magna Charta as to the original compact of society; and rejected Coke and Hale for Hooker and Grotius." Hallam in effect subscribes to the criticism contained in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Letters of Dr. Priestley on this question. Cp. Grotius, Lib. ii. c. 7, § 27.
L. 7. new fanatics, &c. Rousseau attacked Grotius quite as unreasonably as Filmer had done. We may exclaim too often with Burke, "One would think that such a thing as a medium had never been heard of in the moral world!"
L. 11. more of a divine sanction, &c. It would be superfluous to show the inaccuracy of such a notion.
"That King James the second, having endeavoured to subvert the constitution of the kingdom, by breaking the original contract between king and people, and by the advice of jesuits, and other wicked persons, having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, hath abdicated the government, and the throne is thereby vacant."
P. 115, L. 17. broken the original contract—more than misconduct. That is, a higher degree of misconduct than Dr. Price meant to be understood by his use of the word. The argument really amounts to no more than a criticism of Dr. Price's English.
L. 36. the next great constitutional act—the Act of Settlement, 12 and 13 W. III, cap. 2. "It was determined," says Mr. Hallam, "to accompany this settlement with additional securities for the subject's liberty. The Bill of Rights was reckoned hasty and defective: some matters of great importance had been omitted, and in the twelve years which had since elapsed, new abuses had called for new remedies." One of these abuses was the number of placemen and pensioners in the House (cp. note to vol. i. p. 138, l. 27).
P. 116, L. 3. no pardon—pleadable to an impeachment. This question arose upon the plea of pardon put in bar of prosecution by the Earl of Danby in 1679, and resisted with what Mr. Hallam considers culpable violence, by two successive Houses of Commons. It remained undecided until the Act of Settlement. The expressions in the enacting clause of this Act, says Mr. Hallam, "seem tacitly to concede the Crown's right of granting a pardon after sentence; which, though perhaps it could not be well distinguished in point of law from a pardon pleadable in bar, stands on a very different footing with respect to constitutional policy."
L. 7. practical claim of impeachment. Always strongly insisted upon by Burke as an important guarantee of constitutional liberty. Cp. vol. i. p. 120, l. 33, and note.
P. 22, 23, 24.
L. 17. more properly the servant, &c. The idea that a governing functionary is a servant, and that national sovereignty is inalienable, was strongly insisted on by Rousseau in the "Contrat Social" (Liv. ii. ch. 1. 2). It is an advance on the Whig doctrine, maintained by Burke, that government consists in a compact between the king and people, as equal contracting parties, which neither is at liberty to break so long as its original conditions are fulfilled. Cp. Selden's Table-Talk, head "Contracts." "If our fathers have lost their liberty, why may not we labour to regain it?" Ans. "We must look to the contract; if that be rightly made, we must stand to it: if once we grant we may recede from contracts, upon any inconveniency that
L. 22. Haec commemoratio, &c. Ter. And., Act i. sc. 1. l. 17. The steward Sosia, no longer a slave, in these words resents his master's reminding him of the change in his condition. Burke's repartees to Dr. Price, which fill up the rest of the page, are in his most effective parliamentary style.
P. 117, L. 7. Kings, in one sense, &c. Cp. vol. i. p. 118, l. 10.
L. 24. the Justicia of Arragon. See Hallam's account of Arragon. His functions did not differ in essence from those of the Chief Justice of England, as divided among the judges of the King's Bench, but practically they were much more extensive and important. The office is to be traced to the year 1118, but it was not till the Cortes of 1348 that it was endowed with an authority which "proved eventually a more adequate barrier against oppression than any other country could boast." From that time he held his post for life. It was penal for any one to obtain letters from the king impeding the execution of the justiza's process. See Hallam's account of the successful resistance of the justiza Juan de Cerda to John I.: "an instance of judicial firmness and integrity, to which, in the fourteenth century, no country perhaps in Europe could offer a parallel." Middle Ages, chap. iv.
P. 118, L. 3. Let these gentlemen, &c. Selden gives as the original meaning of the maxim that the king can do no wrong, that "no process can be granted against him" (at Common Law).
L. 6. positive statute law which affirms that he is not. Burke clearly alludes to a provision in the Act for attainting the Regicides, 12 Car. II. cap. 30, which runs thus: "And be it hereby declared, that by the undoubted and fundamental laws of this kingdom, neither the Peers of this realm, nor the Commons, nor both together in Parliament or out of Parliament, nor the People collectively or representatively, nor any other Persons whatsoever, ever had, have, hath, or ought to have, any coercive power over the persons of the Kings of this realm." We can hardly wonder that Burke did not think fit to indicate precisely this "positive statute law."
L. 15. Justa bella quibus necessaria. Burke, as usual, quotes from memory. "Justa piaque sunt arma, quibus necessaria; et necessaria, quibus nulla nisi in armis spes salutis." Livy, Lib. ix. cap. 1. The passage is alluded to by Sidney, and also in the famous pamphlet "Killing no Murder"; "His (Cromwell's) indeed have been pious arms," &c., p. 8.
L. 4. The third head, &c. On this Burke does not expend so much useless force. Feeling that after all he had something better to do than to split hairs with Dr. Price, he soon pushes on to the proper business of the book. He avoids actually denying the rights of men, but alleges that Englishmen have not had occasion to insist on them.
See Blackstone's Magna Charta, printed at Oxford, 1759.
P. 120, L. 1. They endeavour to prove, &c. Similarly the Americans had based their claims to liberty on law and precedent.
L. 18. rights of men—rights of Englishmen. "Our ancestors, for the most part, took their stand, not on a general theory, but on the particular constitution of the realm. They asserted the rights, not of men, but of Englishmen." Macaulay, Essay on Mackintosh's History of the Revolution. Burke however himself alludes to the "common rights of men," in distinction from the "disputed rights and privileges of freedom," in the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol. And every Englishman familiar with the literature of his own time must have known that Burke exaggerated. The "rights of men" were a common Whig topic. Bp. Warburton, for instance, says in one of his Sermons that to call an English king "the Lord's Anointed" is "a violation of the rights of men."
L. 20. other profoundly learned men. The allusion is to Coke and Glanvil. Cp. vol. i. p. 238, l. 7.
L. 22. general theories. Hooker and Grotius are alluded to. See also Book I. of Selden "De Jure Naturae et Gentium secundum disciplinam Hebraeorum."
1 W. and M.
P. 121, L. 14. you will observe, &c. Burke here terminates his quotations from the archives of the English constitution, and passes on to his "Reflections" on the French Revolution. He effects the transition in three paragraphs, in which he contrives to rise, at once, and without an effort, to the full "height of his great argument." These three paragraphs, evidently composed with great pains, sum up the conclusions of the previous pages as to matter, and as to style are so regulated as to prepare for the gravity and force which characterize the next section of the work.
L. 16. entailed inheritance. "Major hereditas venit unicuique nostrum a jure et legibus, quam a parentibus," is the well-known motto from Cicero, prefixed to Coke upon Littleton.
L. 17. derived to us from our forefathers, to be transmitted to our posterity. The spirited lines of Cato (Act III.) were familiar to Burke:
The generous plan of pow'r deliver'd down (So dearly bought, the price of so much blood), O let it never perish in your hands, But piously transmit it to your children.
L. 22. an house of commons and a people. Observe the claim here insinuated, suggested by Burke's Whiggish theory of Parliament. It is now understood that the rights of the House of Commons are not distinguishable from, and are immediately resolvable into those of the people.
L. 26. following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, &c. Cp. infra p. 174, l. 32, p. 181, l. 27, &c. So in the Third Letter on Regicide Peace; "Never was there a jar or discord between genuine sentiment and sound policy. Never, no, never, did Nature say one thing, and Wisdom say another." A literal translation of Juvenal, Sat. xiv. l. 321;
The formula is borrowed from the Stoic philosophy, so popular in Rome. Burke often had in mind the description of his favourite author, Lucan;
Secta fuit; servare modum, finemque tenere, Naturamque sequi, patriaeque impendere vitam; Non sibi, sed toti genitum se credere mundo. —Phars. II. 380, &c. The use Burke makes of the idea is, however, a relic of his study of the Essayists. See the Spectator, No. 404. It occurs more than once in Chesterfield's Essays in the "World." The doctrine is well put by Beccaria; "It is not only in the fine arts that the imitation of nature is the fundamental principle; it is the same in sound policy, which is no other than the art of uniting and directing to the same end the natural and immutable sentiments of mankind."
L. 28. A spirit of innovation. Burke does not mean a spirit of Reform. "It cannot, at this time, be too often repeated—line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb—to innovate is not to reform." Letter to a Noble Lord.
IBID. the result of a selfish temper, &c. This might well be illustrated by the attempted innovations on the constitution in the early part of the reign (see vol. i., passim), and by the history of the Stuarts. "Charles II.," says Clarendon, "had in his nature so little reverence and esteem for antiquity, and did in truth so much contemn old orders, forms, and institutions, that the objection of novelty rather advanced than obstructed any proposition."
L. 29. People will not look forward, &c. "Vous vivez tout entiers dans le moment présent; vous y êtes consignés par une passion dominante: et tout ce qui ne se rapporte pas à ce moment vous parait antique et suranné. Enfin, vous êtes tellement en votre personne et de coeur et d'esprit, que, croyant former à vous seuls un point historique, les ressemblances éternelles entre le
P. 122, L. 3. family settlement—mortmain. By which landed property is secured inalienably (subject to important legal restrictions) in families and corporations (in the legal sense) respectively.
L. 4. grasped as in a kind of mortmain (mortua manus, mainmorte). There is an allusion to the fanciful explanation of the term, "that it is called mortmaine by resemblance to the holding of a man's hand that is ready to die, for what he then holdeth he letteth not go till he be dead" (Co. Litt. 2 b). The tenure was really so called because it yielded no service to the superior lord.
L. 10. Our political system, &c. Compare with these weighty conclusions the opinion of Bacon; "Those things which have long gone together are, as it were, confederate within themselves.... It were good, therefore, if men, in their innovations, would follow the example of time itself, which indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly, and by degrees scarcely to be perceived." Essay on Innovations. Cp. Hooker, Eccl. Pol., Book i. ch. 10, par. 9, last clause.
L. 20. never wholly new, &c. Cp. Introd. to vol. i. p. 29, l. 20, &c. Cp. also the theory of the true Social Contract, p. 192 infra.
L. 30. The germ of the argument is to be found in the 14th of South's Posthumous Sermons: "And herein does the admirable wisdom of God appear, in modelling the great economy of the world, so uniting public and private advantages, that those affections and dispositions of mind, that are most conducible to the safety of government and society, are also most advantageous to man in his personal capacity." The argument is amplified in Dr. Chalmers' Bridgewater Treatise.
P. 123, L. 9. a noble freedom. The epithet is not used in the moral sense, but indicates an aristocratic character. The image, however, is not intended to degrade but to elevate the character of popular liberty.
L. 27. possessed in some parts, &c. Burke carries on the idea of the last paragraph, likening the mass of the nation to a nobleman succeeding to his paternal estate.
L. 31. very nearly as good as could be wished. Was it so? This question was much debated before the meeting of the States-General. The Revolutionists wished for a constitution, to which the privileged classes replied that France already had a very good constitution, to which nothing was wanting but a restoration to its pristine vigour. This paradox is supported by Burke. A statesman so far removed from suspicion of prejudice as J. J. Mounier, is quite of another opinion. Burke likened the States-General
P. 124, L. 8. subject of compromise. Cp. vol. i. p. 278, l. 29.
L. 33. low-born servile wretches. Notice the variation from an earlier opinion in vol. i. p. 107, l. 16. The passage of Rousseau quoted in the note to that place may be here appropriately refuted by stating, in the words of Burke, the steady policy of the French monarchy, which had subsisted, and even been strengthened, by the generation or support of republics. The Swiss republics grew under the guardianship of the French monarchy. The Dutch republics were hatched and cherished under the same incubation. A republican constitution was afterwards, under the influence of France, established in the Empire, against the pretensions of its chief; and while the republican protestants were crushed at home (cp. note to p. 97, l. 19, ante) the French monarchs obtained their final establishment in Germany as a law of the Empire, by the treaty of Westphalia. See the Second Letter on Regicide Peace (1796).
P. 125, L. 2. Maroon slaves. Maroon (borrowed from the French West Indies, Marron) means a runaway slave.
L. 20. looked to your neighbours in this land. But how impossible it was, very properly insists De Tocqueville, to do as England had done, and gradually to change the spirit of the ancient institutions by practice! By no human device can a year be made to do the work of centuries. The Frenchman felt himself every hour injured in his fortune, his comfort, or his pride, by some old law, some political usage, or some remnant of old power, and saw within his reach no remedy applicable to the particular
P. 126, L. 8. never can remove. Cp. post, pp. 360, 361.
L. 12. a smooth and easy career. This is putting far too fair a face on the possibilities of the crisis. Any power capable of effectually controlling the antagonistic interests might have directed such a career; but where was such a power to be found?
L. 25. All other nations, &c. Cp. Burnet, History of his own Time, vol. i., on this characteristic in the Bohemian revolution.
End of Notes
France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly *183disgraced the tone of lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and disarmed it of *184its most potent topics. She has sanctified the dark suspicious maxims of tyrannous distrust; and taught kings to tremble at (what will hereafter be called) the delusive plausibilities of moral politicians. Sovereigns will consider those who advise them to place an unlimited confidence in their people, as subverters of their thrones; as traitors who aim at their destruction, by leading their easy good-nature, under specious pretences, to admit combinations of bold and faithless men into a participation of their power. This alone, if there were nothing else, is an irreparable calamity to you and to mankind. Remember that 2.1.62 2.1.63 Were all these dreadful things necessary? Were they the inevitable results of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult, to the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty? No! nothing like it. The *190fresh ruins of France, which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devastation of civil war; they are the sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace. They are the display of inconsiderate and presumptuous, because unresisted and irresistible authority. The persons who have thus squandered away the precious treasure of their crimes, the persons who have made this prodigal and wild waste of public evils (*191the last stake reserved for the ultimate ransom of the state) have met in their progress with little, or rather with no opposition at all. Their whole march was more like a triumphal procession than the progress of a war. *192Their pioneers have gone before them, and demolished and laid every thing level at their feet. Not one drop of their blood have they shed in the cause of the country they have ruined. They have made no sacrifices to their projects of greater consequence than *193their shoebuckles, whilst they were imprisoning their king, murdering their fellow citizens, and bathing in tears, and plunging in poverty and distress, thousands of worthy men and worthy families. Their cruelty has not even been the base result of fear. It has been the effect of their sense of perfect safety, in authorizing treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters, and burnings throughout their harrassed land. But the cause of all was plain from the beginning.
2.1.64
This unforced choice, this fond election of evil, would
2.1.65
After I had read over the list of the persons and descriptions elected into the Tiers Etat, nothing which they afterwards did could appear astonishing. Among them, indeed, I saw some of known rank; some of shining *196talents; but of any practical experience in the state, not one man was to be found. The best were only men of theory. But whatever the distinguished few may have been, it is the substance and mass of the body which constitutes its character, and must finally determine its direction. In all bodies, *197those who will lead, must also, in a considerable degree, follow. 2.1.66 To secure any degree of sobriety in the propositions made by the leaders in any public assembly, they ought to respect, in some degree perhaps to fear, those whom they conduct. To be led any otherwise than blindly, the followers must be qualified, if not for actors, at least for judges; they must also be judges of natural weight and authority. Nothing can secure a steady and moderate conduct in such assemblies, but that the body of them should be respectably composed, in point of condition in life, of permanent property, of education, and of such habits as enlarge and liberalize the understanding. 2.1.67
In the calling of the states general of France, the first thing which struck me, was a great departure from the antient course. I found the representation for the Third Estate composed of *198six hundred persons. They were equal in number to the representatives of both of the other orders. If the orders were to act separately, the number would not, beyond the consideration of the expence, be of much 2.1.68 Judge, Sir, of my surprize, when I found that *200a very great proportion of the Assembly (*201a majority, I believe, of the members who attended) was composed of *202practitioners in the law. It was composed *203not of distinguished magistrates, who had given pledges to their country of their science, prudence, and integrity; not of leading advocates, the glory of the bar; not of renowned professors in universities—but for the far greater part, as it must in such a number, of the *204inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession. There were *205distinguished exceptions; but the general composition was of obscure provincial advocates, of stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attornies, notaries, and the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation, the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation. From the moment I read the list I *206saw distinctly, and very nearly as it has happened, all that was to follow. 2.1.69
The degree of estimation in which any profession is held becomes the standard of the estimation in which the professors hold themselves. Whatever the personal merits of many individual lawyers might have been, and in many it was undoubtedly very considerable, in that military kingdom, no part of the profession had been much regarded, except the highest of all, who often united to their professional offices great family splendour, and were invested with great power and authority. These certainly were highly respected, and even with no small degree of awe. The next rank was not 2.1.70 Whenever the supreme authority is invested in a body so composed, it must evidently produce the consequences of supreme authority placed in the hands of men not taught habitually to respect themselves; who had no previous fortune in character at stake; who could not be expected to bear with moderation, or to conduct with discretion, a power which they themselves, more than any others, must be surprized to find in their hands. Who could flatter himself that these men, suddenly, and, as it were, by enchantment, snatched from the humblest rank of subordination, would not be intoxicated with their unprepared greatness? Who could conceive, that men who are habitually meddling, *207daring, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds, would easily fall back into their old condition of obscure contention, and laborious, low, unprofitable chicane? Who could doubt but that, at any expence to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well? It was not an event depending on chance or contingency. It was *208inevitable; it was necessary; it was planted in the nature of things. They must join (if their capacity did not permit them to lead) in any project which could procure to them a litigious constitution; which could lay open to them those innumerable lucrative jobs which follow in the train of all great convulsions and revolutions in the state, and particularly in all great and violent permutations of property. Was it to be expected that they would attend to the stability of property, whose existence had always depended upon whatever rendered property questionable, ambiguous, and insecure? Their objects would be enlarged with their elevation, but their disposition and habits, and mode of accomplishing their designs, must remain the same. 2.1.71
2.1.72
We know that the British house of commons, without shutting its doors to any merit in any class, is, by the *215sure operation of adequate causes, filled with every thing illustrious 2.1.73
*218After all, if the house of commons were to have an wholly professional and faculty composition, what is the power of the house of commons, circumscribed and shut in by the immoveable barriers of laws, usages, positive rules of doctrine and practice, counterpoized by the house of lords, and every moment of its existence at the discretion of the crown to continue, prorogue, or *219dissolve us? The power of the house of commons, direct or indirect, is indeed great; and long may it be able to preserve its greatness, and the spirit belonging
2.1.74
Having considered the composition of the third estate as it stood in its original frame, I took a view of the representatives of the clergy. There too it appeared, that full as little regard was had to the general security of property, or to the aptitude of the deputies for their public purposes, in the principles of their election. That election was so contrived as to send a very large proportion of *222mere country curates to the great and arduous work of new-modelling a state; men who never had seen the state so much as in a picture; men who knew nothing of the world beyond the bounds of an obscure village; who, immersed in *223hopeless
2.1.75
To observing men it must have appeared from the beginning, that the majority of the Third Estate, in conjunction with such a deputation from the clergy as I have described, whilst it pursued the destruction of the nobility, would inevitably become subservient to the worst designs of individuals in that class. In the spoil and humiliation of their own order these individuals would possess a sure fund for the pay of their new followers. To squander away the objects which made the happiness of their fellows, would be to them no sacrifice at all. *225Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order. One of the first symptoms they discover of a selfish and mischievous ambition, is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they 2.1.76 There were, in the time of our civil troubles in England (I do not know whether you have any such in your Assembly in France) several persons, like *229the then Earl of Holland, who by themselves or their families had brought an odium on the throne, by the prodigal dispensation of its bounties towards them, who afterwards joined in the rebellions arising from the discontents of which they were themselves the cause; men who helped to subvert that throne to which they owed, some of them, their existence, others all that power which they employed to ruin their benefactor. If any bounds are set to the rapacious demands of that sort of people, or that others are permitted to partake in the objects they would engross, revenge and envy soon fill up the craving void that is left in their avarice. Confounded by the complication of distempered passions, their reason is disturbed; their views become vast and perplexed; to others inexplicable; to themselves uncertain. They find, on all sides, bounds to their unprincipled ambition in any fixed order of things. But in the fog and haze of confusion all is enlarged, and appears without any limit. 2.1.77
*230When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition becomes low and base. Does not something like this now appear in France? Does it not produce something ignoble and
Still as you rise, the state, exalted too, 2.1.78
These disturbers were not so much like men usurping power, as asserting their natural place in society. Their rising was to illuminate and beautify the world. Their conquest over their competitors was by outshining them.
2.1.79
The chancellor of France at the opening of the states, 2.1.80
I do not, my dear Sir, conceive you to be *243of that sophistical captious spirit, or of that uncandid dulness, as to require, for every general observation or sentiment, an explicit detail of the correctives and exceptions, which reason will presume to be included in all the general propositions which come from reasonable men. You do not imagine, that I wish to confine power, authority, and distinction to blood, and names, and titles. No, Sir. There is no qualification for government, but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive. Wherever they are actually found, Notes for this chapter
P. 127, L. 3. &c. i. e. thrown into disfavour. Cp. infra, p. 172, l. 12 sqq.
IBID. They have seen, &c. Notice the strength of the antitheses. The whole section is a fine example of Burke's most powerful style.
P. 128, L. 6. national bankruptcy the consequence. Contentio. See note to vol. i. p. 167, l. 2.
L. 13. hid themselves in the earth from whence they came. The germ of this dignified figure is from the Parable of the Talents. There is a passage in Swift's Drapier's Letters, writes Arthur Young, which accounts fully for gold and silver so absolutely disappearing in France; I change only Wood's pence for assignats. "For my own part, I am already resolved what to do; I have a pretty good shop of stuffs and silks, and instead of taking assignats, I intend to truck with my neighbours, the butcher and baker, and brewer, and the rest, goods for goods; and the little gold and silver I have, I will keep by me like my heart's blood, till better times; till I am just ready to starve, and then I will buy assignats." Example of France a Warning to Britain, 3rd Edition, p. 127. The louis d'or (20 livres) was at one time worth 1800 livres in assignats! Much gold and silver was at first hoarded in concealment, but during the year 1791 the treasure of France began to be imported into England. The price of 3 per cent. Consols, which during the previous five years had averaged £75, at midsummer in that year stood at £88.
L. 20. fresh ruins of France. The rest of Europe was at this time under the extraordinary delusion that France was really ruined; in Burke's words, "not politically existing." This persuasion partly accounts for the terror and astonishment which soon succeeded it.
L. 28. the last stake reserved, &c. Cp. ante, p. 119, l. 2, and post, p. 176, l. 12. Burke means that insurrection and bloodshed are the extreme medicine of the state, and only to be used in the last resort, when everything
P. 129, L. 1. their shoe buckles. Alluding to the "patriotic donations" of silver plate. See p. 345.
L. 14. of ten thousand times greater consequence, &c. "They (the Jacobins) are always considering the formal distributions of power in a constitution; the moral basis they consider as nothing. Very different is my opinion; I consider the moral basis as everything; the formal arrangements, further than as they promote the moral principles of government, and the keeping desperately wicked persons as the subjects of laws, and not the makers of them, to be of little importance. What signifies the cutting and shuffling of cards, while the pack still remains the same?" Fourth Letter on Regicide Peace.
L. 29. lay their ordaining hands—promise of revelation. The allusion is to the practice of the Church (see Acts ch. viii).
P. 130, L. 2. talents—practical experience in the state. "Nous n'avons jamais manqué de philosophes et d'orateurs," says De Sacy, in his critique on Rathery's Histoire des États-Généraux; "nous n'avons eu faute que d'hommes d'état."
L. 7. those who will lead, &c. This canon was the result of Burke's observation of the English Parliament. Cp. vol. i. note to p. 208, l. 28. For the parallels in Greek and Roman life, see Plato, Rep., Book vi. p. 493, and Cicero, Rep., Book ii.
P. 131, L. 2. six hundred persons. The double representation of the Tiers État, advocated by Sieyès and D'Entragues, had already been admitted in the provincial assemblies. It was now adopted by Necker with the view of overbalancing the influence of the privileged orders, and overcoming their selfish and impolitic resistance to taxation, and their general determination to thwart the royal policy.
L. 11. soon resolved into that body. The states met on the 5th of May; and the Third Estate on the 17th of June, upon the motion of Sieyès, constituted itself the National Assembly. "The memorable decree of the 17th of June," says M. Mignet, "contained the germ of the 4th of August."
L. 14. a very great proportion, &c. The intervention of the lawyer in so many of the acts of civil life, and the complexity of the different bodies of common law (coûtumes), 300 in number, which prevailed in different parts of the country,* always greatly swelled the numbers of the profession.
L. 15. a majority of the members who attended. This cannot be correct. 652 members took their seats: and they were classed as follows:
L. 16. Cp. note to vol. i. p. 241, l. 10. The remarks of Dr. Ramsay in his History of the American Revolution, on the share of the lawyers in the revolt, are quoted very appositely in Priestley's second Letter to Burke, in answer to these remarks. See also vol. i. p. 249, ll. 8-11.
L. 17. not of distinguished magistrates. The magistrates of the supreme courts and bailliages belonged to the order of the Nobility, and were represented in its representation to the number of 28; and even if they had been eligible, the electors of the Third Estate would hardly have entrusted them with their interests. But 162 magistrates of other tribunals were among the representatives of the Third Estate. "La députation des communes," says Mounier, "était à-peu-pres aussi bien composée qu'elle pouvoit l'être, et il est difficile qu'elle le soit mieux, tant qu'on séparera la représentation des plébéiens de celle des gentilshommes." Recherches sur les causes, &c. Vol. i. p. 257.
L. 21. inferior... members of the profession. On the complaints against practising lawyers in parliament, and their exclusion in the 46th of Edward III, see Hallam, ch. viii. part 3. Cp. the Parliamentum Indoctorum, or lack-learning Parliament, of Henry IV. In Bacon's Draught for a Proclamation
L. 23. distinguished exceptions. There were one or two advocates of profound learning and in large practice, like Camus. There were others, like Mounier and Malouet, distinguished for the wisdom and moderation of their political views.
L. 28. saw distinctly—all that was to follow. Compare with the paragraphs which follow, the Thoughts on French Affairs, under the head "Effect of the Rota." Paine denies that these were the views of Burke at the time, and says that it was impossible to make him believe that there would be a revolution in France: his opinion being that the French had neither spirit to undertake it, nor fortitude to support it. This had been the opinion of the best informed statesmen since the failure of Turgot. Cp. note to p. 271, l. 9.
P. 132, L. 18. daring, subtle, active, &c. Cp. vol. i. p. 242, l. 3.
P. 133, L. 6. Supereminent authority, &c.—Contentio. Cp. note to vol. i. p. 167, l. 2.
L. 9. traders—never known anything beyond their counting-house. The Memoirs of the bourgeois Hardy, Barbier, and Marais afford valuable illustrations of the views of affairs taken by peaceable men of useful and uniform lives, and evidence that their ideas were not bounded by their counting-house. There is no reason to think that they were exceptions in their class.
L. 16. pretty considerable. This expression has ceased to be classical in England, but survives in America. There were only 16 physicians in the Assembly.
L. 17. this faculty had not, &c. The French Ana are full of gibes upon the medical profession. Burke possibly had in mind the constant ridicule of the faculty of medicine by his favourite French author, Molière. Cp. infra, p. 349, l. 25.
L. 32. natural landed interest. But how unreasonable to expect it! The natural landed interest was surely sufficiently represented in the nobility.
L. 35. sure operation of adequate causes, &c. Burke thought that the House of Commons was and ought to be something very much more than what was implied in the vulgar idea of a "popular representation"; that it contained within itself a much more subtle and artificial combination of parts and powers, than was generally supposed; and that it would task the leisure of a contemplative man to exhibit thoroughly the working of its mechanism. See Letter to a Member of the National Assembly.
P. 134, L. 4. = political. See note to p. 93, l. 27, ante.
L. 26. After all, &c. The defects of the preceding observations do not impair the justice of the censure contained in the concluding paragraph, which was amply established by events. Burke's glance was often too rapid to be quite exact, but it was unerring in its augury of the essential bearing of a movement.
P. 135, L. 1. breakers of law in India, &c. See the Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts, in which Paul Benfield, who made (including himself) no fewer than eight members of Parliament, and others, are treated in a rhetorical strain of indignant irony which has no parallel in profane literature.
L. 27. mere country curates. (Curés.) Not in the modern sense of an assistant, but in the old and proper one of a beneficed clergyman or his substitute (vicaire). Bailey's dictionary has: Curate, a parson or vicar of a parish. The order of the clergy was represented by 48 archbishops and bishops, 35 abbots or canons, and 208 curates or parish priests. The income of a beneficed curé averaged £28 per annum: that of a vicaire, about half that sum.
L. 31. hopeless poverty. The Revolution, says Arthur Young, was an undoubted benefit to the lower clergy, who comprised five-sixths of the whole. They were not too numerously represented, if the representation were to mean anything at all.
P. 136, L. 6. those by whom, &c. i. e. the lawyers.
L. 26. turbulent, discontented men of quality. These remarks, applying to the Duke of Orleans, Mirabeau, Talleyrand, the two Lameths, Duport, d'Aiguillon, de Noailles, &c., were indirectly aimed at contemporary English nobles of the class of the Duke of Bedford, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Stanhope, and Lord Lauderdale, who whilst inflated with exaggerated Whig sentiments of liberty, had long disavowed the Whig principle of acting in connexion, and effectually ruined the political power of the party to which they professed to belong. Cp. vol. i. pp. 150 sqq.
L. 32. the first principle of public affections. See p. 107, l. 9 sqq. The argument may be traced in Cic. De Officiis, Lib. i. c. 17. Since Burke's time, it has become a trite commonplace. Dr. Blair wrote a whole sermon upon it. So Robert Hall; "The order of nature is ever from particulars to generals. As in the operations of intellect we proceed from the contemplation of individuals to the formation of general abstractions, so in the developement of the passions in like manner we advance from private to public affections; from the love of parents, brothers, and sisters, to those more expanded regards which embrace the immense society of human kind." Sermon on Modern Infidelity. On the other hand, the private
P. 137, L. 7. the then Earl of Holland. "This (reprieving Lord Goring, and not Lord Holland) may be a caution to us against the affectation of popularity, when you see the issue of it in this noble gentleman, who was as full of generosity and courtship to all sorts of persons, and readiness to help the oppressed, and to stand for the rights of the people, as any person of his quality in this nation. Yet this person was by the representatives of the people given up to execution for treason; and another lord, who never made profession of being a friend to liberty, either civil or spiritual, and exceeded the Earl as much in his crimes as he came short of him in his popularity, the life of this lord was spared by the people." (Whitelock, March 8, 1649.) The bounties prodigally bestowed on him were a reward for his carrying out as chief-justice in eyre the illegal claims made by Charles I., in virtue of the forestal rights (cp. vol. i. p. 77, l. 7). He became one of the leaders of the Parliament party, but deserted them, and paid the penalty with his life. Hallam charges him with ingratitude to both king and queen.
L. 24. when men of rank, &c. The allusion is again to those noblemen who patronised the Revolution Society.
P. 138, L. 2. if the terror, the ornament of their age. Burke perhaps had in mind the well-known epitaph of Richelieu (cp. l. 25), by Des Bois, in which he is described as "Tam saeculi sui tormentum quam ornamentum."
The ornament and terror of the age. —(Halifax, Lines on William III.)
L. 7. great bad men. So Pope, Essay on Man, iv. 284;
Burke perhaps had in mind Milton, Par. Lost, ii. 5;
To that bad eminence.
L. 8. a favourite poet. Waller; "Panegyric to my Lord Protector." After the Restoration, Waller made a panegyric upon Charles; and when the king satirically remarked that that on Cromwell was the better one, replied, with witty servility, that poets succeeded better in dealing with fiction than with truth. Waller was of kin to the Protector through his mother, a sister of John Hampden. Burke was familiar with the domestic history of the Wallers from the circumstance that his estate was in the same parish as theirs (Beaconsfield).
IBID. smote the country—communicated to it the force and energy, &c. Similarly Junius, Feb. 6, 1771; "With all his crimes, he (Cromwell) had the spirit of an Englishman. The conduct of such a man must always be an exception to vulgar rules. He had abilities sufficient to reconcile contradictions, and to make a great nation at the same time unhappy and formidable."
L. 29. how very soon France, &c. France has always been distinguished for the most elastic internal powers. Burke in after times quoted in illustration of this the lines,
Ducit opes animumque ferro.
L. 33. not slain the mind in their country. Mackintosh retorts this dignified figure on the ministers whom Burke after the Revolution conceived it to be his duty to support.
P. 139, L. 6. palsy. Fr. paralysie, now generally disused, in favour of the original term paralysis.
Ecclesiasticus, chap. xxxviii. verses 24, 25. "The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise." "How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad; that driveth oxen; and is occupied in their labours; and whose talk is of bullocks?"
Ver. 27. "So every carpenter and work-master that laboureth night and day." &c. Ver. 33. "They shall not be sought for in public counsel, nor sit high in the congregation: They shall not sit on the judges seat, nor understand the sentence of judgment: they cannot declare justice and judgment, and they shall not be found where parables are spoken." Ver. 34. "But they will maintain the state of the world." I do not determine whether this book be canonical, as the Gallican church (till lately) has considered it, or apocryphal, as here it is taken. I am sure it contains a great deal of sense, and truth.
P. 140, L. 4. of that sophistical, &c. Cp. note to vol. i. p. 193, l. 6.
L. 15. woe to the country, &c. Burke's support of the Test Act has been adduced to show how little practical meaning there was in this tirade. The question, however, here, is one of political, not religious disability. The term "religious" (l. 17) appears only to allude to the established church.
P. 141, L. 3. sortition or rotation. Harrington, the English constitution-monger, made the latter an essential principle in his scheme. Milton, however, wished "that this wheel, or partial wheel in state, if it be possible, might be avoided, as having too much affinity with the wheel of fortune." It will hardly be credited that a practical member of Parliament and shrewd thinker like Soame Jenyns, approved the principle of sortition, and deliberately proposed to have an annual ministry chosen by lot from 30 selected members of the House of Peers, and 100 of the House of Commons! See his "Scheme for the Coalition of Parties," 1782. Well might Burke call that "one of the most critical periods in our annals" (Letter to a Noble Lord). Had the then proposed parliamentary reforms taken place, Burke thought that "not France, but England, would have had the honour of leading up the death-dance of Democratic Revolution. Other projects, exactly coincident in time with those, struck at the very existence of the kingdom under any constitution" (ib.).
L. 7. road to eminence and power from obscure condition... not to be made too easy. There is here possibly an allusion to the preceding generation, and the career of men like Lord Melcombe. The road was always easy enough in England, and by this time in most other countries. Struensee had governed Denmark. Writers had busied themselves in vain to discover the End of Notes
Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state, that does not represent *248its ability, as well as its property. But as ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as property is sluggish, inert, and timid, it never can be safe from the invasions of ability, unless it be, out of all proportion, predominant in the representation. It must be represented too in great masses of accumulation, or it is not rightly protected. The characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition 2.1.82 2.1.83
It is said, that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over two hundred thousand. True; if the *253constitution of a kingdom be a problem of arithmetic. This sort of discourse does well enough with the *254lamp-post for its second: to men who may reason calmly, it is ridiculous. The will of the many, and their interest, must very often differ; and great will be the difference when they make an evil choice. A government of five hundred country attornies and obscure curates is not good for twenty-four millions of men, though it were chosen by eight and forty millions; nor is it the better for being guided by a dozen of persons of quality, who have betrayed their trust in order to obtain that power. At present, you seem in everything to have strayed out of the high road of nature. The property of France does not govern it. Of course property is destroyed, and rational liberty has no existence. All you have got for the present is a paper circulation, and a stock-jobbing constitution: and as to the future, do you seriously think that the territory of France, under the republican system of eighty-three independent municipalities, (to say nothing of the parts that compose them) can ever be governed as one body, or can ever be set in motion by the impulse of one mind? When the National Assembly has *255completed its work, it will have accomplished its ruin. These commonwealths will not long bear a state of subjection to the republic of Paris. They will not bear that this one body should monopolize the captivity of the king, and the dominion over the assembly calling itself National. Each will keep its own portion of the spoil of the church to itself; and it will not suffer either
2.1.84
If this be your actual situation, compared to the situation to which you were called, as it were by the voice of God and man, I cannot find it in my heart to congratulate you on the choice you have made, or the success which has attended your endeavours. I can as little recommend to any other nation a conduct grounded on such principles, and productive of such effects. That I must leave to those who can see further into your affairs than I am able to do, and who best know how far your actions are favourable to their designs. The gentlemen of the Revolution Society, who were so early in their congratulations, appear to be strongly of opinion that there is some scheme of politics relative to this country, in which your proceedings may, in some way, be useful. For your Dr. Price, who seems 2.1.85 It is plain that the mind of this political Preacher was at the time big with some extraordinary design; and it is very probable, that the thoughts of his audience, who understood him better than I do, did all along run before him in his reflection, and in the whole train of consequences to which it led. 2.1.86
Before I read that sermon, I really thought I had lived in a free country; and it was an error I cherished, because it gave me a greater liking to the country I lived in. I was indeed aware, that a jealous, *257ever-waking vigilance, to guard the treasure of our liberty, not only from invasion, but from decay and corruption, was our best wisdom and our first duty. However, I considered that treasure rather as a possession to be secured than as a prize to be contended for. I did not discern how the present time came to be so very favourable to all exertions in the cause of freedom. The present time differs from any other only by the circumstance of what is doing in France. If the example of that nation is to have an influence on this, I can easily conceive why some of their proceedings which have an unpleasant aspect, and are not quite reconcileable to humanity, generosity, good faith, and justice, are palliated with so much *258milky good-nature towards the actors, and borne with so much *259heroic fortitude towards the sufferers. It is certainly not prudent to discredit the authority of an example we mean 2.1.87
I see that your example is held out to shame us. I know that we are supposed a *265dull sluggish race, rendered passive by finding our situation tolerable; and prevented by a mediocrity of freedom from ever attaining to its full perfection. Your leaders in France *266began by affecting to admire, almost to adore, the British constitution; but as they advanced they came to look upon it with a sovereign contempt. *267The friends of your National Assembly amongst us have full as mean an opinion of what was formerly thought the glory of their country. The Revolution Society *268has discovered that the English nation is not free. They are convinced that the inequality in our representation is a "defect in our constitution so gross and palpable, as to make it excellent chiefly in form and theory."*11 That a representation in the legislature of a kingdom is not only the basis of all constitutional liberty in it, but of "all legitimate government; that without it a government is nothing but an usurpation"; that "when the *269representation is partial, the kingdom possesses liberty only partially; and if extremely partial it gives only a semblance; and if not only extremely partial, but corruptly chosen, it becomes a nuisance." Dr. Price considers this inadequacy of representation as our fundamental grievance; and though, as to the corruption of this semblance of representation, he hopes it is not yet arrived to its full perfection of depravity; he fears that "nothing will be done towards gaining for us this essential blessing, until some great abuse of power again provokes our resentment, or some great calamity again alarms our fears, or perhaps till the acquisition of a pure and equal representation by other countries, whilst we are mocked with the shadow, kindles our shame." To this he subjoins a note in these words. "A representation, chosen
2.1.88 You will smile here at the consistency of those democratists, who, when they are not on their guard, *270treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time, they pretend to make them the depositories of all power. It would require a long discourse to point out to you the many fallacies that lurk in the generality and equivocal nature of the terms "inadequate representation." I shall only say here, in justice to that old-fashioned constitution, *271under which we have long prospered, that our representation has been found *272perfectly adequate to all the purposes for which a representation of the people can be desired or devised. I defy the enemies of our constitution to show the contrary. To detail the particulars in which it is found so well to promote its ends, would demand a treatise on our practical constitution. I state here the doctrine of the Revolutionists, only that you and others may see, what an opinion these gentlemen entertain of the constitution of their country, and why they seem to think that some great abuse of power, or some great calamity, as giving a chance for the blessing of a constitution according to their ideas, would be much palliated to their feelings; you see why they are so much enamoured of your fair and equal representation, which being once obtained, the same effects might follow. You see they consider our house of commons as only "a semblance," "a form," "a theory," "a shadow," "a mockery," perhaps "a nuisance." 2.1.89
These gentlemen value themselves on being systematic; and not without reason. They must therefore look on this gross and palpable defect of representation, this fundamental grievance (so they call it), as a thing not only vicious in itself, but as rendering our whole government absolutely illegitimate, 2.1.90
*275Something they must destroy, or they seem to themselves to exist for no purpose. One set is for destroying the civil power through the ecclesiastical; another for demolishing the ecclesiastick through the civil. They are aware that the worst consequences might happen to the public in accomplishing this double ruin of church and state; but they are so heated with their theories, that they give more than hints, that this ruin, with all the mischiefs that must lead to it and attend it, and which to themselves *276appear quite certain, would not be unacceptable to them, or very remote from their wishes. *277A man amongst them of great authority, and certainly of great talents, speaking of a supposed *278alliance between church and state, says, "perhaps we must wait for the *279fall of the civil powers before this most unnatural alliance
2.1.91
It is no wonder therefore, that with these ideas of every thing in their constitution and government at home, either in church or state, as illegitimate and usurped, or, at best as a vain mockery, they look abroad with an eager and passionate enthusiasm. Whilst they are *281possessed by these notions, it is vain to talk to them of the practice of their ancestors, the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of a constitution, whose merits are confirmed by the *282solid test of long experience, and an increasing public strength and national prosperity. They despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men; and as for the rest, they have *283wrought under-ground a mine that will blow up at one grand explosion all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have "the rights of men." Against these there can be no prescription; against these no agreement is binding: these admit no temperament, and no compromise: any thing withheld from their full demand is so much of fraud and injustice. Against these their rights of men let no government look for security in the length of its continuance, or in the justice and lenity of its administration. The objections of these speculatists, if its forms do not quadrate with their theories, are as valid against such an old and beneficent government as against the most violent tyranny, or the greenest usurpation. They are always at issue with governments, not on a question of abuse, but a question of competency, and a question of title. I have nothing to say to the clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics. Let them be their amusement in the schools. 2.1.92 Far am I from denying in theory; full as far is my heart from withholding in practice, (if I were of power to give or to withhold,) *287the real rights of men. In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy. If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to justice; *288as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in politic function or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the *289means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the *290acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to *291instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour. *292In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things. He that has but five shillings in the partnership, has as good a right to it, as he that has five hundred pound has to his larger proportion. But he has not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint stock; and as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must *293deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to be settled by convention. 2.1.93
2.1.94
Government is *299not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it; and exist in much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to every thing they want every thing. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that *300even in the mass and body as well as in the 2.1.95 The moment you abate any thing from the full rights of men, each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience. This it is which makes the constitution of a state, and the due distribution of its powers, a matter of the *303most delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and of the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends which are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions. The state is to have *304recruits to its strength, and remedies to its distempers. *305What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics. 2.1.96
The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught à priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science; because the *306real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; but that which in the first instance is prejudicial 2.1.97
These metaphysic rights entering into common life, *310like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line. Indeed in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature, or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly *311ignorant of their trade, or totally negligent of their duty. The simple governments are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them. If you were to contemplate society in but one point of view, all 2.1.98 The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and *312in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in *313balances between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes, between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral *314denominations. 2.1.99
By these theorists the *315right of the people is almost always sophistically confounded with their power. The body of the community, whenever it can come to act, can meet with no effectual resistance; but till power and right are the same, the whole body of them has no right inconsistent with virtue, and the *316first of all virtues, prudence. Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit; for though a pleasant writer said, *317Liceat perire poetis, when *318one of them, in cold blood, is said to have leaped into the flames of a volcanic revolution, Ardentem frigidus Aetnam insiluit, I consider such a frolic rather as an unjustifiable poetic licence, than as one of the franchises of Parnassus; and whether he were poet, *319or divine, or politician, that chose to exercise this kind of right, I think that more wise, because more charitable thoughts would urge me rather
2.1.100 The kind of anniversary sermons, to which a great part of what I write refers, if men are not shamed out of their present course, in commemorating the fact, will cheat many out of the principles, and deprive them of the benefits of the Revolution they commemorate. I confess to you, Sir, I never liked this continual talk of resistance and revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the constitution its daily bread. It renders the habit of society dangerously valetudinary: it is taking periodical doses of mercury sublimate, and swallowing down repeated provocatives of *320cantharides to our love of liberty. Notes for this chapter
L. 15. its ability as well as its property. "Jacobinism," wrote Burke several years afterwards, when the whole civilised world was in affright at the word, without understanding very well what it meant, "is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property."
L. 23. the great masses which excite envy, &c. Cp. the Letter to a Noble Lord, in which the vast property of the Duke of Bedford is used to illustrate this doctrine. The extract given in a previous note (to p. 113, l. 27) contains the substance of its argument.
P. 142, L. 1. the power of perpetuating our property in our families, &c. Burke alludes to the practice of family settlements.
L. 5. grafts benevolence, &c. Because it encourages a man to other objects than a selfish lavishment of his fortune on his private wishes. The expression is slightly altered from the 1st Edition.
L. 12. sole judge of all property, &c. See the motion relative to the Speech from the Throne, 14th June, 1784, in which this fact is used in justification of the disapproval, expressed by the Commons, of the corruption and intimidation employed by the ministers and peers. The judicial power of the Lords is historically traced by Hallam, ch. xiii.
L. 26. constitution of a kingdom—a problem in arithmetic. Notwithstanding the sarcasm, which became very popular, the principle has now been recognised not only in England, but in most constitutional governments.
Till each fair burgh, numerically free, Shall choose its members by the Rule of Three. —Canning, New Morality. Rousseau's theory, however, referred not to the rule of three, but to the rule of the square root! See "Contrat Social," Liv. iii. ch. 1.
L. 28. lamp-post. (Lanterne), alluding to the summary executions by the mob (see infra, p. 166), which began, during the riots which preceded the 14th of July, with punishing thieves by dragging them to the Grève, and hanging them by the ropes which were used to fasten the lanterns. De Launay, De Losme, Solbay, and Flesselles, were soon afterwards "lynched" in the same way.
P. 143, L. 12. completed its work... accomplished its ruin. Cp. a similar expression, vol. i. p. 207, l. 11.
P. 145, L. 1. ever-waking vigilance. Cp. note to vol. i. p. 76, l. 30. The allusion is of course to the "fair Hesperian tree," which
Of dragon-watch and uninchanted eye.—Comus, l. 393.
L. 14. heroic fortitude towards the sufferers. Cp. note to vol. i. p. 149, l. 27. This idea, often repeated by Burke, is derived from the "Thoughts on Various Subjects," by Pope and Swift: "I never knew any man in my life, who could not bear another's misfortunes perfectly like a Christian."
L. 19. Is our monarchy, &c. By the next page it will be seen that Dr. Price had marked as the fundamental grievance of the English people the inadequacy of popular representation. Could Burke really wish to be understood as declaring that a reform of Parliament in England would lead to the changes here set out? If so, what is the meaning of the high praise he proceeds to bestow on the English people for their steadiness of temperament? It is, however, superfluous to point out all the logical excesses of a heated advocate.
L. 22. done away. Strictly correct. So to do out, do up, do off, do on (dout, dup, doff, don), &c. The modern phrase, to "do away with," has arisen from confusion with the interjectional expression, "Away with." Spenser;
L. 23. house of lords to be voted useless. Alluding to the Resolution of the Commons, Feb. 6, 1649, "That the House of Peers in Parliament is useless and dangerous, and ought to be abolished." On that day the Lords met, and adjourned "till ten o'clock to-morrow." That morrow, says Mr. Hallam, was the 25th of April, 1660.
L. 29. land-tax—malt-tax—naval strength. The land-tax and malt-duty were the only imposts included in the estimate of "ways and means" for raising the "supplies," which provided for the navy, ordnance, army, and miscellaneous services. Taken together, these imposts did rather more than pay for the navy, which then cost about two-and-half millions annually.
P. 146, L. 3. in the increase. i. e. in the form of an increase.
L. 16. dull sluggish race—mediocrity of freedom. Cp. Letter to Elliott; "My praises of the British government, loaded with all its incumbrances; clogged with its peers and its beef; its parsons and its pudding; its commons and its beer; and its dull slavish liberty of going about just as one pleases," &c.
L. 19. began by affecting to admire, &c. There was not much in this. The excellence of the British constitution consisted not in its formal, but in its moral basis; in the unity, the cordial recognition, and the substantial justice, which subsisted between class and class, and this was beyond the reach of French politicians. Formally regarded, not only the French leaders, but some English philosophers, not without a certain justice, always "looked upon it with a sovereign contempt." It is this moral basis which
L. 21. the friends of your National Assembly, &c. The theory of the English constitution was first systematically attacked by Bentham, in his Fragment on Government, 1775.
L. 24. has discovered, &c. It is notorious that England at this time was not free in the sense in which it has now been free for forty years.
Discourse on the Love of our Country, 3d edit. p. 39.
L. 31. representation is partial—possesses liberty only partially. For several years such phrases had been so dinned into the ears of the English nation, as to become a byword for the wits. Of the abstract principle that all men are born free, Soame Jenyns says, "This is so far from being true, that the first infringement of their liberty is being born at all; which is imposed upon them without their consent, given either by themselves or their representatives." Disquisition on Government and Civil Liberty.
P. 147, L. 15. treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt. Nowhere are more flagrant examples of this to be found than in Milton. When he finds or imagines the mass of the people to be with him, he treats them with the greatest respect; when there is a reaction, or a chance of it, they become "the blockish vulgar"—"the people, exorbitant and excessive in all their notions"—"the mad multitude"—"a miserable, credulous, deluded thing called the vulgar" (Eikonoklastes)—"a multitude, ready to fall back, or rather to creep back, to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship"—"the inconsiderate multitude" (Mode of Establishing a Free Commonwealth)—"the simple laity" (Tenure of Kings). The mild Spenser calls the people "the rascal many." So the chorus in Samson;
That wand'ring loose about, Grow up and perish, like the summer flie, Heads without name no more remembered. "Tout peuple," wrote Marat, "est naturellement moutonnier" (Journal de Marat, Mars 5, 1793). On the contempt of the demagogues of the ancient world for their audience, cp. Arbuthnot's (Swift's?) paper "Concerning the Altercation or Scolding of the Ancients."
L. 22. under which we have long prospered. See Bentham's Book of Fallacies, or Sydney Smith's review of it, for a consideration of this trite argument.
L. 23. perfectly adequate, &c. "If there is a doubt, whether the House of Commons represents perfectly the whole commons of Great Britain (I think there is none) there can be no question but that the Lords and Commons together represent the sense of the whole people to the crown, and to the world." Third Letter on a Regicide Peace.
P. 148, L. 19. that house is no representative of the people at all, even in semblance or in form. Directly at variance with all constitutional history, Selden maintains that the Lords "sit for the commonwealth." In the "Present
L. 31. Something they must destroy, &c. Burke altered the commencement of this paragraph, which stands thus in the 1st Edition; "Some of them are so heated with their particular religious theories, that they give more than hints that the fall of the civil powers, with all the dreadful consequences of that fall, provided they might be of service to their theories, could not be unacceptable to them," &c. This was done to make clearer the serious charge here brought against Priestley, which was the beginning of the persecution which finally drove him from the country.
P. 149, L. 4. appear quite certain. Convinced, however, only by the harmless enthusiasm which thinks it necessary to attach a specific meaning to the visions of the seer in the Apocalypse. It was not until 1794 that Dr. Priestley offered this apology for it.
L. 6. a man... of great authority. Dr. Priestley. The offensive passage is that which concludes his formidable "History of the Corruptions of Christianity," and finishes the considerations addressed to the advocates for the civil establishment of religion, and especially to Bishop Hurd. It is as follows; "It is nothing but the alliance of the kingdom of Christ with the kingdoms of this world (an alliance which our Lord Himself expressly disclaimed) that supports the grossest corruptions of Christianity; and perhaps we must wait for the fall of the civil powers before this most unnatural alliance be broken. Calamitous, no doubt, will that time be. But what convulsion in the political world ought to be a subject of lamentation, if it
L. 7. alliance between church and state. The well-known doctrine of Bishop Warburton, alluded to post, p. 188, l. 7 sqq.
L. 8. fall of the civil powers. The meaning of this was not to be mistaken. Immediately before, Priestley has been asking why Lutheranism and Anglicanism had been established, while the Anabaptists of Münster, and the Socinians, had been persecuted? "I know of no reason why, but that the opinions of Luther and Cranmer had the sanction of the civil powers, which those of Socinus and others of the same age, and who were equally well qualified to judge for themselves, had not."
L. 10. Calamitous no doubt, &c. Dr. Priestley on the 28th of Feb., 1794, the day appointed for a general fast, preached at the Gravel-pit Meeting in Hackney a sermon, entitled "The Present State of Europe compared with Ancient Prophecies," in which he repeats and justifies the offensive paragraph, and warns his congregation of the "danger to the civil powers of Europe, in consequence of their connexion with antichristian ecclesiastical systems." He also apologised for it in a letter dated Northumberland, Nov. 10, 1802, addressed to the editor of the Monthly Magazine, by saying that it was not intended for England, but for Europe generally, "especially those European States which had been parts of the Roman Empire, but were then in communion with the Church of Rome.... Besides that the interpretation of prophecy ought to be free to all, it is the opinion, I believe, of every commentator that these states are doomed to destruction." In an Appendix to the Fast Sermon, he prints a long extract from Hartley's "Observations on Man" (1749), in which the fall of the civil and ecclesiastical powers was predicted with similar coolness. "It would be great rashness," says Hartley in his conclusion, "to fix a time for the breaking of the storm that hangs over our heads, as it is blindness and infatuation not to see it, nor to be aware that it may break; and yet this infatuation has always attended all falling states."
L. 19. In the sense of diabolical possession. "An obstinate man," says Butler, "does not hold opinions, but they hold him; for when once he is possessed with an error, 'tis like the devil, not to be cast out but with great difficulty."
L. 25. wrought under-ground a mine... the "rights of men." Locke and Sidney were the founders of the school of the "Rights of Men," and first
P. 150, L. 8. Illa se jactet in aula, &c. Virg. Aen. i. 140.
L. 15. the real rights of men. The profound and just remarks which follow are a fine example of that "dower of spanning wisdom" in which Burke was so rich, and expressed with an unusual strength and simplicity of construction.
L. 24. means of making their industry fruitful—i. e. to the occupation of the soil, without prejudice to the rights of the owner. Cp. vol. i. p. 247, l. 26.
L. 25. acquisitions of their parents. Without prejudice, of course, to the right of the parent to dispose of it himself. Cp. ante, p. 142, l. 1.
L. 31. In this partnership, &c. This happy illustration is an after-thought, and is wanting in the First Edition.
P. 151, L. 3. deny to be amongst the direct original rights, &c. Equality of power might even be denied to be among the physical possibilities of civil society.
L. 7. offspring of convention. Burke here admits the fundamental doctrines relating to the Social Contract, and proceeds to show how they change their significance in practice.
L. 14. one of the first motives to civil society, &c. The process is traced with his usual clearness by Hooker, Ecc. Pol., Book i. § 10. Burke seems to have in mind Hooker's disciple Locke, Treat. of Government, Book ii. ch. 7, § 90; "For the end of civil society being to avoid and remedy those inconveniences of the state of nature, which necessarily follow from every man's being a judge in his own case," &c.
L. 16. judge in his own cause. Cp. vol. i. p. 252, l. 8, and the "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol," in which the argument from this principle is expanded and applied to the relations of states between themselves. "When any community is subordinately connected with another, the great danger of
L. 22. rights of an uncivil and a civil state together. Cp. Lucretius, v. 1147;
Ulcisci, quam nunc concessum est legibus aequis, Hanc ob rem est homines pertaesum vi colere aevum. Other illustrations from the classics are given in Grotius, Lib. ii. c. 20.
L. 25. secure some liberty, makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it. "Il me semble que l'homme, sortant de l'état naturel, pour arriver à l'état social, perd son indépendance pour acquérir plus de sûreté. L'homme quitte ses compagnons des bois qui ne le gênent pas, mais qui peuvent le dévorer, pour venir trouver une société qui ne le dévorera pas, mais qui doit le gêner. Il stipule ses intérêts du mieux qu'il peut, et, lorsqu'il entre dans une bonne constitution, il céde le moins de son indépendance, et obtient le plus de sûreté qu'il est possible." Rivarol, Journal Politique. Liberty is a compromise between independence and security. This "surrender in trust" resembles the surrender, in the contract of insurance, of a portion of your property, for the security of the whole.
P. 152, L. 4. even in the mass and body, &c. "With all respect for popular assemblies be it spoken," says Swift, "it is hard to recollect one folly, infirmity, or vice, to which a single man is subjected, and from which a body of commons, either collective or represented, can be wholly exempt." Contests and Discussions in Athens and Rome, ch. iv.
L. 7. power out of themselves. Compare this with the trivial sophism of Sieyès, "Il ne faut pas placer le régulateur hors de la machine." Burke truly says elsewhere; "An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance, and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in meddling with what they do not understand." Rivarol says, in the same view, "Rien ne ressemble moins à une balance que la machine du gouvernement; rien ne ressemble moins à un équilibre que la marche des corps politiques," &c. Oeuvres, vol. iv. p. 265.
P. 153, L. 1. real effects of moral causes. "Moral" is used as commonly by Burke, for the contrary of "physical."
L. 16. pulling down an edifice. "To construct," wrote Burke six years before, "is a matter of skill; to demolish, force and fury are sufficient." Similar expressions are used by Soame Jenyns.
L. 21. like rays of light. An admirable illustration. Cp. Bacon's observation that the human understanding is not a "dry light," but imbued with the colours of the will and passions.
P. 154, L. 12. in proportion as they are metaphysically true, &c. Burke takes up a cant paradox of the day. Soame Jenyns; "It is a certain though a strange truth, that in politics all principles which are speculatively right, are practically wrong; the reason of which is, that they proceed on a supposition that men act rationally; which being by no means true, all that is built on so false a foundation, on experiment falls to the ground." Reflections on Several Subjects. "Metaphysics" was commonly applied as a term of reproach by English writers after the promulgation of the philosophy of Locke, and especially so used by the Essayists.
L. 27. first of all virtues, prudence = &phgr;r&oacgr;n&eegr;siς. Cp. Arist. Eth., Lib. vi. c. 8, &c. In a previous work Burke calls prudence "the God of this lower world," perhaps in allusion to Juv. Sat. x. 365.
IBID. one of them. Empedocles. The allusion is of course to him in his philosophical rather than his poetical character.
L. 34. or divine. The allusion is to Dr. Price, as may be seen from the opening of the next paragraph. Burke means that at the end of an honourable career, Price was playing the fool, like the philosopher in the legend. Cp. Butler, Fragments;
Leapt into Aetna, with his sandals shod, That b'ing blown out, discover'd what an ass The great philosopher and juggler was, That to his own new deity sacrific'd, And was himself the victim and the priest. So Milton, Par. Lost, iii. 469;
A god, leap'd fondly into Aetna flames, —Empedocles. End of Notes
This distemper of remedy, grown habitual, *321relaxes and wears out, by a vulgar and prostituted use, the spring of that spirit which is to be exerted on great occasions. It was in the most patient period of Roman servitude that themes of tyrannicide made the ordinary exercise of boys at school—*322cum perimit saevos classis numerosa tyrannos. In the ordinary state of things, it produces in a country like ours the worst effects, even on the cause of that liberty which it abuses with the dissoluteness of an extravagant speculation. *323Almost all the high-bred republicans of my time have, after a short space, become the most decided, thorough-paced courtiers; they soon left the business of a tedious, moderate, but practical resistance, to *324those of us whom, in the pride and intoxication of their theories, they have slighted, as not much better than tories. *325Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent. But even in cases where rather levity than fraud was to be suspected in these ranting speculations, the issue has been much the same. These professors, finding their extreme
2.1.102 2.1.103 This famous sermon of the Old Jewry breathes nothing but this spirit through all the political part. Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution. A cheap, bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to their taste. There must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouze the imagination, grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years security, and the *329still unanimating repose of public prosperity. The Preacher found them all in the French revolution. This inspires a juvenile warmth through his whole frame. His enthusiasm kindles as he advances; and when he arrives at his peroration, it is in a full blaze. Then viewing, from the *330Pisgah of his pulpit, the free, moral, happy, flourishing, and glorious state of France, as in a bird-eye landscape of a promised land, he breaks out into the following rapture: 2.1.104
2.1.105
Before I proceed further, I have to remark, that Dr. Price seems rather to over-value the great acquisitions of light which he has obtained and diffused in this age. The last century appears to me to have been quite as much enlightened. It had, though in a different place, a triumph as memorable as that of Dr. Price; and some of the great preachers of that period partook of it as eagerly as he has done in the triumph of France. On the trial of the Rev. Hugh Peters for high treason, it was deposed, that when King Charles was brought to London for his trial, the Apostle of Liberty in that day conducted the triumph. "I saw," says the witness, "his majesty in the coach with six horses, and Peters riding before the king triumphing." Dr. Price, when he talks as if he had made a discovery, only follows a precedent; for, after the commencement of the 2.1.106
After this sally of the preacher of the Old Jewry, which differs only in place and time, but agrees perfectly with the spirit and letter of the rapture of 1648, the Revolution Society, the fabricators of governments, the heroic band of cashierers of monarchs, electors of sovereigns, and leaders of kings in triumph, strutting with a proud consciousness of the diffusion of knowledge, of which every member had obtained so large a share in the donative, were in haste to make a generous diffusion of the knowledge they had thus gratuitously received. To make this bountiful communication, they adjourned from the church in the Old Jewry, to the London Tavern; where the famous Dr. Price, in whom the fumes of his oracular tripod were not entirely evaporated, moved and carried the resolution, or address of congratulation,
2.1.107 I find a preacher of the gospel prophaning the beautiful and prophetic ejaculation, commonly called "nunc dimittis," made on the first presentation of our Saviour in the Temple, and applying it, with an inhuman and unnatural rapture, to the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle, that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind. This "leading in triumph," a thing in its best form *332unmanly and irreligious, which fills our Preacher with such unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral taste of every *333well-born mind. Several English were the stupified and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was, unless we have been strangely deceived, a spectacle more resembling a *334procession of American savages, *335entering into Onondaga, after some of their murders called victories, and leading into hovels hung round with scalps, their captives, overpowered with the scoffs and buffets of *336women as ferocious as themselves, much more than it resembled the triumphal pomp of a civilized martial nation—if a civilized nation, or any men who had a sense of generosity, were capable of a personal triumph over the fallen and afflicted. 2.1.108 This, my dear Sir, was not the triumph of France. I must believe that, as a nation, it overwhelmed you with shame and horror. I must believe that the National Assembly find themselves in a state of the greatest humiliation, in not being able to punish the authors of this triumph, or the actors in it; and that they are in a situation in which any enquiry they may make upon the subject, must be destitute even of the appearance of liberty or impartiality. The apology of that Assembly is found in *337their situation; but when we approve what they must bear, it is in us the degenerate choice of a vitiated mind. 2.1.109
2.1.110 The Assembly, their organ, acts before them the farce of deliberation with as little decency as liberty. They act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience; they act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, *347explode them; and sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them; domineering over them with a strange mixture of servile petulance and proud presumptuous authority. As they have inverted order in all things, the *348gallery is in the place of the house. This Assembly, which overthrows kings and kingdoms, has not even the physiognomy and aspect of a grave legislative body—*349nec color imperii, nec frons erat ulla senatus. They have a *350power given to them, like that of the evil principle, to subvert and destroy; but *351none to construct, except such machines as may be fitted for further subversion and further destruction. 2.1.111
Who is it that admires, and from the heart is attached to national representative assemblies, but must turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque, and abominable perversion of that sacred *352institute? Lovers of monarchy, lovers of republicks, must alike abhor it. The members of your Assembly must themselves groan under the tyranny of which they have all the shame, none of the direction, and little of the profit. I am sure many of the members who compose even the majority of that body, must feel as I do, notwithstanding the applauses of the Revolution Society. Miserable king! miserable Assembly! How must that assembly 2.1.112
This address was made with much good-nature and affection, to be sure. But among the revolutions in France, must be reckoned a considerable revolution in their ideas of politeness. In England we are said to learn manners at second-hand from your side of the water, and that we dress our behaviour in the *357frippery of France. If so, we are *358still in 2.1.113 A man is fallen indeed, when he is thus flattered. The anodyne draught of oblivion, thus drugged, is well calculated to preserve a galling wakefulness, and to feed the living ulcer of a corroding memory. Thus to administer the opiate potion of amnesty, powdered with all the ingredients of scorn and contempt, is to hold to his lips, instead of "the *361balm of hurt minds," the cup of human misery full to the brim, and to force him to drink it to the dregs. 2.1.114
Yielding to reasons at least as forcible as those which were so delicately urged in the compliment on the new year, the king of France will probably endeavour to forget these events, and that compliment. But history, who keeps a durable record of all our acts, and exercises her awful censure over the proceedings of all sorts of sovereigns, will not forget either those events or the aera of this liberal refinement in the intercourse of mankind. History will 2.1.115
This king, to say no more of him, and this queen, and their infant children (who once would have been the pride and hope of a great and generous people) were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcases. Thence they were conducted into the capital of their kingdom. *365Two had been selected from the unprovoked, unresisted, promiscuous slaughter, which was made of the gentlemen of birth and family who composed the king's body guard. These two gentlemen, with all the parade of an execution of justice, were cruelly and publickly dragged to the block, and beheaded in the great court of the palace. Their heads were stuck upon spears, and led the procession; whilst the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies 2.1.116 Is this a triumph to be consecrated at altars? to be commemorated with grateful thanksgiving? to be offered to the divine humanity with fervent prayer and enthusiastick ejaculation? These Theban and Thracian Orgies, acted in France, and applauded only in the Old Jewry, I assure you, kindle prophetic enthusiasm in the minds but of very few people in this kingdom; although a saint and apostle, who may have revelations of his own, and who has so completely vanquished all the mean superstitions of the heart, may incline to think it pious and decorous to compare it with the entrance into the world of the Prince of Peace, proclaimed in an holy temple by a venerable sage, and not long before not worse announced by the voice of angels to the quiet innocence of shepherds. 2.1.117
At first I was at a loss to account for this fit of unguarded transport. I knew, indeed, that the sufferings of monarchs make a delicious repast to some sort of palates. There were reflexions which might serve to keep this appetite within some bounds of temperance. But when I took one circumstance into my consideration, I was obliged to confess, that much allowance ought to be made for the Society, and that the temptation was too strong for common discretion. I mean, the circumstance of the Io Paean of the triumph, the animating cry which called "for all the BISHOPS to be hanged on the lamp-posts,"*15 might well have brought forth a burst of enthusiasm on the foreseen 2.1.118
2.1.119 I hear that the august person, who was the principal object of our preacher's triumph, though he supported himself, felt much on that shameful occasion. As a man, it became him to feel for his wife and his children, and the faithful guards of his person, that were massacred in cold blood about him. As a prince, it became him to feel for the strange and frightful transformation of his civilized subjects, and to be more grieved for them, than solicitous for himself. It derogates little from his fortitude, while it adds infinitely to the honour of his humanity. I am very sorry to say it, very sorry indeed, that such personages are in a situation in which it is not unbecoming in us to praise the virtues of the great. 2.1.120 I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, the other object of the triumph, has borne that day (one is interested that beings made for suffering should suffer well) and that she bears all the succeeding days, that she bears the imprisonment of her husband, and her own captivity, and the exile of her friends, and the insulting adulation of addresses, and the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs, with a serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race, and becoming the *370offspring of a sovereign distinguished for her piety and her courage; that like her she has lofty sentiments; that she feels with the dignity of a *371Roman matron; *372that in the last extremity she will save herself from the last disgrace, and that if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand. 2.1.121
2.1.122
This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the antient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human 2.1.123 But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and *388obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a *389bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the *390decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the *391superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, *392which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. 2.1.124
On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded 2.1.125 On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of *393cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom, as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, *394laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every *395visto, you see *396nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this *397mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place. These public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law. The precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic, for the construction of poems, is equally true as to states. *398Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto. There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely. 2.1.126
*399But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its support. The usurpation which, in order to subvert antient institutions, has destroyed antient 2.1.127 When antient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer. Europe undoubtedly, taken in a mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which your Revolution was compleated. How much of that *402prosperous state was owing to the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say; but as such causes cannot be indifferent in their operation, we must presume, that, on the whole, their operation was beneficial. 2.1.128
We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced, and possibly may be upheld. *403Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in *404this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in the midst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes than formed. Learning paid back what it received to 2.1.129 If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing to own to antient manners, so do other interests which we value full as much as they are worth. Even commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our oeconomical politicians, are themselves perhaps but creatures; are themselves but effects, which, as first causes, we choose to worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished. They too may decay with their natural protecting principles. With you, for the present at least, they all threaten to disappear together. Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people, and the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always ill supplies their place; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time, poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honour, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter? 2.1.130
I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity in all the proceedings of the assembly and of all their 2.1.131 It is not clear, whether in England we learned those grand and decorous principles, and manners, of which considerable traces yet remain, from you, or *406whether you took them from us. But *407to you, I think, we trace them best. You seem to me to be "*408gentis incunabula nostrae." France has always more or less influenced manners in England; and *409when your fountain is choaked up and polluted, the stream will not run long, or not run clear with us, or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in my opinion, but too close and connected a concern in what is done in France. Excuse me, therefore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the sixth of October 1789, or have given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day, I mean *410a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions. As things now stand, with every thing respectable destroyed without us, and an attempt to destroy within us every principle of respect, one is almost *411forced to apologize for harbouring the common feelings of men. 2.1.132
Why do I feel so differently from the Reverend Dr. Price, and those of his lay flock, who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse? *412For this plain reason—*413because it is natural I should; because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct our reason; because when kings are hurled from their thrones by the Supreme Director of this great drama, and become the objects of 2.1.133
Indeed the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than churches, where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged. Poets, who have to deal with an audience not yet graduated in the school of the rights of men, and who must apply themselves to the moral constitution of the heart, would not dare to produce such a triumph as a matter of exultation. There, where men follow their natural impulses, they would not bear the odious maxims of a Machiavelian policy, whether applied to the attainment of monarchical or democratic tyranny. They would reject them on the modern, *416as they once did on the antient stage; where they could not bear even the hypothetical proposition of such wickedness in the mouth of a personated tyrant, though suitable to the character he sustained. No theatric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne, in the midst of the real tragedy of this triumphal day; a principal actor weighing, as it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors, so much actual crime against so much contingent advantage, and after putting in and out weights, declaring that the balance was on
2.1.134
But the Reverend Pastor exults in this "leading in triumph," because, truly, Louis the XVIth was "an arbitrary monarch"; that is, in other words, neither more nor less, than because he was Louis the XVIth, and because he had the misfortune to be born king of France, with the prerogatives of which, a long line of ancestors, and a long acquiescence of the people, without any act of his, had put him in possession. A misfortune it has indeed turned out to him, that he was born king of France. But misfortune is not crime, nor is indiscretion always the greatest guilt. I shall never think that a prince, the acts of whose whole reign were a series of concessions to his subjects, who was willing to 2.1.135
If it could have been made clear to me, that the king and queen of France (those I mean who were such before the triumph) were inexorable and cruel tyrants, that they had formed a deliberate scheme for massacring the National Assembly (I think I have seen something like the latter insinuated in certain publications) I should think their captivity just. If this be true, much more ought to have been done, but done, in my opinion, in another manner. The punishment of real tyrants is a noble and awful act of justice; and it has *423with truth been said to be consolatory to the human mind. But if I were to punish a wicked king, I should regard the dignity in avenging the crime. Justice is 2.1.136 If the French King, or *428King of the French, (or by whatever name he is known in the new vocabulary of your constitution) has in his own person, and that of his Queen, really deserved these unavowed but unavenged murderous attempts, and those subsequent indignities more cruel than murder, such a person would ill deserve even that subordinate executory trust, which I understand is to be placed in him; nor is he fit to be called chief of a nation which he has outraged and oppressed. A worse choice for such an office in a new commonwealth, than that of a deposed tyrant, could not possibly be made. But to degrade and insult a man as the worst of criminals, and afterwards to trust him in your highest concerns, as a faithful, honest, and zealous servant, is not consistent in reasoning, nor prudent in policy, nor safe in practice. Those who could make such an appointment must be guilty of a more flagrant breach of trust than any they have yet committed against the people. As this is the only crime in which your leading politicians could have acted inconsistently, I conclude that there is no sort of ground for these horrid insinuations. I think no better of all the other calumnies. 2.1.137
In England, we give no credit to them. We are generous enemies: we are faithful allies. We spurn from us with disgust and indignation the slanders of those who bring us their anecdotes with the attestation of the *429flower-de-luce on their shoulder. We have *430Lord George Gordon fast in Newgate; and neither his being a *431public proselyte to Judaism,
2.1.138
To tell you the truth, my dear Sir, I think the honour of our nation to be somewhat concerned in the disclaimer of the proceedings of this society of the Old Jewry and the London Tavern. I have no man's proxy. I speak only from myself; when I disclaim, as I do with all possible earnestness, all communion with the actors in that triumph, or with the admirers of it. When I assert anything else, as 2.1.139
I almost venture to affirm, that not one in a hundred amongst us participates in the "triumph" of the Revolution Society. If the king and queen of France, and their children, were to fall into our hands by the chance of war, in the most acrimonious of all hostilities (*438I deprecate such an event, I deprecate such hostility) they would be treated with 2.1.140
You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. *451Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, (and they seldom fail) they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an Notes for this chapter
L. 14. relaxes the spring. Burke often employs this image, which was very fashionable in the times when the most usual illustration of a government was some piece of inanimate mechanism.
L. 22. almost all the high-bred republicans—i. e. extreme. Cp. vol. i. p. 76, l. 11, &c., and note. The Bedford Whigs, the Grenville Whigs (excepting their head, Lord Temple), and finally the party of Lord Chatham, had yielded in succession to the attraction of the Court party. This high-bred republicanism, extending even to equality of rank and property, seems to have been much in vogue in the reign of Anne, when it was often advanced in Parliament, fortified by the abstract reasoning to which Burke was so hostile. Its currency was commonly laid to the account of the writings of Locke; but it is easy to trace it to much earlier and more general causes. A democratical tone was frequently assumed by Whig politicians in the succeeding reigns, in order to conciliate popular favour.
L. 34. civil and legal resistance. Cp. with this paragraph, the passage in the "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol" in which the Party system is defended against the attacks of "those who pretend to be strong assertors of liberty." "This moral levelling is a servile principle. It leads to practical passive obedience far better than all the doctrines which the pliant accommodation of theology to power has ever produced. It cuts up by the roots, not only all idea of forcible resistance, but even of civil opposition."
P. 156, L. 4. think lightly of all public principle. See the description of the process of Ratting at the end of the "Observations on a late State of the Nation" (1769).
P. 157, L. 13. well-placed sympathies. Cp. note to vol. i. p. 153, l. 2.
L. 23. still unanimating repose of public prosperity. "Still" is an adverb = ever. Cp. ante, note to p. 146, l. 16.
*x1Another of these reverend gentlemen, who was witness to some of the spectacles which Paris has lately exhibited—expresses himself thus; "A king dragged in submissive triumph by his conquering subjects is one of those appearances of grandeur which seldom rise in the prospect of human affairs, and which, during the remainder of my life, I shall think of with wonder and gratification." These gentlemen agree marvellously in their feelings.
State Trials vol. ii. p. 360, p. 363.
L. 26. Peters had not the fruits, &c. He was tried at the Restoration, and executed with other regicides at Charing Cross.
P. 159, L. 34. unmanly. A characteristic epithet with Burke.
P. 160, L. 2. well-born = generous, liberal, Gr. e&upsgr;&phgr;u&eeacgr;ς.
L. 5. procession of American savages. A reminiscence of Burke's reading in the preparation of one of his early works, the "Account of European Settlements in America." See that work, part ii. ch. 4.
IBID. entering into Onondaga. An Indian village in the western part of what
L. 8. women as ferocious as themselves. "The women, forgetting the human as well as the female nature, and transformed into something worse than furies, act their parts, and even out-do the men in this scene of horror." Sett. in America, vol. i. p. 198. It is unnecessary to illustrate this by the incidents of the Revolution.
L. 26. whose constitution, &c. The municipal government of Paris, which had passed out of the hands of the 300 electors, was at this time shared between 60 departments. Each department was a caricature of a Greek democratic state, was considered by its inhabitants as a sovereign power, and passed resolutions, which had the force of laws within its limits. This division into 60 departments was first introduced to facilitate the election to the States-General; but the easy means which it afforded of summoning the people of each district upon short notice, and of communicating a show of regularity and unanimity to their proceedings, made it too useful a system to be discarded. Much of that appearance of order and government which characterises the first year of the Revolution is due rather to this device, than to that self-restraint which made "anarchy tolerable" in Massachusetts. (See vol. i. pp. 244-45.)
L. 26. emanated neither from the charter of their king, &c. Having arisen out of temporary and mechanical arrangements. Necker, however, had by a grave error in policy recognised the 300 electors as a legal body. Their functions properly extended only to the choosing of representatives in the States-General; and they were entrusted with power by the people on the 13th of July merely because they were the only body in whom the public could immediately confide.
L. 28. an army not raised either by the authority, &c. The National Guards, formed in haste after the dismission of Necker on the 11th of July. "Thirty thousand citizens, totally unaccustomed to arms, were soon seen armed at all points, and in a few hours training assumed some appearance of order and discipline. The French Guards now shewed the benefits of their late education and improvements; they came in a body to tender their services to the people."
L. 31. There they sit, &c. The first edition represented all the moderate members as having been driven away. "There they sit, after a gang of assassins had driven away all the men of moderate minds and moderating authority among them, and left them as a sort of dregs and refuse, under the apparent lead of those in whom they do not so much as pretend to
P. 161, L. 4. decided before they are debated. The clubs governed in the departments of Paris, and through them, in the National Assembly.
L. 9. all conditions, tongues and nations. Aristocrats and clergymen joined and even took the lead in these assemblies. Germans, Italians, Englishmen, Swiss, and Spaniards were found among them. The greater part of the Central Committee at the Évêché were not Frenchmen.
L. 14. Academies... set up in all the places of public resort. The allusion is to the Conciliabules. "The Parisians," says Mercier, "have wished to imitate the English, who meet in taverns, and discuss the most important affairs of the state; but that did not take, because every one wished to preside at these meetings."
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