The political philosophy of Burke

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THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
OF BURKE

THE

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
OF BURKE

BY

JOHN MAC CUNN

KMBRITU8 PROFB880R OF PHILOSOPHY IN
THB UNIVRRSITY OF LIVERPOOL

• • • •

LONDON

EDWARD ARNOLD

1913

[All rights reserved)

30 .viuiu

3^

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAO«

- i. Theories and Theorists, . . . . 1

ii. From Kin to Kind, 16

in. ' Prudence,' 38

iv. What is a People? 50

v. Conservatism :

(a) The Impracticability of Radical Reform, 68

(6) The Undesirability of Radical Reform, . 84

vi. The Wisdom of our Ancestors, . . . 92

vii. The Limitations of Discussion and Tolera-
tion :

(a) The Limits of Political Discussion,

. 104

(b) The Limits of Toleration,

111

viii. Religion and Politics,

122

ix. Government,

144

x. Rights :

(a) What are the Rights of Man 1

190

(b) Rights and Circumstances, .

209

o^o««Q

vi POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

CHAP. PAGE

xi. Whig Trusteeship and Democracy :

(a) The Unity of the State, ... 218

(b) The Political Incapacity of the Multitude, 233
"~(c) Kepresentatives and Delegates, . . 251

(d) The Need for a Natural Aristocracy, . 258

(e) The Limitations of Burke's Political

Ideal, 268

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
OF BUEKE

CHAPTER I

THEORIES AND THEORISTS

There is a passage in Burke's writings in which he
says that he does not vilify theory,1 and the remark
is truer than he knew. But it does not alter the
fact that, in the whole range of our literature, there
is no decrier of theories and theorists comparable
to him. Sometimes he despises them ; sometimes
he fears them ; always, or almost always, he appears
to hate them. In a large proportion of his politi-
cal writings there is a point at which, despite his
deep-seated rationality, he drops argument and be-
takes himself to missiles. ' Refining speculatists,'
4 smugglers of adulterated metaphysics/ ' atheis^
tical fathers,' ' metaphysical knights of the sorrowTi/'
ful countenance,' ' political aeronauts ' — these mojf
suffice as fragments from the commination service.
Or shall we add this, as sum of the whole matter :
1 They are modern philosophers, which when you
say of them you express everything that is ignoble,

1 Speech in May 1782.
A

2 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE
;e and hard-hearted.' Small wonder that he

should declare that the propensity of the people
tcT resort to theories is 'one sure symptom of an
ill-conducted state.' 1 ^

^-This is remarkable. But it is not so remarkable
as the fact that it is to this denouncer of theories,
this vilipender of theorists, that the world has
turned, and never in vain, not only for the oracles
of practical wisdom, but for that large reasoning
discourse upon the nature of society, and man's
place in it as a political and religious animal, which
makes it impossible to withhold from its exponent
the designation of thinker, theorist, and philosopher.
This is, in truth, the paradox of Burke's position as
a political thinker. Constrained by the force of
circumstances, not less than by personal proclivity,
to turn from the theoretic to the practical life, he
carried into affairs a reasoning imagination which
had been fed and nurtured on wider pastures than
those where politicians browse in happy uncon-
sciousness of their limitations. He had dipped
into philosophies ; it is evident, though the record
of his intellectual debts is meagre and obscure,
that, not to mention lesser names, he had studied
Aristotle, Locke, and Montesquieu ; and he even
appears, in early days, to have contemplated the
tough task of refuting Hume. The Philosophical
Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and

1 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol.

THEORIES AND THEORISTS 3

Beautiful exists to show that he was not averse to
an excursion of his own into aesthetic theory. And
every speech, pamphlet, or treatise which he gave
to the world is proof of the range of his reading, and
not least in history and politics. Above all, he had
thought profoundly, and argued himself with all
comers into deep-seated convictions. The result
was that, when he became a Whig politician, he
was already far more. A mere politician he could
not be. When he encountered a political problem
it was not in him to deal with it in ordinary fashion,
and to be content to cut knots with the blunt
hatchet of common sense. ' He went on refining/
as Goldsmith said. And to good purpose. For the
inherent rationality and penetrative insight of his
mind were not to be denied. Hardly could a policy,
a bill, an amendment, an administrative act come
before him which he did not press back to principles
with a thoroughness which raised it far above the
levels of ordinary politics into the upper air of
political thought. No politician, either in ancient
or in modern times, has had so irrepressible a faculty
of lifting even the passing incidents of the political
hour into the region of great ideas. A rival candi-
date dies suddenly in the course of an election
contest : ' the mejancholy event of yesterday/ so
runs Burke's comment, '. . . has feelingly told us
what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.'
An enemy attacks his well-earned pension, and

4 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

evokes that Letter to a Noble Lord (1776) which
Lord Morley has called the best repartee in the
English language ; as indeed it is, not only because
it goes home to the quick, but because it smothers
the spitefulness of the assailant in a flood of elo-
quence and wisdom. Similarly, and in intensi-
fied degree, when he handles the larger issues of
politics : he goes to meet them as a statesman, but
he never leaves them till he has enriched their dis-
cussion by the insight and reflection of the thinker.
For however he makes haste to disclaim acting
upon theory, this does not prevent him from theoris-
ing upon his actions. In truth, he theorised upon
them with such habitual persistence that no one
can rise from a perusal of his writings without feeling
that he has been led on to what falls little or at all
short of a political philosophy. A theorising poli-
tician is of course not the same as a political theorist,
but he is on the highroad to becoming one.

Yet this paradox (as we have called it) of Burke's
position is not so acute as might at first sight appear.
For it quickly becomes manifest that what he means,
in his diatribes, by a ' modern philosopher ' is pre-
cisely what a modern philosopher is not, if one may
be allowed to generalise from some of the best of
that diversified species. The theorists, the ' modern
philosophers ' Burke had in view, were the apostles
of abstract rights who had become, as he thought,
the victims of their own abstractions, and were so

THEORIES AND THEORISTS 5

fanatically in love with their own notions of man's

* natural ' rights that they had quite forgotten
man's nature and experience. In short, the word

* theorist ' or ' philosopher ' suggested to him the
type of one-ideaed abstract thinker who is almost as
much the abhorrence of some modern philosophers
as of Burke himself.

For, thanks above all to Hegel, but also to writers
as diverse as Coleridge, Comte, Macaulay, and John
Stuart Mill, we have come to see that not only the
theory of abstract rights, but all abstract political
theories of a like kind are open to attack upon more
sides than one. From the one side comes the re-
minder that abstract thought can never really wed
fact, and is therefore doomed either to futility or
fanaticism, if it does not come to terms with the
force of circumstances. And from another side, not
necessarily hostile to abstractions, we have the
insistence that an abstract theory, even if it be
granted that, within its own abstract province, it
is the truth and nothing but the truth, is not the
whole truth ; nor ever can be, till it is at once com-
pleted and corrected by equally legitimate abstrac-
tions, which along with it divide the many sided
complex domain of concrete social fact. In the
first of these two cases, abstract theory simply is
confronted with the empirical facts of life and history ;
in the second, it is bidden to accept its modest place
as but one of many aspects which the rich and com-

6 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

plex tissue of experience may offer to the dissecting
knife of social analysis. Nor is anything more
characteristic of modern philosophers than to insist
upon one or other, or both, of these requirements.
For philosophy has, for the most part, ceased to seek
for reality in a region behind and beyond experi-
ence : it is more concerned to discuss and define
what ' experience ' is. And one of the first fruits
of this scrutiny is the disclosure of the fact that
experience is much too complex and many sided to
be understood either by any one-sided abstract
method or by any purely observational method,
and indeed demands, if justice is to be done to it,
that analysis and abstraction should be freely
pushed in many directions. For never can the
concrete reality of things be understood till it has
thus been exhaustively resolved into its constitu-
tive forces, tendencies, and conditions.

Hence it turns out that, in his assaults upon theory
and theorists, Burke renders theory a twofold service.

On the one hand, he is never weary of confronting
abstractions with concrete facts. He is oftenest
quoted as the prophet of ' circumstances.' ' I never
placed your solid interests upon speculative grounds,'
he said to his constituents. ' I must see the men, I
must see the things,' he elsewhere cries. ' I never
govern myself, no rational man ever did govern
himself by abstractions and universals . . . : he
who does not take circumstances into consideration

THEORIES AND THEORISTS 7

is not erroneous, but stark mad — dat operant ut
cum ratione insaniat — he is metaphysically mad.' l
One more sentence (it has been quoted a thousand
times) may clinch the point : ' Circumstances
(which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give
in reality to every political principle its distinguish-
ing colour and discriminating effect.' 2

Yet this, even this, is not Burke's greatest service
to theory. For it is a service greater still, and philo-
sophically far more significant, that as he added
speech to speech, and pamphlet to pamphlet, there
grew under his hands a conception of civil society
so rich, so comprehensive, so coherent, that it must
stand, so long as English literature is read, as a
touchstone of all abstract theories which, by failing
to do justice to the complexity of the social system,
fall into the pitfall, so perilous to abstract thinkers,
of losing sight of the concrete whole in preoccupation
with the limited, fragmentary, abstract part, aspect,
or element. To see human life, no less than Nature,
as a whole — this is of the essence of the philosophical
spirit. It is also the spirit of Burke.

Nor are these the only services that this decrier
of theories renders to theory. For, in the very force
and fervour of his invective against ' modern philo-
sophers,' he himself lights upon a principle of
immense philosophical significance — none other than
the old Aristotelian doctrine that the subject-matter

1 Speech, May 11, 1792. 2 Reflections on the Revolution.

8 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

of politics is by its very nature such as to baffle all
attempts to reach results of scientific universality
and exactness. No statements in all his writings
are more emphatic than those upon this point.
' Nothing universal,' he roundly asserts, ' can be
j&tionally affirmed on any moral or any political
subject ' ; x and the sweeping generalisation is but
one of many similar passages : ' No lines can be
laid down for civil or political wisdom. They are a
\patter incapable of exact definition.' 2 ' Aristotle,'
he remarks elsewhere, ' the great master of reasoning,
cautions us, and with great weight and propriety,
against this species of delusive geometrical accuracy
in moral arguments, as the most fallacious of all
sophistries.' 3

It is manifest at a glance that this involves con-
clusions of nothing less than the first importance.
f It draws the distinction, Aristotelian in its emphasis,
I between the mathematical sciences and political
J science. It commits itself to the assertion that
universal laws, strictly so-called, are in the nature of
things unattainable in the latter. It avers, in short
* *^with Aristotle), that a scienceoi politics is impossible.
Clearly, therefore, this sworn foe of theory has
reached a theory of first-rate theoretical significance.
And all this, it may be added, is doubly valuable
because Burke's assault upon abstract theory and

1 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

2 Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents.

3 Speech on Conciliation with America.

THEORIES AND THEORISTS 9

abstract theorists cannot be said to have been/
historically victorious. For though it gave a blow
to the doctrine of the ' rights of man,' against which
it was directly levelled, a blow from which that
memorable dogma never again quite lifted up its
head, it did not prevent abstract theory from
springing to life again in some of its most abstract
forms. The first quarter of the nineteenth century
was to see the Benthamite theory of government
expounded, by the uncompromising logic of James
Mill, in what Burke would have called w all the
nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.'
Almost simultaneously, Ricardo, one of the most
abstract minds the world has ever seen, developed
a political economy with a disregard of ' circum-
stances ' so pronounced as to have led one critic *
to brand his work as ' an intellectual imposture.'
And not less unfalteringly, John Austin, building on
Hobbes and Bentham, gave the world, the English
world at any rate, that juristic doctrine of Sove-
reignty which has always, and rightly, been regarded
as one of the most thoroughgoing specimens of the
abstract and analytic, as contrasted with the histori-
cal method. And Austin, needless to say, was long,
and even to our own day is, a commanding figure in
English jurisprudence.

Nor is this vitality of abstraction and abstract
method to be lamented. It has a permanent value.

1 Toynbee in his Industrial Revolution.

10 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

For it may well suggest, and it has suggested, that
the right path for the political philosopher lies, not
in a repudiation of abstraction — for this would be
the abandonment of analysis — but rather in pressing
abstraction in many directions, and thereby pre-
paring the way for a comprehensive social synthesis
in which competing — though by no means irre-
concilable— abstractions may find at once their
completion and corrective.

None the less Burke's influence remained. It is
at any rate in harmony with the drift of his teach-
ing that Macaulay, his enthusiastic eulogist — ' our
greatest mind since Milton,' he calls him — urged,
with all the resources of his rhetoric, the claims
of a ' Baconian ' inductive method, in that contro-
versy without quarter in which he withstood James
Mill and the Benthamite theory of government to
the face. So when Comte, in his enthusiasm for a
concrete social science, waged a war of extermina-
tion against abstract political economy. So not
least, when J. S. Mill was constrained to acknow-
ledge that, in that duel between his father and
Macaulay over the Benthamite theory of govern-
ment, James Mill was wrong, and even to assert that
a science of government — that doctrine so dear to
his father's heart — was impossible.1 And so also
at a later time, when Sir Henry Maine, deeply
dipped in the history of institutions, and keenly

1 Cf. Logic, Bk. vi. c. ix.

THEORIES AND THEORISTS 11

alive to the qualifications which Austinian ' sove-
reignty ' must experience in the eyes of all students
of early law and custom, declared that Austinian
identification of law with force, and of sovereignty
with the fiat of a political superior, would need for
its verification the discovery of an absolute despot
with a disturbed brain.1 Nor is it less in the spirit'
of Burke that nineteenth-century sociology should
have so frankly embraced the historical method
For whether by ' historical method ' we mean simply
the inductive study of institutions as they present
themselves in history, or, more precisely and
properly, the genetic study of institutions as they
pass through phases of historical development, th
historical point of view is substantially that o
Burke when he turned away, with many a gibe an
sarcasm, from abstraction and all its ways, an
declared that his was the better foundation — the
foundation laid in the actual concrete, verifiabl
experience of men and nations. It is no doubt
difficult to judge how far these writers of the nine-
teenth century draw upon Burke. For Burke's
thought, not being avowedly theoretical, has never
won adequate acknowledgment from avowed theor-
ists. But, be this as it may, few contributions
to method are more valuable than Burke's whole
handling of the ' philosophers ' of abstraction. The
results of his handling of the theorists are far wider

1 Early History of ItistittUions.

12 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

than its aim. Its aim was to overthrow pestilent
fanatics who were recklessly rushing to reform
and revolution with ' rights of man ' and suchlike
watchwords, or catchwords, on their lips : its re-
sults were to open the eyes of every reader of his
works, from the American Speeches onwards, to the
nature of political fact, to the difficulties of social
investigation, and to the limitations that dog the
steps of analysis and generalisation the moment
they turn from the mathematical or physical world
to try to frame a science of society.

This was a service of the first magnitude. The
century that was about to begin when Burke died
(1797) was to see science freely extending itsTnEerest
from Nature to man. And nothing could be more
fortunate than that, on the threshold of this adven-
ture, it should have its eyes opened to the nature
of the new order of facts with which it had to deal.
This was what Burke was pre-eminently fitted to
do. He was steeped in politics. He knew what
political fact was by lifelong contact with it. He
1 saw the men : he saw the things.' He realised
the complexity and ever-shifting combinations of
the world of affairs. He understood the force of
circumstances. He looked at society as a whole.
And in these ways, by the irony of fate, in denounc-
ing ' modern philosophers,' he furnished in his
speeches and writings one of the best of all intro-
ductions to modern social philosophy.

THEORIES AND THEORISTS 13

All the more so because, despite the constant
appeal to facts and Uhe gospel of ' circumstances,^/ ***
Burke's attitude is by no means purely empirical.
Though he argues from experience, and is never
weary of claiming that his generalisations are ' the
arguments of kingdoms and nations,' it is not to be
supposed that he approaches experience with that
complete repudiation of all presuppositions which
has sometimes been extolled as the glory of the
Baconian inductive method. On the contrary,
one can go far into his pages without becoming
aware that his thought is profoundly influenced by
convictions which he takes for granted. Some of
them are psychological, and some are metaphysical.
That man is ' a religious animal ' ; that he is ill
wise a ' political animal ' ; that all ordinary men are
creatures in whom feeling, habit, even prejudice are
apt to be stronger than reason ; that they act on
motives relative to their interests far more than on
theories ; that they are much quicker to feel griev-
ances than to find remedies — these are amongst the
principles of his psychology. He does not prove
them. He does not feel himself called upon to prove
them. He had made up his mind on most, or all,
of them long before he entered politics. But he
constantly appeals to them. It is not enough for
him therefore that a political generalisation should
be drawn from history : he seldom rests till he has
added that it is confirmed, or, it may be, shaken^

14 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

by all that we know of human nature. To phrase
the matter in the language of the schools, he con-
stantly tests political inductions by a psychology
that is none the less firm because it is forthcoming
only in fragments scattered throughout his pages.

Similarly, and in greater measure, with the
presuppositions that are metaphysical. For it
would be nothing less than a fatal misconception
to write down Burke as a purely inductive thinker.
Even he who runs as he reads must soon discover
that, in the background of all his political
thought, there lie large assumptions which pro-
foundly influence the conclusions which he draws.
fThat God willed the state, that He willed likewise
the nation of man, and that the whole course of a
nation's life is ' the known march of the ordinary
providence of God ' * — these, and much else that
depends on them, are fundamental articles of his
^political creed. These high doctrines, needless to
say, are never proved. They are held as a faith.
But, then, they are held with a tenacity so great, and
urged with a reiteration so insistent, that they not
only colour, but saturate all he has to say about
the nature and the sanctions of the social order.
Few points indeed are of greater interest to the
readers of Burke than the relation between these
sweeping theological principles and that inductive

1 Regicide Peace, Letter n. : ' The rules of prudence which are
formed upon the known march,' etc.

THEORIES AND THEORISTS 15

appeal to history and fact which is, in the eyes of
many of his students, his distinctive characteristic.

This will be clearer in the sequel. For the present
it is enough to suggest that though students of
philosophy may naturally enough prefer to study
political philosophers by habit and repute, it may be
doubted if they ever study that subject at greater
advantage than when they have the opportunity
of tracing the process whereby a great mind, versed
in affairs and steeped in practicality, is so instinct
with the philosophic spirit as to be forced far across
the frontier of practical politics into the larger
world of political theory. Such, at any rate, is the
opportunity which, in unique degree, is to be found
in the life and writings of this great theorising
assailant of theorists. The writings are, naturally,
the main concern ; but it may prepare the way to
glance at some not irrelevant aspects of the life.

CHAPTER II

FROM KIN TO KIND

It is well known to readers of biography that Burke
was a self-made man. When enemies jeered at
him as ' an Irish adventurer,' this was but the
malevolent version of Prior's tribute to him as ' the
first person who, under so many disadvantages,
attained to consequence in Parliament and in the
country by his own unaided talents.' As he said
himself, when driven to apologia pro vita sua by that
ungenerous attack on his well-won pension to which
reference has already been made, he had to show
his passport and prove his quality at every step of
his laborious career : ' I had no arts but manly arts.
On them have I stood, and, please God, in spite of
the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale,
to the last gasp will I stand.' *

In a struggle like this, any man might be for-
given some forgetfulness — the forgetfulness not
of want of heart, but the more excusable forgetful-
ness of want of thought and want of time. Yet
the only thing Burke seemed to forget, as his best

1 Letter to a Noble Lord.

16

FROM KIN TO KIND 17

biographer 1 justly remarks, was his own interests.
Certainly there are few more satisfying chapters in»
biography than the record of his fidelity to the private!
ties and obligations of life. And not to kindred only.
It is characteristic that the last lines he wrote were
words of consolation to the daughter of Shackle ton,
the friend of his boyhood. Nor did absorption in
public affairs prevent him from turning aside to
rescue the genius of Crabbe from the last extremes
of poverty, to render unwearying thankless service
to the erratic painter Barry, to befriend the friend/
less Armenian adventurer Emin, whom one day he
found wandering in the Park. When he kept house
in Beaconsfield in later years, suffering peasants and
French exiles were equally the objects of his care
or hospitality. And it need hardly be said that, of
all the friendships of men of letters, none can surpass
his with Johnson, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Garrick,
and the rest who have made the Turk's Head
as memorable as the Mermaid. ' Ah ! ' exclaims
Thackeray, in words easy to re-echo, * I would have
liked a night at the Turk's Head, even though bad
news had arrived from the colonies, and Doctor
Johnson was growling against the rebels ; to have
sat with him and Goldy ; and to have heard
Burke, the finest talker in the world ; and to

1 Lord Morley : ' There is much good material in the Lives by
Prior and MacKnight, but readers in search of living portraiture
must turn to Burke in " English Men of Letters," and to Burke :
A Historical Study.'

B

18 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

have had Garrick flashing in with a story from his
theatre.' 1

Such things, of course, needed no theories to
prompt them. They were instincts of the heart.
But they are none the less illustrative of certain
settled convictions, again and again avowed, which
Burke held as to the right relation between the
private and the public affections. (For when Burke
called Rousseau ' a lover of his kind ; a hater of his
kindred/ the taunt was no mere bitter epigram.
1 It convened,- .and was meant to convey, the sugges-
| tion that the man who hates his kindred is not
\ likely to love his kind. For, in the natural history
of the wider human ties, as Burke understood it,
growth does not begin all at once at the circum-
ference. From kin to kind is the true order of
j development. Men must learn experimentally
what ties are, and what duties are in the home and
the friendly circle, if they are to develop sympathies
worth the giving tcT"the Neighbourhood or the
nation. ' No cold relation is a zealous citizen ' —
so runs his formula. ' To be attached to the sub-
division, to love the little platoon we belong to,' is
I the first step, and the reality of the wider sympathies
is suspect if it be not built on fidelity to the lesser
relationships that lie at our feet.
/"""It is not the whole truth. It cannot be, if there
(be any truth at all in the ascetic creed that ' the

1 The Four Georges.

FROM KIN TO KIND 19

forlorn hope in the cause of mankind must have no,
narmwfir *;rr t~ fji^iifr +h* allegiance/ 1 But (his
is no part of the gospel of BurkeT^sTor is it the
general law of the genesis of public interests. Nor-
mally the charities of life begin at home, not, of
course, because the claims of family and friendship
are more imperative than the service of city or
nation, but for the better reason that the civic
virtues, unless one is to suppose that they fall like
manna from heaven, spring naturally from the
kindly soil of ordinary human intercourse.

We find the same principle, though on a larger
stage, when we turn to Burke's attitude to political
party.

It need not be said that Burke was a party poli-
tician. From his entrance into the House in 1765,
it is well known that he threw in his lot with the
Rockingham Whigs, and that, for the next five-and-
twenty years * night by night in the forlorn hope
of constant minorities,' laboured, as few politicians
have ever laboured, to build up the party in face
of the dogged hostility and corrupt influence of
George in. and the various ministries which, after
1766, the Whigs strove in vain for many a year to
oust from power. ' In the way they call party I
worship the constitution of your fathers ' — this was
his boast. And, in the spirit of the words, this

1 Robertson of Brighton, Sermon on * Marriage and Celibacy.'

20 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

' John Wesley of politics ' not only gave to political
party as an institution a vitality which since his
day it has never lost, but wrote in the Thoughts on
the Present Discontents the best plea for party in
our own or in any language.

It was, of course, not his theory of party that
made him thus a party man. Men do not join
parties to illustrate theories. He became a Whig
because he held certain political principles — he had
formed them, he declares, before he had so much as
set foot in St. Stephen's, — and because the Whig
party, or the section of it that followed Rockingham,
seemed to him the best instrument for making these
principles effective, y All his life he was, as he often

rsaid, a practical politician, a combatant not a spec-
tator, whose prime business it was to promote good
measures and resist bad ones. Nor had he any love,
as we have seen, for politicians who acted on theories.
They filled him with distrust, derision, and denuncia-
tion. Yet none the less he had his justification of
party. For it was an article of his creed that if a
politician means to serve his country, the path to
all effective service lies through loyalty to party.
All the world knows how Goldsmith once, in Retalia-
tion, satirised his friend for giving up to party what
was meant for mankind. But the taunt was in
reality a tribute. For mankind was not defrauded,
nor ever could be, by Burke's becoming a Whig ;
because, in his creed at any rate, it was in and

FROM KIN TO KIND 21

through party that political work for mankind
could best be done. No one ever felt this more
convincedly than Burke. No one ever looked with
a deeper distrust upon the politician without party.
No one ever more vehemently denounced the loose
allegiance that, with the shibboleth ' not men but
measures,' rides off, usually to impotence (' unpitied
sacrifice in a contemptible struggle ' are his words)
upon personal ideals, policies, fanaticisms, or
crotchets, and with a light heart casts to the winds j
4 the practised friendships and experimented fidelity ' /
which bind comrade to comrade in great public/
causes. No one was ever more convinced thatf
strong party was one of the prime securities of)
liberty.

And yet, as every reader of history knows, though
Burke lived for his party, he did not die in it. The
French Revolution came, and, in face of the issues,
not to be evaded, which it raised, latent divergencies
sprang to light and the Whig party fell into ruins.
Needless to tell again that familiar tale of inevitable
rupture, embittered division, and renounced friend-
ship ; the point that alone concerns us is its explana-
tion. Many have said that Burke was inconsistent,
or worse. Bentham and Buckle have imperilled
their own reputation for sanity by pronouncing
him mad. ' It is at any rate ' (to use words of his
own), ' the madness of the wise, which is better than
the sobriety of fools.' But the truth is that the one

22 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

I imputation is as false, though not so absurd, as the
other. The more temperate, and to the student of
Burke's writings the convincing explanation is simply
that, much as Burke loved his party, he loved his
country more. Instead of being stigmatised for
infidelity to party, he stands to be lauded for the
courage of convictions that relegated party ties to
their proper and subordinate place.

For when any man throws in his lot with a political
party as an invaluable instrument of action, he need
not, and, indeed, if he be open-minded he cannot,
pledge himself to take his political convictions from
it. The world will not blame him, perhaps, if he
, attach something more than their weight to the
oracles of the party in which he finds himself, but
his convictions, if they be more than echoes, will
be fed from wider sources. Not all the springs of
political wisdom rise in the land of Whig, or of
Tory, or of Radical party, or even in all of them put
together. Burke is a case in point. He did not take
his convictions on trust either from ' new Whigs '
or ' Old Whigs,' even if he attached what some may
regard as more than their due to the dicta of the
latter.1 He had a wider outlook. He had read
widely and thought much. He had observed with
the eye of the man of affairs ; and, partly by nature,
partly by experience, he had gained the insight of
genius. The result followed. His life and thought

1 As e.g. in. the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

FROM KIN TO KIND 23

came to be dominated by a patriotism which in
fervour has never been surpassed, and in utterance
seldom equalled. ' I owe to this country my
labour, which is my all ; and I owe to it ten times
more industry, if ten times more I could exert.' x
There are avowals stronger still : ' Do me the
justice to believe that I never can prefer any fas-
tidious virtue (virtue still) to the unconquered
perseverance, to the affectionate patience of those
who watch day and night by the bedside of their
delirious country, who for their love to that dear
and venerable name bear all the disgusts and all
the buffets they receive from their frantic mother.' 2
It is, however, only when we have some idea of
the object which evoked this unfaltering patriotism
that we can understand its influence upon Burke's
attitude to party. For that object was a widely
different thing from the conventional and abstract
entity which ' nation ' or ' country ' too often
suggests to popular thought. It was a singularly
concrete, comprehensive, and well-compacted reality
which had emerged in the world of men by the
labours of many hands and many minds all working,
sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously,
under the ultimate direction of a ' Divine tactic'
Therefore it was not to be identified with either
crown or aristocracy, or landed interest, or moneyed

1 Speech on the Economical Reform.

* Letter to a Member of the National Assembly.

24 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

interest, or parliament, or electorate, or populace —
not with any of these singly, because with all of them
in richly integrated organic union. For if a nation
be indeed a ' partnership,' in the sense that Burke
read into that word,1 then must it stand altogether,
if it stand at all, and move altogether if it move at
all. One member or element must not usurp upon
another, or arrogate to itself more than its appropri-
ate function in the subtly and harmoniously knit
system of the body politic ; any more than, in the
body physiological, this organ or that organ, this
function or that function, can ignore its necessary
co-operation with other organs and other functions
which along with it constitute the living unity of the
whole*..- Nothing, as we shall abundantly see, is
more constantly reiterated in Burke's pages than
; this idea of balance, equipoise, harmony, organic
unity. Nor is it only to the political constitution
in the narrower sense that he applies these and such-
like categories ; it is to the constitution of civil
society as a whole.

This was Burke's idea of a nation. This was
what he saw actually realised in the England of his
day. This was the object that enkindled his pat-
riotic devotion. It may be, as has often enough
been said, that in seeing it he was looking, in part
at any rate, at his fancy's own creation. But even
if this be true, it would only prove that he loved

1 Cf. p. 59.

FROM KIN TO KIND 25

his country because of what he conceived it ought
to be, as well as for what he held it to be in fact.

It was upon this conception of his country that,
from first to last, Burke took his stand. In his
earlier career he saw authority and royal influence'
usurping our popular institutions, and so he with-/!
stood the influence of the Crown in the name of
liberty. These were the days when he sided with
Wilkes and the Middlesex electorate against the i
House of Commons ; when he urged repeal of the j
restrictions that strangled Irish commerce ; wjjsn j
he denounced the fatuity of American pplicy ; when
he pled with a convincing persuasiveness against I
the disabilities of the Irish Catholics ; and when,
all along, he was in the front rank of the Whig
battle against old royal prerogative in the new dress
of corrupt Georgian influence. The scene changed,
and when the French Revolution had come, he saw
in Radical ideals and popular movements a menace
to the constitution from another side ; and so he
withstood them too. It was then he broke with
Eaj, anfl denounced Paine, and ridiculed Price,
and poured contempt on Rousseau, and dropped
bitter words about the ' swinish multitude/ and won
the plaudits of old enemies by ' diffusing the Terror.'
It is open to critics to think that he was wrong in
one or other or all of these points. ' The King's
friends ' thought him in the wrong in the earlier
years ; the ' new Whigs ' thought him equally

26 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

^n the wrong after the Revolution. But at any rate
[he was consistent, if fidelity to principles be con-
sistency. Lord Morley has here, with his usual
felicity, put the whole question in a nutshell when
he says that Burke changed his front, but never
changed his ground.1 For it was precisely because
he held his ground so tenaciously that, in face of
changed circumstances and new problems, he felt
constrained to change his front so decisively that he
was fated to worship the constitution of his fathers,
not in the way men call party, but in the way they
call patriotism, even by rupture of party ties. It is
not the least of his legacies. In all party ridden
countries strong parties run a risk of creating narrow
men. It is good to be reminded that even the
greatest party is after all a part, and that fidelity
to party ties, however necessary, however honourable,
is dearly bought if the price be loss of the larger
outlook and the patriotic spirit. It is not to be
lamented that, by the fortunate irony of history,
the greatest of our apologists of the party system
should have been also a monument of its limitations.

Political sympathies and ideas, however, are not
bounded by the nation. They certainly are not now,
when the cosmopolitan idea appears conspicuously
enough, not only in religion and ethics, but in practi-
cal philanthropy, international law, finance, com-

1 Burke in 'English Men of Letters,' p. 169.

FROM KIN TO KIND 27

merce, and industry. Nor were they then, when
revolutionary France was offering her 4 fraternity *
to all peoples ; when ' the ambassador of the Human
Race/ mountebank though he was, had been received
in all seriousness by the French Assembly ; when
Paine, in writings that ran to one hundred thousand
copies, was foreseeing an European republic with
man free of the whole ; * and when it was the claim
and the boast of Whigs as well as Radicals in England
that they were no whit worse patriots because their
sympathies overleaped the frontiers of the nation
and went out freely, not only to America and France,
but to all struggles for freedom where there were I
wrongs to right, or rights to win.

Now it is not to be supposed that Burke was
devoid of cosmopolitan ideas and sympathies. We
meet in his pages many a word and phrase — ' man-
kind,' ' the species/ ' the race,' ' the great primaeval
contract of eternal society,' ' the great mysterious
incorporation of the human race,' all of which
suggest that his thought moved in a large political
orbit. Nothing can be more striking than the ease
and familiarity with which his mind ranges in the
wide sphere of international politics, in his handling
alike of the American crisis and the French Revolu-
tion.2 Even when, in the Letters on a Regicide
Peacey he was preaching war to the death against

1 Rights of Man, p. 70.

1 See e.g. the Thoughts on French Affairs.

28 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

the ' regicide republic,' it was in anything but an
insular spirit. On the contrary, he always had a
lofty conception of the part which England was
called upon to play in the politics of the world. ' I
was convinced,' he said in 1794, ' that war was the
only chance of saving Europe, and England as
included in Europe, from a truly frightful revolu-
tion ' ; and it is a comment on the words that his
death was felt as a calamity for Europe. And this
was not merely policy : it was principle. The
Machiavellian spirit was alien to his nature ; he
always believed in a higher law, ' an order that
holds all things fixed in their place,' to which
nations as well as individuals are eternally subject.
Human laws were, in the last resort, only ' declara-
tory ' — declaratory of ' an original justice ' that is
above and beyond all legislators.1 So, too, he argues
that there is a ' law of civil vicinity ' which ' is as
true of nations as of individuals,' and which ' has
bestowed on the grand vicinage of Europe, a duty
to know, and a right to prevent, any capital inno-
vation which may amount to the erection of a
dangerous nuisance.' 2 Nor will it be forgotten, one
may hope, either in the East or the West, that
he gave the years of his prime to the championing
of the wrongs of the millions of India against
what he regarded as the flagitious rapacity of their
rulers, in days when the duties of England to her

1 Tracts on the Popery Laws. 2 Regicide Peace, Letter i.

FROM KIN TO KIND 29

distant dependency were but faintly realised. In
all these ways he was without doubt cosmopolitan
enough.

Nevertheless, it was not from this wider outlook
that he drew the real nerve and passion of his
political inspiration. However wide his range of
idea, he was, all his life through, profoundly under
the influence of the spirit of locality. ' The locality
of the affections ' was one of the points of his faith.
* Do you know,' he once wrote, thinking of his own
early home, ' I had rather rest in the corner of a
country churchyard than in the tomb of all the/
Capulets.' The same jyjirikJmpelled him, as wc
have seen, to seek the seedplot of the wider interests (
in private ties, and to graft something of the fidelities \
of friendship upon political association. Similarry
with the sentiments that come of the natural human
intercourse of neighbourhood. None of his many
points against the revolutionists of Paris is urged
with more conviction than his warning against the
wanton sacrifice of the social bonds that come of
locality, which he saw in the subjection of a newly
subdivided France to the centralised despotism of
Paris. ' It is boasted that the geometrical policy
has been adopted, that all local ideas should be
sunk, and that the people should be no longer
Gascons, Picards, Bretons, Normans, but French-
men, with one country, one heart, and one assembly.
But, instead of being all Frenchmen, the greater

30 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

likelihood is that the inhabitants of that region
will shortly have no country.' 1

The same trend of thought carried him with it,
in a wider application, when he encountered the
cosmopolitanism that menaced the tie of patriotism.
And this was what he was convinced the cosmo-
politanism of the Revolutionists and their English
sympathisers did. To his eyes it had the fatal
defect of being reared on the negation of patriotism,
and sometimes even of all those lesser ties out of
^which a real patriotism is woven. ' Benevolence
>:to the whole species, and want of feeling for every
individual with whom the professors come in
contact '—this is the indictment that comes in
his invective on Rousseau,2 that ' ferocious, low-
minded, hard-hearted father, of fine general feelings.'
' Their humanity,' he says of them in general,
' is at the horizon, and like the horizon it ever
recedes before them.' ' On that day ' (it was the
day when the Opposition denounced the war with
France as unjust), ' I fear there was an end of
that narrow scheme of relations called our country,
with all its pride, its prejudices, and its partial
affections. All the little quiet rivulets that watered
an humble, a contracted, but not an unfruitful field
are to be lost in the waste expanse and boundless
barren ocean of the homicide philanthropy of

1 Reflections on the Revolution.

2 Letter to a Member of the National Assembly.

FROM KIN TO KIND 31

France.' l For to Burke, as later to Mazzini, the

only cosmopolitanism that could be genuine and of
worth was that which, to borrow the formula of
Coleridge, comes by antecedence of patriotism ;
with the result that ' humanity,' ' the species,' ' the '
race,' and all similar conceptions, were forthwith/
to be numbered amongst the abstractions he de-(
tested, if they did not gather up into themselves the ]
rich and varied content of the habitual ties and tried |
allegiances which can alone give substance to the
idea and service of the nation. Hence his quarrel
with French ' fraternity,' which had become in his
eyes no better than a catchword, pretentious, empty,
unsatisfying, and powerful only as a deadly solvent
of patriotism.

The surprising feature here is undoubtedly the
acuteness of Burke's apprehensions. Even now,
despite the indubitable advances which the cosmo-
politan spirit has made in the course of the nineteenth
century, it can hardly be maintained that cosmo-
politanism by negation of patriotism is anything
approaching to an imminent danger. The danger
that threatens comes rather of the growth of that
spirit of nationality which is certainly one of the
most masterful forces of the political world of the
present day — so masterful indeed that cosmopoli-
tan ideas and sentiments seem strikingly inadequate
to repress it. For however true it be that the spirit
1 Regicide Peace, Letter m.

32 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

of locality, in many of its lesser old-world aspects,
has perished, or is fast perishing, before the solvents
of wider ideas and larger interests ; and however
manifest it is that many of the traditional local
attachments and sentiments, so dear to Burke's
heart, are going down before the activities of central-
ised legislation, these signs of the times cannot be
taken as proof that local patriotism, especially in
the supreme form of national allegiance, is vanishing
or likely to vanish from the world. On the contrary,
the spirit of locality appears to be assuming new
and fruitful forms under the reorganisation of the
modern state. When popularly elected parish and
district and county councils do their work, there is
not likely to be a diminution of local interests.
When towns and cities vie with each other in the
stimulating rivalries of municipal enterprise, there
is room enough for civic spirit and provincial pride
in the place of a man's birth or adoption. When
large sections of our country are, in season and out
of season, clamouring for more control of their own
affairs, the spirit of locality is certainly alive. Nor
are these new ties necessarily weaker because they
are so much more deliberate and self-conscious than
the older traditional attachments which they are
superseding. And least of all is this the case when
the object of local patriotism is the nation. Few
facts indeed seem more incontrovertible in our day
than that the citizens of all nations, however open

FROM KIN TO KIND 33

to cosmopolitan ideas and influences, are becoming
aware, as never before, that the national heritage
is the national responsibility. How indeed could it
be otherwise, when the fact is brought home to
them, in the burdens of armaments, and in intensi-
fied national rivalries, bursting out at times into
sanguinary wars, which the international situation
has developed ? Small wonder that it should be
dawning upon the minds of even the least militant
of citizens that, in the absence of any power higher
than the nation to enforce the dictates of a cosmo-
politan justice, it still rests with themselves and their
fellow-countrymen, and with no one else, to con-
serve, defend, and transmit their national heritage
inviolate to their posterity. What other conclusion
can be drawn, so long as every nation of the world
appears to act upon the settled conviction that its
own continued existence, and the fulfilment of its
own destinies, are essential to civilisation ? Those
who adventure on the darkly veiled paths of political
prophecy may descry the advent of another dis-
pensation. They may dream with Cobden of the
coming of a time when the barriers between nations
will be broken down by commerce ; or with some
of the Socialists, of a day when the common cause
of Labour all the world over will swamp the rival
interests that divide peoples ; or with Mazzini, of
the realisation of an international system in which
the several nations, more intensely national than

c

34 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

ever, will hold their organised strength as a trust
for mankind. Be it so. Yet the point remains that,
if such a transformation of Europe is to come, it
does not yet at any rate seem to be coming through
that cosmopolitanism by negation of patriotism
which Burke so dreaded and denounced.

It is needful to dwell on these considerations
because they carry in them a criticism of Burke.
They convict him of a mistaken, and even an
alarmist, emphasis. All his insight, knowledge,
and wisdom did not save him, in his horror of
French fraternity, from over-rating the strength
and dangers of the cosmopolitanism of his day.
His fears for his country, which were the other
side of his passion of patriotism, drove him to hurl
against the cosmopolitans a whole arsenal of
flouts, sarcasms, and invectives, which may all too
readily be appropriated by the Machiavellian
apostles of blood and iron who recognise no wider
interests than the greeds, and no higher law
than the needs, of the self-centred and self-seeking
nation.

Not that Burke was without his provocations
either. It unfortunately happens that, in the ranks
of cosmopolitanism, there are individuals who
seem unable to indulge their humanitarian sym-
pathies without setting themselves in aggressive
hostility to the patriotic spirit, and even denouncing
it as a ' bias/ a superstition, or a crime. Nor is it

FROM KIN TO KIND 35

a sufficient plea for such that their attitude may be
prompted by lofty motives, and by the entirely
true perception that patriotism, like every other x
great human passion, may go wrong. For at no
time is a nation more in need of the loyalty of a
citizen than when he believes it to have gone wrong.
It is precisely then that he is called upon, not to
indulge in general declamations against patriotism,
which is the strength and security of every people,
but rather ' to sit ' with Burke ' by the bedside of
his delirious country,' and to spare no patriotic
effort to restore it to what he believes to be a saner
and a juster mind. It is pardonable to indulge
the hope that it is possible to hold fast to cosmopoli-
tan ideas and sentiments, and yet to turn away,
with Burke and Mazzini, from the cosmopolitanism
of apostate patriotism. Nor is it to be forgotten
that there were facts before Burke's eyes which go
far to explain the virulence of his antipathies here.
Apart from the excesses of the ' homicide philan-
thropy ' of the revolutionists, ' in the groves of whose
Academy,' as he savagely said, ' at the end of every
vista you see nothing but the gallows,' there were
conspicuous figures before his eyes, in whom the
cosmopolitan confession of faith was suspect because
it seemed to come so easily. When Tom Paine
capped Franklin's ' Where is liberty, there is my
country,' by the amended version, ' Where is not
liberty, there is mine,' the sentiment was noble.

36 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

It is worthy of a political crusader. Who does not
wish to re-echo it from his heart ? But it has a less
impressive force, when we remember that it came
from a political soldier-of-fortune whose allegiance
to any country in particular was so loose that, in
his shallow -rooted, nomadic life, he played, not
I without self-glorification, the role of citizen of three,
^his was what Burke distrusted and abhorred. It
ras in sharpest contradiction, as must now be
ident, to all he believed and felt about the growth
the social and political affections. That no cold
Nation can be a zealous citizen, that the locality
of the affections enriches life, that personal friend-
ship can be grafted upon political comradeship,
that ' the combined and mutually reflected charities '
of ' our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our
altars ' must be inseparably interwoven in the
tational life 1 — these were amongst his most pas-
donate convictions. And, true to the same spirit,
ie held the faith that a single-minded and unfalter-
ing patriotism must needs be the normal path to
the service of mankind. But as the idea of mankind,
species, the race, was still, in his day as in ours,
vague, undefined, and imperfectly realised, it is
not to be wondered at that, to a mind like his,
intent upon actualities and impatient of abstrac-
tions, it was still in the idea of the nation, say
rather in the realised idea of the British people,

1 Reflections.

FROM KIN TO KIND 37

that he found the central source of his political
inspiration.

This, however, will be more evident when we pass
from this brief sketch of his general attitude to the
substance of his teaching as to what a nation is.1
1 P. 60.

CHAPTER III

One of the most interesting points about a man of
affairs is the way in which he approaches and solves
his practical problems. Is it by the reasoning that
links together means and ends ; or is it by the swift
intuitive decision that seems to reason not at all ;
or is it, in whole or in part, by appeal to authority,
be it the authority of traditions or persons or in-
stitutions ; or is it rather by some combination of
all three methods ?

Now this is a matter on which Burke is explicit.
He has left us in no possible uncertainty as to what
he deems the paramount virtue of the man of
affairs. ' Prudence,' he declares, ' is not only thev
first in rank of the virtues, political and moral, but I
she is the director, the regulator, the standard of
them all.' x This being so, the question that emerges

is obvious : What is this ' prudence ' that is thus so

^

unhesitatingly promoted to the primacy ?

Clearly, to begin with, it is to be sharply distin-
guished from the characteristic virtue of the theorist.
J The theorist thinks first and last of truth and

1 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

* PRUDENCE' $9

error: the man of a flairs is concerned with good
and evil. The theorist has but one thing before
him at a time ; his problem is simplified by the
familiar, necessary artifice of abstraction, more or
less rigorously applied : the statesman is confronted
by all the baffling complexity of concrete situations
in which considerations of good and evil, advantage
and disadvantage, meet and cross and intermingle
in ever varying proportions and combinations.
Unlike the abstract thinker, he must see, or try to
see, everything and neglect nothing. Hence the
peculiar, and sometimes crushing, difficulty of the
statesman's task. Moving, as he must, in the
troubled, perplexing, and shifting medium of con-
crete circumstances, and thrust on by the imperious
urgency of crises that brook no delay, he cannot
indulge in that suspense of judgment, which is one
of the virtues of the theorist, nor pause to work out
his problems theoretically. Time forbids it. Nor
can he have recourse to thinkers or theorists who
will solve his problems for him. Easy and light
would be the burden of the statesman if, in the
urgent hour of his perplexity, he could turn to some
political adviser, some casuist in politics, to find his
problems theoretically anticipated, and their solu-
tions already made. But no such thing is possible.
The nature of political fact precludes it. In the
complex interaction of human wills and social
forces and endlessly varying circumstances, the

40 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OP BURKE

problems, if they be serious, are such as no theor-
etical acuteness can have foreseen, and no theoretical
foresight solved by anticipation. And just for that
reason there is no course open to the man of affairs
but to take upon his own shoulders the burden of
facing his problems for himself, and solving them to
the best of his ability by his own ' prudence.' For
if the tangled knots of politics are to be dealt with,
it will not be by the philosopher who unravels
them at his leisure : sooner or later, and often
enough sooner rather than later, they must be cut
by the statesman who is fortunate enough to possess
the practical wisdom, the ' prudence,' to grasp and
weigh the circumstances of the situation, and the
nerve to decide what the day or the hour or the
* moment requires to be done. Small wonder there -
jT fpre if Burke sets such store on ' prudence ' as to
>; dignify it as the mother of all the virtues. fTor his
- * f glorification of prudence, like Aristotle's laudation
I of (ppovrjats,1 is but the inevitable complement of
\ that doctrine of ' circumstances ' which, as we have
I already seen,2 led him roundly to declare that no
{lines could be theoretically laid down for civil and
(political wisdom.3
■ And yet it must not be supposed that, because
' prudence ' does not come to its decisions by theory,

1 Ethics, Bk. vi. * P. 7.

3 For Burke's contrast between the theorist and the statesman,
see Speech, May 11, 1792, and Speech for Shortening the Dura-
tion of Parliaments (date doubtful).

' PRUDENCE ' 41

it is therefore purely intuitive. For however sharp
the contrast between the statesman and the theorist
or 'professor,' as Burke sometimes calls him, it does
not imply that ' prudence ' can dispense with
principles and the application of principles to facts.
And it is of especial importance to take note of this,
not only because the practical man (as he calls
himself) is notoriously apt, in contempt for theory,
to pin his faith to instinctive common sense, but
because Burke himself has, often enough, been
taxed with substituting prejudice for judgment and
drawing his inferences with his passions rather
than his understanding. Nothing could be further
from the mark. For the ' prudence ' of Burke's
panegyric is neither a sense nor an instinct. It is
apt to be mistaken for such because its decisions
are often so swift as to seem intuitive. But as
Burke himself remarks, in speaking of judgments
of taste,1 this celerity of its operation is no proof
that it needs a distinct faculty to account for it.
For whatever intuitive element it may, and indeed
must, include, seeing that no man can in matters
of detail go on deliberating for ever, and however
passions and even prejudices may colour its valua-
tions, it is fundamentally a virtue of the reason.
He has himself said so. 'I have ever abhorred,' so
runs a declaration of his later years, ' since the first

1 Introduction to Inquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful.

42 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

dawn of my understanding to this its obscure
twilight, all the operations of opinion, fancy, inclina-
tion, and will in the affairs of government, where
only a sovereign reason, paramount to all forms of
legislation and administration, should dictate.' x

Not that it is difficult to find passages which,
on a superficial perusal, might seem to have a very
different ring. One occurs in the ' Speech on Ameri-
can Taxation ' : ' If you apprehend that on a conces-
sion you shall be pushed by metaphysical process to the
extreme lines, and argued out of your whole authority,
my advice is this : when you have recovered your
old, your strong, your tenable position, then face
about — stop short — do nothing more — reason not
at all — oppose the ancient policy and practice of the
empire, as a rampart against the speculations of
innovators on both sides of the question ; and you
will stand on great, manly, and sure ground.' The
words are strong, but it would be a serious mistake
to take them as if meant to carry a depreciation of
the reason declared to be sovereign and paramount.
They are levelled only against that bastard reason
which all his life he detested — the reason of the one-
ideaed fanatic of ' the hocus-pocus of abstraction,'
who, having seized an abstract principle, insists
upon pushing it to the extreme of logical illation,
in all ' the nakedness of metaphysical abstraction,'
and in defiance of the inevitable friction of concrete

1 Letter to a Noble Lord.

' PRUDENCE ' 43

circumstances. Nor is it the man who in this fashion
pushes principles to extremes (as if he were reason-
ing in a vacuum) who thereby establishes his claim
to rationality. Rationality in politics at any rate,
whatever it may be in the abstract sciences, is more
convincingly evidenced by holding fast to principles
in presence of the stubborn difficulties of actual
fact, which it is much easier to ignore than to
rationalise. This is the kind of reason at any rate
that Burke had in view from the first dawn of his
understanding to its obscure twilight. Nor did he
the less believe it to be ' paramount ' because he
set himself so copiously to denounce the abstract
theorists and metaphysicians of politics.

It follows that the man of affairs whose sovereign
virtue is ' prudence,' who is also the statesman after
Burke's own heart, is likewise the man of principles,
and far removed from the type who blindly trusts
his instincts, even when he calls his instincts his
conscience. 'Without the light and guide of sound,
well-understood principles,' so runs one of many
similar statements, which may be taken as conclu-
sive, ' all reasonings on politics, as in everything
else, would be only a confused jumble of particular
facts and details, without the means of drawing
out any sort of theoretical or practical conclusion.' 1
Two things, therefore, Burke would have us distin-

1 Speech, May 11, 1792; and cf. his denunciations of 'the
profane herd of vulgar and mechanical politicians ' who disbelieve
in principles.

44 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

guish. The one, which he distrusts, is to act upon
theory ; the other, which he commends, to act
upon principles. The first of these can never be
other than the way of fanatics or madmen : the
second is the path of sanity and statesmanship.
These two things, it may be granted, are not easy
to sunder. For when principles are not only definite
but coherent, as the principles held by Burke will
be found to be, it is obvious that the line between
acting on a theory and acting on principles becomes
difficult to draw. And it is doubtless the percep-
tion of this that brings this denouncer of theories to
declare at times (though not often) that he has no
aversion to theories. ' I do not vilify theory and
speculation,' he says, ' no, because that would be
to vilify reason itself. Neque decipitur ratio, neque
decipit unquam.'' l And though this was said (in
1782) before the theories of the ' French philoso-
phers ' had unsealed the vials of his invective, he
could repeat the same thing ten years later : ' I
do not put abstract ideas wholly out of any ques-
tion, because I well know that, under that name, I
should dismiss principles.' 2 We might wish that
he had pushed these admissions further. These
pages indeed will fail of their object if they do not
make it evident that all his life through, Burke's
political judgments were rooted in theory to an
extent which he seems imperfectly to have realised.

1 Speech, May 7, 1782. 2 Speech, May 11, 1792.

' PRUDENCE ' 45

So much so that it is impossible to suppress the wish
that a mind so essentially philosophical had done
more to gather into systematic shape the mass of
singularly coherent principles which readers are
left to glean from his pages for themselves. But to
ask for this would be to ask that Burke should be
other than he was. By profession he was a states-
man, not a theorist. And when, with the practi-
calities of day and hour before him, he grasped a
principle, his first instinct was, not to weave it into
a system of thought, but to use it and apply it to
circumstances. The result followed. Forthwith the
principle, ceasing to be an abstract thought, was
utilised as a rule and instrument of ' prudence,'
and as such became subject to all the inevitable
abatements and qualifications which must always
come when thought weds fact, and theory meets
practice.

It will be the object of succeeding chapters to
extricate these principles, and to exhibit them in
their coherency. But meanwhile we may, with
advantage, limit ourselves to one particular group,
the interest of which lies in the fact that they are
so frankly utilitarian. Almost indeed we might
fancy at times, when we encounter them, that
somehow we had strayed from the pages of Burke
into those of Bentham. Thus we read that 'it is'
the direct office of wisdom to look to the consequences j
of the acts we do ; if it be not this, it is worth I

46 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

nothing.' x If this be not utilitarian, what is ? Yet
it is not more utilitarian than many other utter-
ances equally explicit : ' The object of the State
is (so far as may be) the happiness of the whole.

. . The happiness or misery of mankind, esti-
mated by their feelings and sentiments, and not by
any theories of their rights, is, and ought to be, the
standard for the conduct of legislators towards the
people.' 2

Nor can there be a doubt that these were prin-
ciples on which Burke himself consistently acted.
Dazzled by his rhetoric and the passion of his utter-
ance, the world has come to think of him too much
as a man of emotions and intuitions ; and critics
of his own day, and since, have dealt with him too
often as if he were an inflammable political partisan
and combatant, betrayed by political and even
personal passions into all manner of emotional
exaggerations and prejudiced judgments. * He
loved to exaggerate every thing ' ; says Lord
Holland, ' when exasperated by the slightest oppo-
sition, even on accidental topics of conversation, he
always pushed his principles, his opinions, and even
his impressions of the moment to the extreme.' 3
So he did. Restraint, either in feeling or utterance,
was not in his temperament. But the correction
to this, and to all similar verdicts, lies in words of

1 Speech, May 11, 1792. 2 Ibid.

8 Lord Holland's Memoirs.

1 PRUDENCE ' 47

his own : ' Vehement passion does not always
indicate an infirm judgment/ For though the
passion, not to say the fury, of Burke's utterance
is not to be denied — who would dream of denying
it who recalls the pages of the Reflections or the
Regicide Peace ? — the inference is not that, because
Burke said many vehement things, he was no wise
man, but rather that no so profoundly wise man
ever said so many vehement things. Few pages
are richer than his in luminous sentences that have
the serene light of wisdom on them. ■ I am most
afraid of the weakest reasonings, because they dis-
cover the strongest passions.' ' He censures God
who quarrels with the imperfections of men.' ' The^
tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.'
1 Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects J
are rebels from principle.' ' Those who attempt
to level never equalise.' ' Equal neglect is not
impartial kindness.' ' They who always labour can
have no sound judgment.' ' Wisdom is not the
most severe corrector of folly.' ' But calamity is
unhappily the usual reason for reflection ; and the
pride of men will not often suffer reason to have
any scope until it can be no longer of any service ' —
these may serve as bricks from the temple. Simi-
larly with innumerable sustained passages too
lengthy for quotation. For, in truth, when due
allowance is made for the fact that all his life long
Burke was on his own avowal a passionate com-

48 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

batant in the stormy strifes of politics, the dis-
tinctive mark of his genius is its sanity. Even in
those pieces where the whirlwind of his passion and
invective is at its height, his wisdom and rationality
are never far off. This is apparent even in the
Regicide Peace, for, though these fiery pages ransack
the English language to find vituperative missiles —
robbers, assassins, cannibals — it is in them we find
towards the end of the Third Letter — a tribute to
the old Greek virtue of moderation. * Our physical
well-being, our moral worth, our social happiness,
our political tranquillity, all depend on that control
of all our appetites and passions, which the ancients
designed by the cardinal virtue of temperance.' x
And it is in keeping with the words that the Letter
ends on the note of ' responsibility.' Nor was it
without good reason, though the immoderation of
his words often obscures the fact, that the virtues
to which perhaps above all others he laid claim,
were consistency and sobriety of judgment. ' In
reality,' he wrote to his intimate friend Laurence,
when the hand of death was already on him (the
topic was the prosecution of Hastings), ' you know
that I am no enthusiast, but according to the
powers that God has given me, a sober and reflect-
ing man.' 2 ' Please God,' he said on another
occasion, when describing his own procedure, ' I
will walk with caution, whenever I am not able

1 Regicide Peace, Letter in. 2 Feb. 10, 1797.

« PRUDENCE ' 49

clearly to see my way before me.'1 'It may be
allowed,' so runs still another dictum, ' to the
temperament of the statesman to catch his ultimate
object with an intuitive glance ; but his movements
towards it ought to be deliberate.'2 It was this-
deliberateness, this sobriety, this rationality which
constrained him, throughout his career, and even
in utmost stress and bitterness of party passions,
to turn to principles as the necessary rules and
standard of the ' prudence ' of his panegyric, and not
least to keep unwaveringly before him * the happi-
ness of the whole ' as the end of all political work.
And this utilitarian phrase finds reinforcement in
the variant (one of many) that ' those on whose
account all just authority exists ' are ' the people to
be governed.' 3

It would, however, be a misnomer to call Burke \
utilitarian — at any rate till we construe ' happiness
of the whole ' or ' happiness of the people ' in the
light of his conception of what a people is. For
will quickly appear that this is vastly different
from anything that is to be found in the Radical
gospel of Bentham and the Benthamites.

the

Dr it J
rent
lical/

1 Letter on the Duration of Parliaments. a Reflections.

3 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol.

CHAPTER IV

WHAT IS A PEOPLE ?

From the beginning of his political career Burke
seems to have already formed a definite conception
of what a people is, which, if it changed at all,
changed only, as the years went on, in the direction
of maturity and clearness. The best expression of
it is to be found in some pages of the Appeal from
the New to the Old Whigs, which are amongst the
most luminous in the whole of his writings. The
passage is much too lengthy for quotation ; but
this is the less necessary because the keynote of the
whole may be said to be struck in the three words,
'discipline of nature.' 'When great ^multitudes
act together, under that discipline of nature, I
recognise the PEOPLE.' 1

What then is this ' discipline of nature ' which
thus avails to gather men together and give them
the unity of a people, or, to use the phrase that meets
us oftenest in Burke's pages, of a civil society ?

The answer is that it is that long and gradual
| process of historical development, divinely guided,
las Burke believed, through which the many hands

1 Appeal.

50

WHAT IS A PEOPLE ? 51

and many minds of successive generations slowly
bring a society out of the rude and undisciplined
state, when as yet a ' people ' cannot be said to
exist, into that state of organisation in which the
varied elements of a corporate life, throne, aristo- j
cracy, church, judiciary, parliament, electorate, \
non-electorate, professions, trades, science, art,
morality, manners — all find their appropriate place
and function. In a sense this corporate life implies
a compact or agreement. Burke says it does. He
speaks of ' the original compact or agreement which
gives its corporate form anTT capacity to a State.' *
He even says that the idea of a people is ' wholly
artificial and made, like all other legal fictions, by
common agreement. ' 2 But these and other terms
and phrases which he freely borrows from the
philosophy of the eighteenth century must never
be taken to mean that he thought, as Hobbes or
Rousseau thought (or at any rate say), that a
' people ' was called into being once for all by an
explicit act of contract in some far-off imaginary
past. If compact^ there be, it is a compact of a
kind that is tacitly rather than explicitly, gradually
rather than by any single transaction, made, as the
growth of corporate life advances from generation
to generation. Much as he makes of » the original
contract ' in arguing about 1688 against the New
Whigs, it is the contract ' implied and expressed in

1 Appeal » Ibid.

52 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

the constitution of this country' not the contract as
a single transaction.1 No idea, indeed, is more
repugnant to Burke than the notion that any mere
multitude of men, whether savage or civilised,
should at a given time, and by their own explicit
choice, fabricate a state by contract. It filled him,
he says, and it is evident without his saying it,
' with disgust and horror.' ' Alas ! ' he exclaims,
* they little know how many a weary step is to be
taken before they can form themselves into a mass
which has a truly politic personality.' 2 For it is by
V the discipline of nature,' as it operates through
the centuries, and not by the abrupt initiatives of
parties to an explicit contract, that peoples and
states are fashioned and perpetuated.

This was the conception of a ' people ' that was
central in Burke's thought from the beginning, and
it carries in it further conclusions of far-reaching
significance.

One of these is that a ' people ' is a highly complex
unity. For when Burke speaks of the 'discipline
of nature ,' the word ' nature ' suggests to him
nothing whatever of the associations of artless,
primitive simplicity, social or political, that gathered
round the fancied state of nature in the minds of
the disciples of Rousseau. That vision of a simpli-
fied social fife, a fife that had escaped the incon-
veniences and limitations of savagery, and yet had

1 Appeal. z Ibid.

WHAT IS A PEOPLE ? 53

not fallen victim to the artificialities, vices, and
* chains - of advanced civilisation, had no charms
at all for Burke. One of his earliest literary adven-i
tures, The Vindication of Natural Society, was an J
elaborate satire designed to unmask its hollowness I
by a reductio ad absurdum. The picture repelled/
him. He regarded it as a proof that its admirers/
were lacking in the barest rudiments of political
knowledge and wisdom. ' When I hear of sim-
plicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of
in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to
decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their
trade or totally negligent of their duty.' 1 Two
pregnant aphorisms justify this condemnation. The
one is that ' art is man's nature,' 2 the other that
1 nature is never more truly herself than in her
grandest forms. The Apollo of Belvedere is as
much in nature as any clown in the rustic revels
of Teniers.' 3 For it is only necessary to piece
these together to develop the conclusion that we
shall never understand what the ' discipline of
nature ' can achieve till we turn away from the
1 savage and incoherent ' life of primitive man to
the complex, richly differentiated, and highly organ-
ised structure of a civilised society. To Burke the
belauded state of nature of the Rousseauites is little,
if at all, better than the ' city of pigs ' satirised by

1 Reflections. * Appeal.

* Regicide Peace, Letter ni.

54 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

Plato in his Republic, or than the ' solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short ' life of pre-social man as
delineated in the trenchant pages of Hobbes. His
conception of ' nature ' and the ' natural ' is in its
essence Greek to the core. It is the Aristotelian
\ conception of the organised ' natural ' municipal
I State read into the life of the modern nation.

Nor can it be doubted that the truth here rests
with Aristotle and Burke. It has become a common-
place of evolution that, the more fully evolved
societies become, they are, by the very laws of
social growth, immeasurably more richly integrated
than the more primitive forms which have some-
times carried captive the imagination of apostles
f the simple life. And though there is nothing in
his, as many an ugly social fact too clearly shows,
prevent the growth of societies, like other forms
of growth, from running to rankness and disease, so
that luxurious, corrupt, distempered, ill-conducted
States need the remorseless knife of revolutionary
surgery ; yet the laws of social development are not
thereby abrogated. For even when revolution,
though it were ten times repeated, has done its
drastic work, the result is never a permanently
simplified society. On the contrary, the irrepressible
vitality of the social system, purified as by fire, re-
asserts itself, and the State finds itself once more ad-
vancing in the path of growth which leads from the
simple to the complex, from loose aggregation to

WHAT IS A PEOPLE ?

intimate integration of parts and members, and
which stretches onwards along that line of advance
whereby the unity of a people is intensified by the
illimitable triumphs of organised specialisation in
its myriad forms. To try to reverse this process, to
re-trace this path — what is this but to fly in the face
of all that the history of institutions has to tell us of
the growth of States ? Grant that there is a place
for simplification. Grant that there is a time for
reform. The man is not to be envied who cannot,
with Bentham, execrate the complication, confusion,
and unintelligibility of bad laws ; or who cannot with
Paine anathematise the barriers between man and
man and ' the wilderness of turnpike gates which
have been set up between man and his Maker ' by
bad governments ; or who cannot with Wordsworth
lament the materialism and artificiality which choke
the truer life. Yet neither is it to be supposed that
these moods and movements are endings. They are
really new beginnings. So far from being the
journey's end, they are but places of regeneration
where the spirit of man renews its powers for fresh
effort in its endless forward march. Never can they
bring those who face the facts of history to wish
seriously to set themselves to fight against the very^
laws of fife. ' As well rock the grown man in the \
cradle of the infant,' as Burke has it. In a word, they
cannot justify rebellion against ' the discipline of J
nature.'

56 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

This leads to a further point. For it must be
already evident that Burke's conception of a people
as ' under the discipline of nature ' involves a com-
plete divergence from that identification of a people
with the aggregate of its units, or a 'greatest number '
of them, which, in the generation that followed, was
the distinctive mark of Bentham and the Bentham-
ites. In the fight of Burke's teaching all such arith-
metical categories are seen in a moment to be thin
and inadequate to the facts. A mere mass of men,
still less a mere majority of a mass of men, is not a
people. ' It is said that 24,000,000 ought to prevail
over 200,000. True, if the constitution of a king-
dom is a problem of arithmetic' So Burke wrote,1
when denying the claims of a majority by count of
heads to work its will in politics ; and the words are
but one of many illustrations of his decisive rejection
of mathematical categories as inadequate to social
fact. For on his view, as must now be evident, a
people cannot be said to exist at all, save when the
mere multitude or mass of men has been organised
by the discipline of nature in the long course of
actual historical evolution. Apart from this, a
people dissolves into an incoherent, disbanded mob
which is the sheer negation of a civil society ; for,
as it seems to be the law of life that the social or-
ganism, like other organisms, advances towards or-
ganisation ; and as it is through organisation that

1 Reflections.

WHAT IS A PEOPLE ? 67

it gets its work done, it cannot divest itself of this
its character as a developed society, without thereby
ceasing to be a people in the true sense of the word.
The happiness of the whole, in other words, can
never be the happiness of a people or nation or civil
society or commonwealth (call it by what name we
will) unless it be, as it was to Burke, as to Plato, the
happiness of an organic whole.

For Burke, as must now be evident, had firmly"^
grasped our latter-day conception of society. The
eighteenth century had called society a contract ;
the nineteenth has rebaptized it as an organism.
And there can be no doubt which of these categories
Burke prefers. Not that he refuses to call society
a contract. He ofien does. For, as already said,
he^s tar from having divested nimseii 01 tne ter-
minology of his age. But, even in the passages in
which he does this, two points emerge quite clearly.
The one is that he is little, if at all, interested in the
student's question, whether society had its actual
historical origin in a contract. The contractual
theory becomes interesting to him, as a practical
thinker, only when and because it was made the
ground of the claim that the members of an exist-*
ing State, and even a majority of their number, by
the exercise of that free individual choice which the
notion of a contract suggests, could overturn the
existing constitution and set up a new one in its
place — a claim which he always withstood to the

58 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

uttermost. And the second point is that, though
this implacable antagonism to the author of the
Contrat Social and all his following did not prevent
him from using their terms — 'contract,' ' pact,' ' con-
vention,' and suchlike — it led him to regard society
as. a contract or convention of a peculiar kind. For
r the ' contract ' he has in mind always involves those
i slowly evolved, habitual, intimate, living ties between
the members and classes of the body politic which
are so clearly not the product of any explicit act of
contract between man and man, or class and class
that they have driven our sociologists to lift society
above the categories of law and plunge it deep in
Uhe categories of biology. Nor is it too much to say
that all the main implications which justify the cur-
rency of this now somewhat trite analogy are to be
found in Burke's pages. Justly does Lord Morley
(writing in 1879) conclude his illuminating estimate
of Burke's life and writings * with the prophecy that
Burke ' will be more frequently and more seriously
referred to within the next twenty years than he
has been within the whole of the last eighty.' It
will be strange if it is otherwise in the century that
has now begun, for though Burke's words are often
those of the eighteenth century, his thought is that
of the nineteenth. Far more so than the thought,
not only of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau who moved
in the atmosphere of contract, but of Bentham,

1 Burke in 'English Men of Letters.'

WHAT IS A PEOPLE ? 59

Cobden, and even Mill, who, though they had left
contract behind, had not yet advanced to the con-
ception of organism. ' Society,' so runs the classical
confession of his faith on this point, ' society is
indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for ob-
jects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at
pleasure — but the State ought not to be considered
as nothing better than a partnership agreement in
a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or
some other such low concern, to be taken up for a
little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the
fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other
reverence ; because it is not a partnership in things
subservient only to the gross animal existence of a I
temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership
in all science ; a partnership in all art ; a partnership
in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends
of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many
generations, it becomes a partnership not only
between those who are living, but between those
who are living, those who are dead, and those who
are to be born. Each contract of each particular
State is but a clause in the great primaeval contract
of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher
natures, connecting the visible and invisible world,
according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the in
violable oath which holds all physical and all moral
natures each in their appointed place. This law is
not subject to the will of those who by an obligation

60 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

£above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to
I submit their will to that law.' x
•j^This passage is decisive. It parts Burke by a gulf
from both Rousseau and Bentham. For Contract
it, in effect, substitutes Growth : for Greatest Num-
ber it reads Social Organism. The categories of law
land arithmetic are dethroned, and the conceptions
V)f biology advanced to the supremacy.

Yet this supremacy is not unqualified ; and it is
to Burke's credit that he is awake to its limitations.
Not only did he see, and say, that the conception of
society as an organism was merely analogical ; he
recognised the precise point on which the analogy
is weak, and may readily, by its assimilation of
social to natural organisms, pass into a pernicious
dogmatism. For the writers, from Locke, and even
from Hobbes onwards, who invoked the contract,
were not without their reasons. They saw that a
political system, if it is to be justifiable, must rest,
in some sense, upon agreement, choice, or consent.
The real reason why they make so much of their
fancied contract is not that they thought they were
offering the world a chapter in the history of origins,
in which, indeed, they had but a feeble interest, but
that the conception enabled them to find a place
for human will and private judgment in the consti-
tution of society. Even Hobbes, apologist of des-
potism though he be, recognises individual will in

1 Reflections.

WHAT IS A PEOPLE ? 61

the contractual act by which the contracting parties
enslave themselves for ever. Nor are these claims
for individual will gratuitous or irrational. For
however appropriate it may be, because closer to
the facts, to call society an organism, it is admittedly
one of the dangers of the conception that, in thus
closely assimilating the social to the natural order,
it is prone to do less than justice to the part that is
played by individual wills in all social and political
causation. ' Constitutions/ we are told, in well-
worn words, ' grow and are not made.' The positive
statement is true, but it would be better to leave
out the ' not.' Constitutions grow and are made.
For whatever be the process of growth, it must find
room for that initiative and energy of individual wills
to which it is difficult to find a sufficiently close
analogy in the growth of plant or animal. However
helpful biological categories may be, they must not
be suffered to obscure the undoubted fact that, from
the clan or the family onwards, and most of all in
a civilised society, the wills of the units are capable
of much.

This is what Burke sees, and his perception of it j
appears with much clearness in several passages,!
which are the more noteworthy because there is so
much denunciation elsewhere in his writings of the j
radicals who were bold enough to claim that they
could choose their own rulers, and frame a govern- i
ment for themselves. In one of these passages he I

62 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

is arguing against the theory that States have
necessarily the same stages of infancy, manhood,
and decrepitude as are found in the lives of the
individuals who compose them. ' Parallels of this
sort,' he proceeds, ' rather furnish similitudes to
illustrate or to adorn than supply analogies from
whence to reason. The objects which are attempted
to be forced into an analogy are not found in the
same classes of existence. Individuals are physical
beings, subject to laws universal and invariable.
The immediate cause acting in these laws may be
obscure : the general results are subjects of certain
calculation. But commonwealths are not physical
but moral essences. They are artificial combina-
tions ; " and, in their proximate efficient cause, the
Arbitrary productions of the human mind. We
are not yet acquainted with the laws which neces-
sarily influence the stability of that kind of work
made by that kind of agent.' 1

The force of this is obvious. It makes three
statements, each of the utmost importance : the
first, that the ' similitude ' between the individual
and the social organism does not by any means run
upon all fours ; the second, that this is so because
the ' things forced into an analogy are not found in
the same classes of existence ' ; and the third, that
the human mind is ' the proximate efficient cause '
in the construction and maintenance of the Btate.
1 Regicide Peace, Letter i.

WHAT IS A PEOPLE ? 63

And to these we may add two corollaries, the first
from the immediate context and the other from an
earlier piece. The one is the fact, so suggestive of
the romance of politics, that, by intervention of
individual agency, many events occur, in the vicissi-
tudes of States, as contrasted with the uniformity of
the physical world, so unexpected that they are
often set down to chance or divine interposition.
4 The death of a man at a critical juncture, his
disgust, his retreat, his disgrace, have brought
innumerable calamities on a whole nation. A
common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn,/
have changed the face of fortune, and almost of
nature.' * The other corollary is practical, and words
can hardly be stronger in the protest they carry
against the political quietism which may all too
easily flow from the acceptance of the given social
system as if it were a part of the unalterable order
of nature. It is worth quoting at length : * These
analogies between bodies natural and politic, though
they may sometimes illustrate arguments, furnish
no argument of themselves. They are but too often
used under the colour of a specious philosophy, to
find apologies for the despair of laziness and pusill-
animity, and to excuse the want of all manly efforts,
when the exigencies of our country call for them
more loudly. How often has public calamity been

1 E. S. Fayne, in his enlightening notes on the Regicide Peace,
identifies the soldier as Arnold of Winkelriod, the child as
Hannibal, the girl as Joan of Arc.

64 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

arrested on the very brink of ruin by the seasonable
energy of a single man. ... I am as sure as I am
of my being that one vigorous mind, without office,
without situation, without public function, of any
kind (at the time when the want of such a thing is
felt), I say, one such man, confiding in the aid of
God, and full of just reliance in his own fortitude,
vigour, enterprise, and perseverance, would first
draw to him some few like himself, and then that
multitudes, hardly thought to be in existence,
would appear and troop about him.'^1 And it is in
keeping with these sentences that one of his latest
injunctions to his friends, when the sands of life
were running, was ' Never succumb.'

But Burke went much further even than this.
For where, one may well ask, is a belief in ' the
proximate efficient causation ' of individual wills
more forcibly affirmed than in the many hundred
flaming pages in the Reflections and the Regicide
Peace, in which he was diffusing the terror ? For
Burke diffused the terror because he felt it. He
was convinced that the radicals in England, like
the revolutionists in France, had capacities for
infinite mischief. Miss Burney tells us, in words
not easily forgotten, how, in his later years, he could
not even speak of the Revolution without his face
immediately assuming ' the expression of a man
who is going to defend himself against murderers.'

1 Letter to William Elliot.

WHAT IS A PEOPLE ? 65

Critics may call this panic, but, even if it were, it
sprang from the entirely deliberate conviction, again
and again repeated, that the Radicals of his day, if
not withstood to the face, had it in them not only
to wreck the constitution of England, but even to
destroy civilisation and usher in a new barbarism.
And his words of alarm and denunciation were
levelled against not only the outstanding leaders,
but the rank and file, the mob of Paris, who had
given so notable a demonstration of ' the proximate
efficient causation of the human mind ' by over-
turning, as it were in the twinkling of an eye, an
ancient, imposing, and (as men had thought) a
firmly rooted monarchy. ' It is asserted that this
Government ' (i.e. the Revolutionary Government)
' promises stability. God of His mercy forbid. If
it should, nothing upon earth besides itself can be
stable.' "

The result of all this is manifest. It makes it
evident that Burke's conception of a ' people ' has
two aspects, not easy to reconcile. On_jtha~one
hand, he has grasped the idea that society is an
organism — grasped it so firmly as to see and say
that the social system comes to maturity in obedi-
ence to laws of growth that are above and beyond
the competence of individual wills to alter.2 And
when this aspect is to the front, one rises from his

1 Regicide Peace, Letter iv. This letter was written before
the others. * Cf. p. 59.

E

66 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

I pages all but convinced that it is the whole political
duty of man to recognise the social system as if it
were part of the fixed order of nature, and to accept
his situation as a thing decreed for him and not
chosen by him. On the other hand, we meet the
conviction, no less firmly held, that the proximate
efficient causation of the human mind is so master-

ful a force, that human wills may even overturn
the constitution of the state and lay civilisation
in ruins.

Not that he leaves these two aspects apart and in
antagonism. He at least suggests a synthesis in
the pregnant principle that 'art is^an!a"^1irft/
nd that there is therefore a large sense of ' nature '
nd the ' natural ' wide enough to include human
gency. Even more important is the theistic
aith — of which we shall see more in the sequel —
hich prompts the far-reaching principle that, as
( man's nature and the State are alike the manifes-
tations of the Divine will, they must be presumed
|to be harmoniously adapted each to the other.
Nor is there any principle in the whole of his writings
with which Burke is more in earnest than this.1

How far these principles avail to make his thought
self-consistent, and in particular how far they
reconcile his frank recognition of the efficient causa-
tion of the human mind in the making of the State,
with his undoubted anticipation of the latter-day

1 See p. 84 et seq.

WHAT IS A PEOPLE ? 67

notion that society is an organism — this is a question
we shall be in a better position to answer when
we have seen something of the influence of his
conception of a ' people ' upon his practical
conservatism.

CHAPTER V

CONSERVATISM

(a) The Impracticability of Radical Reform

Burke's conservatism is not a conservatism of
sentiment, and still less of prejudice. It is the
conservatism of principles. And there are two
principles of wide generality on which it rests. The
one is the conviction that, by the very nature of a
civilised society as well as by the nature of man, all

(radical reconstruction of a political system is, to
put the matter bluntly, simply a thing that cannot
be done, though, of course, it may be attempted :
the other, that, for the same reasons, reinforced by
the fact that man is a moral and religious, as well
as a political being, it is a thing which ought not to
be attempted. We may take these points in turn.

Turning to the first, it may be granted that it
is an arguable question whether the latter-day
conception of society as an organism tells more in
favour of conservatism or of radicalism. But there
can be no doubt as to its influence on Burke. In
his case, it is conservative to the core. For, from a
wide survey of life, he returned with a deep and

CONSERVATISM 69

unalterable conviction that, whatever happiness bo
within reach of a people — and he never lost sight
of the happiness of the people as the ultimate end —
this is only to be won slowly, and by making the
most of existing conditions which, so far as the
efforts of any single generation are concerned, are
in great measure inexorable. This seemed to him
to follow from that conception of a people which we
have just been examining. For a civilised society,
like all highly developed products, has come to be
so manifoldly differentiated in organs and functions,
and so cunningly integrated in the relation of itsj
parts, that the resulting whole is a ""'^Ifl.frf org^^l
jsation. Add to this that of the elements thus*
unified — and in these elements fall to be included
not only institutions, but the ideas, sentiments,
and habits that gather round them — by far the
greater number, as indeed the very notion of organic
growth suggests, send their roots deep into the
past, and Burke's inference lies ready to hand. He
draws it at any rate without any hesitation. For
what is it but a monstrous and upstart usurpation
that any man or association of men should set
themselves up, at a given epoch of a nation's life,
to reconstruct de novo a product like this ? It is too
great, too complex, too intricately fashioned, too
firmly rooted in the persistent trend of historic
tendencies. Better, because saner, to accept it, in
essential features at any rate, as if it were part of the

70 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

order of nature, as in the higher sense of ' nature '
it is, and to dispose our lives and frame our projects
accordingly. For never, if Burke is to be believed,
does the path to the happiness of men and nations
lie through sweeping innovation ; always it lies in
doing justice to the past, in welcoming what it has
achieved as ' an entailed inheritance,' and even in
the hour of reform, when reform is needful as it
sometimes is, in carrying it through in a spirit of
gratitude and reverence towards existing institu-
tions, which, as they certainly have not been made,
are as certainly not to be remade, by the energies of
any single generation of radical reformers, however
ardent their passion for human happiness may be.

This is the secret of those passionate exhortations
in which Burke adjures the reformer to approach
[the defects of his country as he would the wounds of
!a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude ;
this that constrains him to require of the statesman
a heart full of sensibility, a love and respect for his
kind, and a fear of himself ; this that prompts the
avowal that he would rather distrust his judgment
than condemn his species ; this that inspires the
faith that, though the individual may be foolish, the
species is wise ; this that evokes the declaration that
if he cannot reform with equity he will not reform
at all ; this that impels him to affirm that all titles
rest ultimately on prescription ; this that brings
him to invest even the machinery of an existing

CONSERVATISM 71

constitution with a sacro -sanctity it can never really
possess ; and this, not least, that inflames him to
eye all revolutionists, nay, even all radical reformers,
with the contempt of the skilled mechanician when
he sees the bungler meddling with the springs and
balances of a delicate machine,1 or, as we might more
fitly say, with the indignation of the surgical expert
when he sees the knife of the quack menacing the
still more delicate organism of the human body.
This is his ever-recurring refrain. And, in the later
days especially, when Revolution theory and Revolu-
tion excess had stirred him to the depths, it waxes
so shrill and passionate as almost to drown the
soberer mood in which he had sometimes paid his
tribute to * the great law of change,' and even
recognised it as a condition of the conservation of
society.2

Nor is this conservatism merely a general inference
from the analogy of the organism, with all its sug-
gestions of gradual, persistent growth and continuity.
It has also definite and specific grounds, drawn more
directly from his immense knowledge of men and
affairs. And amongst these two are salient.

(a) In the first place, he was convinced that]
the distance between any plan or programme of/
radical reform and its realisation was, by the very/
constitution of human nature, vast. 'The little!
catechism of the Eights of Man,' to take the instance

1 Appeal. * Letter to Sir H. Langriahe.

/

72 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

that was most to the front, could be quickly got by
heart, and new constitutions rapidly enough ex-
cogitated by the resourceful arts of an Abbe Sieves
and the pens of ready writers. But it is simplicity
itself to fancy that from these, and suchlike things,
it can be other than a long and arduous road to the
engrafting of them upon t^e slowly, won iiabits and
habitual sentiments and 'just prejudices y of an

organised people. No_Jjiinker, indeed, has ever
grasped more firmly than Burke the fact that man's
habits and sentimejats,lagjar behind his ideas ; and
that whilst ideas, theories, projects, declarations
may capture the imagination at a stroke, they can
be wrought into life only under inexorable limits of
time. It is here that his psychology profoundly in-
fluences his politics. Hence the frequent antithesis
in his pages between habits and sentiments without
ideas, and ideas without sentiments and habits, and
his avowed preference for the former. ' Politics
.ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but!
to human nature.' * Hence, too, his tenderness I
towards what may appear to be no more than hoary
prejudices. For it is largely of ' just prejudices ' —
so he will have it — that the substance of men's duties
is made. What else are we to make of the averment
that ' the moral sentiments ' are ' so nearly con-
nected with early prejudice as to be almost one and
the same thing.' 2

1 Observations on a Late State of the Nation. 2 Appeal.

CONSERVATISM 73

Not, of course, that he had any wish that poli-
ticians should part company with ideas. He had cer-
tainly ideas enough of his own, and we have already
seen his unstinted tribute to principles. But there is
always the per contra that, if men of affairs are not
to degenerate into vapouring theorists and ' political
aeronauts/ they must respect the nature of the
human material in which, as political craftsmen, they
have to work ; and, holding fast to ' prudence, the
mother of all the virtues,' recognise the force of cir-
cumstances with which, whether they like it or not,
they must needs reckon. This was a lesson he him-
self had early learnt. Once, in a sentence startling
enough — it was comparatively early in his career —
he told the House that 4 he had taken his ideas of
liberty very low ; in order that they should stick to
him, and that he might stick to them, to the end of
his life.' * It was only his way of saying that he
took a sober view of what reform could do. And
this spirit grew upon him, as might be expected, in
direct proportion as reform began to pass into (what
seemed to him) revolution. We hear less, far less iiT?
the later years, of the reforms that are the conser-j
vation of the state, and more of the innovations,!
which are not reforms, of ' speculatists,' ' fanatics,' \
1 theorists,' and ' able architects of ruin.'

(6) To this we must add the further principle, and
there is none more consistently urged, that the

1 Appeal.

74 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

practicability of any reform is to be measured, not
merely with reference to the particular grievances
and abuses it is meant to extinguish, but by its
effects upon the body -politic as a whole. ' There
are many things in reformation,' he said in 1780,
when discussing parliamentary reform, ' which would
be proper to be done, if other things can be done
along with them ; but which, if they cannot be so
accompanied, ought not to be done at all.' l The
\ / caution that underlies the words, it may be granted,
became excessive. Nay, let it be said at once, it
passed into the political valetudinarianism which
shrinks from touching even the insignificant parts of
a constitution from a nervous fear of the far-reaching
effects upon an organic whole so delicately balanced
and so permeable to influence. Yet, if this be true,
it does but accentuate the point before us. When
we laugh at the valetudinarian of private life, we
need not grudge him the true perception, hidden
sometimes from his robuster neighbours, that the
human body is an organic whole. Similarly in
politics, fear of reform is often enough far more than
the blind panic of alarmists for what may happen
to this particular institution or that, this particular
interest or that, with which they may chance to have
thrown in their lot. It may come also, in worthier
and more patriotic form, from the entirely true per-
ception that, in matters social, to act upon the part

1 Letter on the Duration of Parliaments.

CONSERVATISM 75

is inevitably to influence the whole, and that no
serious reforms are circumscribed in their effects
within the horizon and control of their authors.
This is what Burke saw from the outset of his career.
Again and again, with a reiteration which, but for the
varied splendours of his rhetoric, would be wearisome,
he claims that he always looked at his country and
its institutions as a whole. ' The diversified bu i
connected fabric of universal justice ' — so runs his de
claration to the electors of Bristol in 1780 — ' is wel
cramped and bolted together in all its parts ; anc
depend upon it I have never employed, and I never
shall employ, any engine of power which may come
into my hands to wrench it asunder. All shall
stand, if I can help it, and all shall stand connected.'
This runs throughout ; and its result is natural
enough. It led him to magnify, perhaps beyond all
other political writers, the dangers as well as the
difficulties of reform ; and eventually, we must add,
to think, not without contempt and fury, that the
radical theorists, in the darkness of their fancied
illumination, were grotesquely ignorant of the
magnitude and perils of the task to which they had
set their hands. To put it plainly, they did not
know what they were doing ; because, in their con-
cern for man's rights, they forgot his nature, and in
their raw haste to reform understood neither the
complexity nor the vulnerability of the society they
were reforming. This did not prevent him from

76 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

saying with entire sincerity to the end of his days
that there was a time for reform. He never went
back upon that. But it certainly brought him, in
his later years, to resist and denounce wellnigh
every reformer with whom he found himself con-
fronted.

All this, however, may well seem so far from con-
vincing as rather to provoke a question. For what,
we may ask, has become of the human mind which
Burke so frankly recognised as ' the proximate
efficient cause ' of events ? Has he not admitted its
initiative ? Has he not said, on many a warning
page, that it can even work havoc with civilisa-
tion ? If so, it is surely not rash to believe that it
can do something. And if it can do so much as even
reform a representative system, not to say carry
through a revolution, as in 1688 it did, why should
it be thought a thing impossible that radical minds
and radical ideals should build up the democratic
» state ? If a common soldier or a girl at the
jdoor of an inn can change the course of history,
j is there no room for the combined energies of radical
| reformers ?

To such questions as these it is not easy to find
a completely satisfying answer in Burke. He recog-
nises the proximate efficient causation of the human
mind so explicitly in the life of states that he makes
it difficult to see why there should be so little room
for it in even thoroughgoing reconstructive work.

CONSERVATISM 77

He can speak with eloquence, as we have seen,1 of
what one vigorous mind, confiding in the aid of God
and his own fortitude, can do in averting calamity,
by rallying supporters to his side. Why, then, it is
natural to ask, should this be the monopoly of the
conservative spirit ? Nay, was not Burke himself
a reformer ? ' He was no enemy to reformation.
Almost every business in which he was much con-
cerned, from the first day he sat in that House
to that hour, was a business of reformation ; and
when he had not been employed in correcting, he
had been employed in resisting abuses ' 2 — this is
what he said of himself in a speech in the House in
1790. And the best illustrative comment on his
words is a list drawn up by Buckle of the measures
of reform to which he put his hand.

1 Not only did he attack the absurd laws against
forestalling and regrating, hiiLJjy advocating the
freedom of trade, he struck at the root of all similar
prohiBTtiQjas. He supporteoTtnose^ Just claims of the
Catholics which, during his lifetime, were obstin-
ately refused ; but which were conceded, many years
after his death, as the only means of preserving the
integrity of the empire. He supported the petition
of the Dissenters, that they might be relieved from
the restrictions to which, for the benefit of the
Church of England, they were subjected. Into other
departments of politics he carried the same spirit.

1 P. 64. a Speech on the Army Estimates, 1790.

78 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

He opposed the cruel laws against insolvents by
which, in the time of George in., our statute-book
was still defaced ; and he vainly attempted to soften
the penal code, the increasing severity of which was
one of the worst features of that bad reign. He
wished to abolish the old plan of enlisting soldiers
for life — a barbarous and impolitic practice, as the
English legislature began to perceive several years
later. He attacked the slave-trade, which, being
an ancient usage, the king wished to preserve as
part of the British constitution. He refuted, but
owing to the prejudices of the age, was unable to
subvert, the dangerous power exercised by the judges,
who, in criminal prosecutions for libel, confined the
jury to the mere question of publication, thus taking
the real issue into their own hands, and making them-
selves the arbiters of the fate of those who were so
unfortunate as to be placed at their bar. And, what
many will think not the least of his merits, he was
the first in that long line of financial reformers to
whom we are deeply indebted. Notwithstanding
the difficulties thrown in his way, he carried through
Parliament a series of Bills by which several useless
places were entirely abolished, and, in the single
office of paymaster-general, a saving effected to the
country of £25,000 a year.' 1

This is a notable record, and in the light of it,
as supplement to his general doctrine as to the

1 Buckle's History of Civilisation, vol. i. p. 462.

CONSERVATISM 79

causation of the human mind, it is the most natural
thing in the world that the reader of Burke should
feel inclined to press the question why the radical
reformers who followed Price or Paine should be
resisted and vilified, when they were only doing
their best to carry reform into the political con-
stitution with the same thoroughness with which
Burke himself had dealt with matters — slavery, for
instance, or freeing of trade, or economic reform —
not less important to the happiness of a people.

This question, however, is not without its answer ;
and this lies along quite definite lines. It turns^ in
fact, upon the two closely related convictions :
firstly, that a civil society, just because it is a highly
developecTorganism, is peculiarly vulnerable ; and
secondly, that though the minds and wills of men may
play their part., and that part far from slight, in the
growth and conservation of states, they may be all
too easily perverted into the instruments of social
disintegration and misery. For not only was Burke,
with the wide outlook of a student of history, alive
to the fact that nations and even civilisations have
perished in the past, and may perish in the future ;
he came to believe, especially in the lurid light of
events in France, that they may disintegrate with
an incalculable and calamitous rapidity. It is
easy to say that his fears were excessive ; easy to
contend (in the light of what has happened since)
that neither England nor Europe was really on the

80 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

brink of the ' red ruin and the breaking up of laws/
which was his dream by night and his spectre by
day ; easy to point out that the conjuncture of
conditions which precipitated events in France did
not exist in Great Britain. Yet it does not follow
that his fears were theoretically unreasonable. For
what is it but the truth, and not a little of the
tragedy of human life is due to it, that all the slow
and hardly won results of organic growth may be
in many ways undone at a stroke ? It is so in
vegetable and animal life, when blight and parasit-
ism do their swift, insidious work. It is so with a
["human character which, fashioned by the fostering
I care of years, may be precipitated towards declen-
; sion by a single, sudden, grievous lapse. It is so in
commerce, when a great business, built up by years
of industry, may be ruined by the speculative folly
of an hour. Is it not so also in the life of states, in
which the sensitive complexity of social structure
offers to the turbulent wills of their members oppor-
tunities of working mischief on the largest scale %
For it is not to be denied that human wills may assert
themselves in what Burke regarded as a fatally
wrong way. They may shut their eyes to the
experience of the past, and scoff at the teaching of
history, as Paine and Godwin and Bentham did.
They may glory, as these men gloried, in an ignorant
irreverence for ancient institutions. They may
prefer, with light hearts, to fling all their energies

CONSERVATISM 81

into new beginnings ; and if they have the courage
of their convictions, they may proceed, after the
fashion of the men of 1789, to realise their ideals
forthwith, if need be, by pike and guillotine. It is
at such times that states may be undone by the very
agencies, the wills of men, which, duly restrained
and rightly directed, might have become the proxi-
mate causes of national strength, stability, and
happiness. This was the fear that seems to have
haunted Burke in his later years. His conception
of society as organic never led him to think that
constitutions grow like plants or animals, or to fail
to realise that political parties, and even individuals,
can leave their mark on a social system. But he1
also realised, with an acute perception, that inter-
ference with a social system is one thing, and the
control of the results of mlerlerence another. TofT
many, it is to be feared, fail to recognise the depth
of the distinction. For it is the snare of all reformers
to succumb to the illusion that their control of the
movements which they initiate is in proportion to
the energy, honesty, and hopefulness of their initi-
ative. They fail to make allowance for the extent
to which the life of a nation all the while goes on its
own way, not of course uninfluenced by the efforts
of politicians to direct it, yet nevertheless obedient
to forces which remain imperfectly under control.
Statesmen have before now enacted a Corn Law —
to discover after many days that they were starving

F

/

82 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

a people ; or passed a Poor Law — to leave posterity
to find out that they were pauperising a community.
Or a company of merchants have established a
trading company, all unaware that they were
annexing a dependency or preparing the way for
a protectorate. Or reformers may press forward
radical measures till they have, all unwittingly,
pressed them across the line that parts reform from
revolution. One may not say that the initiative is
easy, but it is sometimes child's play as compared
with the control of what has been initiated. For
there is a chemistry of politics as well as of labora-
tories ; and the new combinations of human ele-
ments and reagents may liberate, if not create,
unexpected forces such as even the most far-sighted
political manipulators cannot foresee, and still less
control. Beyond a doubt Danton and Robe-
spierre believed they were reconstructing the French
state ; what neither they nor the collective wisdom
of the Convention saw was that they were unchaining
a spirit which was, in brief space, to carry them
whither they would not, and to end by devouring
them and their following. ' How unknown is a
man, or a body of men to itself/ exclaims Carlyle,
moralising upon the irony of Fate that used the
revolutionists for its purposes, not for theirs. It
was no abnormal phenomenon. It is a common-
place, because it is a common experience, of all
political life that political forces seldom observe

CONSERVATISM 83

the limits or follow the forecasts of those who set
them in motion.

It is at any rate in reflections such as these that
we must seek the explanation of the distrust, and
even the terror, of all root and branch work which
at once illumined and darkened the later post-
Revolution years of Burke's life. For never by
the methods of the Jacobins, nor by any approxima-
tion thereto, was it possible, according to his life-
long conception of human affairs, for any genuine
amelioration of man's lot to be achieved. The
facts of human nature, the constitution of a people,
the laws of social growth were all against it. The
thing might, of course, be tried, but it could not
be done. For of nothing was Burke more convinced,
in his energies of reform no less than in his energies
of resistance to reform, than that no political work
could stand, nor any people advance by a single
step towards happiness, unless reform, if reform
must needs come, was cautious, gradual, reverent
of the past, appreciative of the present, and ruled
by the central principle that the actual performance
of the constitution, whatever its defects, was im-
measurably preferable to the untried projects and
promises of radical reformers.

We have still, however, to see that what for
these reasons was judged impracticable was likewise
deemed undesirable. The attempt must fail. But,
for other reasons besides the certainty of failure,

84 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

with all the disasters it was sure to carry in its
train, the attempt ought never to be made. This
is a point of vital moment. For it brings us
back1 to the fact that Burke's conservatism was
begotten not only of the analogies of organic growth,
nor of his generalised knowledge of men and affairs,
nor yet of his fears of radical ' architects of ruin/
but of his religious convictions.

(b) The Undesir ability of Radical Reform

For the last word, and the deepest, of Burke's
conservatism has not yet been said. If it were so,
his political doctrine would be written only in two
chapters ; the alarmist chapter of fears, and the
persuasive chapter which would convince us that,
by the very constitution of human nature on the
one hand, and of civil society on the other, advance
must inevitably be slow ; fear of the ruin rash wills
may work, and acceptance of those actualities of
social existence which come fortified by the analogy
of organisms, and accredited by the wisdom and
experience of past generations.

But Burke's horizon as a thinker is no't thus
limited. He moves, as we have said, in a larger
and more philosophical orbit. Nor does he rest
till he has linked on his conception of a people
to those presuppositions of sweeping generality
already indicated — none other than those involved
1 P. 14.

CONSERVATISM 85

in the assumption that the course of history and the ^
destinies of nations are guided by the providence of /
God, and that therefore the constitution of a state!
is ultimately the result of spiritual forces which are 1
eternal and supreme. Writers on Burke have
rightly dwelt on his preference for the historical 1
method, on his constant appeal to the experience of I
men and nations, on his fruitful application of bio-
logical analogies to the state. And, justifiably
enough, they have on these grounds enrolled him in
the ranks of inductive historical thinkers.1 But the
truth is (as we have already ventured to suggest)
that, in the last resort, his method is deductive.
What else can be said of a thinker who not only
avows a passionate theistic creed, but applies this
creed with such assiduity that neither his conser-
vative faith nor his conservative fear can be ade-
quately understood apart from it ? Nothing can
be more evident, indeed, than that Burke's politi-
cal teaching, however firmly grounded in historical
and analogical methods, does not find its final
explanation in them.

This, to be sure, is a strong statement. But
will any reader of Burke condemn it as too strong,
when he recalls the sustained and closely reasoned
passage — and it is only one of many lesser passages

1 E.g. Professor Graham, who in his English Political Philo-
sophy calls the Reflections ' the first English book in which the
new Historical Method of inquiry and explanation is employed,'
p. 92.

86 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

— in which this linking-up of political doctrine to
religious faith finds its fullest expression. It comes
in the context of the Appeal from the New to the Old
Whigs, when he is urging the characteristic and
highly conservative doctrine that it is the situation
of the individual, far more truly than his choice,
that is the arbiter of his duties :
fi Taking it for granted that I do not write to the
•disciples of the Parisian philosophy, I may assume
| that the awful Author of our being is the Author of
| our place in the order of existence ; and that, having
I disposed and marshalled us by a Divine tactic, not
according to our will, but according to His, He has in
and by that disposition, virtually subjected us to act
the part which belongs to the place assigned us. We
have obligations to mankind at large, which are not
in consequence of any special voluntary pact. They
arise from the relation of man to man, and the rela-
tion of man to God, which relations are not matters
of choice. On the contrary, the force of all the pacts
which we enter into with any particular person or
number of persons amongst mankind depends upon
those prior obligations. In some cases the subordinate
relations are voluntary, in others they are necessary
j— but the duties are all compulsive. When we marry,
jthe choice is voluntary, but the duties are not matter
fcf choice. They are dictated by the nature of the
situation. Dark and inscrutable are the ways by
which we come into the world. The instincts which

CONSERVATISM 87

give rise to this mysterious process of nature are
not of our making. But out of physical causes,
unknown to us, perhaps * unknowable, arise moral
duties which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend,
we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents
may not be consenting to their moral relation ; but,
consenting or not, they are bound to a long train
of burthensome duties towards those with whom
they have never made a convention of any sort.
Children are not consenting to their relation, but
their relation, without their actual consent, binds
them to its duties ; or rather it implies their consent,
because the presumed consent of every rational
creature is in unison with the predisposed order of;
things.' And the whole passage (which cannot
further be quoted) winds up with the words : ' If
you ask, Quern te Deus esse jussit ? you will be
answered when you resolve this other question,
Humana qua parte locatus es in re ? ' x

It is impossible to regard this as other than one of
the most important passages in Burke's writings.
The more so because it is only what we might ex-
pect from the study of his life. For religion was
from first to last so central a fact in his outlook upon
the world that it would be strange indeed if he were
minded to leave it on the shore when he embarked
on the sea of politics. It is needless to enlarge on this.
His own avowals are decisive : ' We know, and what

1 Appeal,

88 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

is better, we feel inwardly that religion is the basis
of civil society, and the source of all good and of
all comfort.' * ' On that religion,' he declares else-
where, referring to Christianity, ' according to our
mode, all our laws and institutions stand as upon
their base.' 2

Hence we may expect to find, and indeed it would
be wonderful were it otherwise, that this theistic faith
not only colours but saturates his political doctrine
through and through. Far more, indeed, than a
reader might gather from the many wise and charm-
ing pages by which Lord Morley has earned the
gratitude of every student of Burke — if one may
venture thus to suggest what savours of criticism of
a conscript father of literature. ' This brings me,'
says Lord Morley, ' to remark a really singular trait.
In spite of the predominance of practical sagacity,
of the habits and spirit of public business, of vigorous
actuality in Burke's character, yet at the bottom
of all his thoughts about communities and govern-
ments there lay a certain mysticism. ... He was
using no otiose epithet, when he described the dis-
position of a stupendous wisdom " moulding together
ijthe great mysterious incorporation of the human
irace." To him there actually was an element of
/ mystery in the cohesion of men in societies, in poli-
j tical obedience, in the sanctity of contract ; in all
I that fabric of law and charter and obligation, whether

1 Reflections. 2 Regicide Peace, Letter iv.

CONSERVATISM 89

written or unwritten, which is the sheltering bul-i
work between civilisation and barbarism. When
reason and history had contributed all that they
could to the explanation, it seemed to him as if the
vital force, the secret of organisation, the binding
framework, must still come from the impenetrable
regions beyond reasoning and beyond history.' 1

In one particular this passage is unimpeachable.
It recognises explicitly enough the theistic meta-
physic that lies behind Burke's politics. But why
should this be regarded as ' a really singular trait ? '
Practicality and religious faith are not necessarily
divorced. Grant that to many minds theism and
politics lie far apart, and that from some minds the
theism has vanished. Yet these two classes do not
exhaust the universe of political discourse. Cer-
tainly the philosophers of history, both in France
and Germany, have for the most part regarded it as
neither singular nor impossible to find a place for
Divine agency in human affairs. And, apart from
them, what are we to say of Plato, Coleridge, Hegel,
Carlyle, Mazzini, and T. H. Green ? They are diverse
enough, and their diversity makes it all the more
striking that they are at one in being constrained,
by such light of reason as was in them, to discern in
the political life of nations the action of more than
merely secular forces. None of these, hardly even
Carlyle, was much in love with ' the impenetrable

1 Burke in • English Men of Letters,' p. 165.

90 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

regions beyond reasoning,' if there be such. None
of them ever doubted that Reason assured him that
society rests on spiritual, foundations. To ignore
this would be to dismiss spiritual idealism without
a hearing.

Similarly with Burke. The vision of God, the
faith in ' stupendous wisdom,' the belief in a ' Divine
tactic ' in history were inwoven with his whole inter-
pretation of experience and outlook on the world.
And though, being neither theologian nor meta-
physician, he never dreamed of proving these con-
victions (therein, no doubt, disclosing his limits as
a thinker), this does not touch the fact that he carried
them with him, with a passionate insistence, into
his politics. Apart from them his thought and his
utterance are in large measure unintelligible.

This becomes evident when we recall the intensity
of his antipathy to radical reform. For his con-
tention here is not merely that reformers can do
little to construct, however easy they may find it
to destroy, but that, beyond comparatively narrow
limits, they ought not to try. The limitations he
would lay upon them are more than those imposed
by the practical difficulties and dangers of their
attempts. They are moral and religious. They
arise from the fact that ' the place of every man
determines his duty,' and that these duties of one's
station are to be accepted, not because we cannot,
if we will, revolt against them, but because in respect

CONSERVATISM 91

of the fundamental relationships at any rate, we have
been ' disposed and marshalled by a Divine tactic/
and thereby ' virtually subjected to act the part
which belongs to the place assigned us.' Few writers
have gone further than Burke in this direction.
Almost, at times, he would persuade us that it is a
sin to lay a finger on the ark of the constitution.
He tells us that ' duties are not voluntary ' : he adds
that ' duty and will are even contradictory terms ' ; *
and though we may quarrel with the ethical ter-
minology, it is none the less well fitted to emphasise
the rigour of the restraints of moral and political,
which are also for him those of religious, obligation.
Nor is this a merely general attitude. On the con-
trary it determines his position in respect of specific
questions of the first magnitude. We may take
these, briefly, in turn, and first that reverence for
the past which is perhaps the characteristic of Burke's
writings best known to the general reader.

1 Appeal.

CHAPTER VI

THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS

In nothing is Burke more pre-eminently in harmony
with the spirit of the nineteenth century than in that
reverence for the past, for lack of which the writers
of the eighteenth have been severely handled even
by latter-day radicals. ' No one,' says Mill, in his
great essay on Coleridge, ' can calculate what
struggles, which the cause of improvement has yet
to undergo, might have been spared, if the philo-
sophers of the eighteenth century had done anything
like justice to the past.' Burke at any rate did
justice to it. His very name is a symbol for reverence
towards all that is old and venerable. Who has not
met the familiar words that ' people will not look
forward to posterity who never look backward to
their ancestors ' ? Who fails to recognise the almost
equally familiar declaration : ' We fear God ; we
look up with awe to kings ; with affection to parlia-
ments ; with duty to magistrates ; with reverence
to priests ; and with respect to nobility ' ? And
what reader can forget the passages which come
crowding on the memory in defence and laudation of

92

THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS 93

prescription ? ' Prescription is the most solid of all
titles, not only to property, but, which is to secure
that property, to government.' ' All titles ter-
minate in prescription. ' ' Nor is prescription of
government formed upon blind unmeaning pre-
judices— for man is a most unwise and most wise
being. The individual is foolish ; . . . but the species
is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it
almost always acts right.' * Nor does he hesitate
again and again to hold a brief even for prejudice,
which indeed, if only it be inveterate, has never had
an apologist to equal him. ' Prejudice/ he writes,
J* is of ready application in the emergency ; it pre-
viously engages the mind in a steady course of wis-
?dom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitat-
Mng in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled,
jand unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue
I his habit ; and not a series of unconnected acts. I
' Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of i
j his nature.' 2 He even goes a step further. Nothing
is easier than to find sentences in which he urges
what sounds like a surrender of individual judgment
altogether in the presence of principles and insti-
tutions which come clothed in the loyalties and
experiences of successive generations. Three may
suffice. In one he declares himself obliged ' by an
infinitely overwhelming balance of authority, to
prefer the collective wisdom of ages to the abilities

1 Speech, May 7, 1782. * Reflections.

94 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

of any two men living.' * In the second he makes
the characteristic confession : ■ We are afraid to put
men to live and trade each on his own private stock
of reason ; . . . individuals would do better to
avail themselves of the general bank and capital
of nations and of ages.' 2 The third is even more
pronounced : * Thanks to our sullen resistance to
innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our
national character, we still bear the stamp of our
forefathers. . . . We know that we have made no
discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to
be made, in morality ; nor many in the great prin-
ciples of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which
were understood long before we were born, alto-
gether as well as they will be after the grave has
heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the
silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert
loquacity.' 3

It is needless, however, to labour this point.
These passages are sufficient to justify us in taking
many others to a like effect as read, and in going
on to inquire into the grounds upon which this
reverential, and, as some might think, this all too
deferential attitude to the past may be said to
rest, f And this is the more important because it

/is so easy to surrender to the notion (not, one sus-
pects, uncommon) that Burke is simply the preju-
diced prophet of authority — the authority of usages

1 Regicide Peace, Letter in. 2 Reflections. 3 Ibid.

THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS 95

and institutions and beliefs that stand sponsored by
old use and wont and the wisdom of ancestors.

This, however, would be a flagrant misinter-
pretation. For, if we are to characterise Burke by
a single epithet, that epithet would not be apostle
of authority. As already suggested,1 it would be
apostle of ' prudence.' Grant that the appeal to
prescription is strong, sweeping, and at times almost
unqualified; it is nevertheless not final. It does
not really involve the deposition of that reason
which he declared, as we have seen,2 to be alone
1 sovereign ' in all matters political. For, when all
is said, it is not reverence that is the mother of the
virtues ; it is ' prudence.' And where this virtue
of the practical reason is supreme, there can be no
such thing as the surrender of the judgment in
presence even of the most venerated authorities.
That this holds true of Burke we can see in more
ways than one. We can see it, for example, in
his handling of precedents. Of course he is fond of
citing precedents. One of the greatest of his pieces,
the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, suggests-
this by its very title. And it lies on the surfa<
that he assigns to precedents a value which was
Tom Paine a stumbling-block, and to Benthai
foolishness. But he is not for that reason to
confused with those lawyers of politics to whom a
precedent is a solution. ' Cases,' he says, ' are dead

1 P. 38 el scq. 5 I>. 42.

96 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

things, principles are living and productive.' * For
the genuine value of precedents, on his view of them,
lies not in their being reproducible in the letter,
which indeed is usually impossible in face of changed
circumstances, but in their serving to enlighten the
practical judgment, as object-lessons of the ways
in which men of affairs go to meet their problems.
Nor does it need much proof that the man whose
practical judgment is alive, the man in whom
' prudence ' is truly the mother of the political
virtues, is at the opposite pole from that of the
precedent-ridden lawyer of politics. ' Legislators
ought to do what lawyers cannot.' 2

The same line of thought recurs in Burke's esti-
mate of the value of the study of history. He loved
history. He even aspired to write history. But
this did not prevent him from laughing at the
shallow partisans who would degrade history into
an arsenal of controversial weapons, or from despis-
ing the pedants who, blind to the incalculable
combinations of circumstance, expect to find in the
past ready-made solutions of difficulties which
every man of affairs must meet for himself. ' Not
that I derogate from the use of history. It is a
great improver of the understanding, by showing
both men and affairs in a great variety of views.
From this source much political wisdom may be
learned ; that is, may be learned as habit, not as

1 Observations. 2 Letter to the Sheriffs.

THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS 07

precept ; and as an exercise to strengthen the mind
as furnishing materials to enlarge and enrich it, not
as a repertory of cases and precedents for a lawyer :
if it were, a thousand times better would it be that
a statesman had never learned to read.' ■

Similarly in his attitude towards the authority of
great names or venerable institutions : though rever-
ential to the verge of superstition, it is not slavish.
He never abdicates, nor would he have any states-
man abdicate, his rational judgment. ' Prudence
in new cases/ he says, ' can do nothing on grounds
of retrospect. ' 2 And if, as in some of the passages
cited above, he counsels a self -distrust which is not
easy to distinguish from surrender, this attitude
was one which he was firmly convinced was dic-
tated by reason itself. For his liturgy to the past i
is inspired not by the mere love of bygone things — /
he protests again and again that he is no antiquarian
— nor yet, in more than part, by the sentiment and]
romance that gathered round all that was old and*
venerable to a mind like Scott's. It has a deeper,
a more practical, and a more rational root in two
further convictions which go hand-in-hand in his
scheme of things.

(a) The one of these is that every institution, I
nay, every prejudice that has long held its ground,!
is a deposit of experience — the experience which I

1 Remarks on the Policy of the Allies,
1 Thoughts on French Affairs.
G

98 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

the many minds and hands of successive genera-
tions have been hoarding up in ' the bank and capital
of nations, and of the ages.' Here are his words :
' Then what is the standard of expedience ? Ex-
pedience is that which is good for the community
and good for every individual in it. Now, this
expedience is the desideratum to be sought either
without the experience of means, or with that
experience. If without, as in the case of the fabri-
cation of a new commonwealth, I will hear the
learned arguing what promises to be expedient ; but
if we are to judge of a commonwealth actually
existing, the first thing I enquire is what has been
found expedient or inexpedient. And I will not
take their promise rather than the performance of
the constitution.' 1 Nowhere is his position put
with greater clearness. Expedience is the ultimate
end. So far his face was to the future. So far he
was, in a sense,2 a utilitarian. But to this there
are two qualifications : the one — on which enough
has been said — that expedience always means, in
his vocabulary, what is expedient for a people as
an organic whole ; the other, that it is only in and
through the long and gradual process of social
organisation that discovery is made of the institu-
tions and the principles of civil and religious liberty
whereby the expedient can best be realised. Not
that he ever thought ' the performance of the
i Speech, May 7, 1782. * P. 49,

THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS 99

constitution ' to be faultless. He was well aware
that perfection was not to be found in it, nor in any
other human contrivance. No, he was only con-
vinced that with all its corruptions, to which he
by no means closed his eyes, it had experimentally
proved itself immeasurably better than anything
that radical reform had to put in its place.

(b) But, then, we must not suppose that experi-
ence, ' the arguments of states and kingdoms ' as
he called it, weighed for so much simply because TtTN
ejoabodied the experience of ancestors. There was I
(the further reason that the experience of a people*/
|as disclosed in t^e nrmraft nf its historyi was regarded/ \ /
by him as providentially guided. In his eyes it
was nothing less than * the known march of the
oro^nar^^piovidencc of GocL' * Had it been merely
Isecular experience, it would have been much ; but
as experience with the Divine imprimatur, it was
immeasurably more.

It is here that Burke is at the opposite pole to
that of the radicals, both of his own day and of that
which was immediately to follow. The past was
nothing to them. To the irreverent soul of Paine
history was nothing but a horrid spectacle of
4 ruffian torturing ruffian.' To the practical mind
of Bentham, to whom the ' wisdom of ancestors
was the wisdom of the cradle, it was of value only

1 ' The rules of prudence, which are formed upon the known
march of the ordinary providence of God.' — Regicide Peace,
Letter el

100 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

in so far as something might be learnt from its
follies and its crimes. Nor was it enough for Burke
to escape these lamentable limitations by insisting,
as Mill did at a later day, that reformers must learn
to do justice to the past, or, with the evolutionists
of the nineteenth century, that past and present are
inseparable phases of one continuous development.
Nothing could satisfy him short of the faith that
the whole drama of a nation's life was the revelation
of a ' Divine tactic' He does not prove his point.
He does not dream of attempting to prove it. He
made no claim to furnish a philosophy of history.
But there can be no doubt at all that it was an
unalterable conviction, apart from which his pro-
found reverence for the past can neither be under-
stood nor justified.

Hence, too, the peculiar passion of detestation
which all too freely suffused his polemic against
the radical reformers for their contempt for the
lessons of history. Not only were they setting at
nought the experience of their species ; they were
guilty, in his eyes, of a kind of practical atheism.
Hence, too, the ferocity of his invective. It is not
politics. It is not toleration. It is not charity.
But it is intelligible. For he who habitually sees
in the constitution under which he rejoices to live
nothing less than the handiwork of God, will cer-
tainly be more tempted than his more secularly
minded neighbours to denounce radical reforms as

THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS 101

1 prodigies of sacrilege.' This, of course, must not
be taken to mean that he stigmatised all radicals
as atheists, though the word flows so easily from
his pen as almost to suggest it. On the contrdJy
he remarks, when assailing Dr. Price in the Reflec-
tions, that the signal for revolutions has often been
given from pulpits. But there can be no doubt
at all that he regarded radicalism, whether in
pulpits or out of them, as both in its principles and
methods antagonistic to ' the known march of the
ordinary providence of God.'

It is this indeed which raises one of the most
serious difficulties which the student of Burke
encounters. So masterful is the force of his religious
faith, that it becomes difficult to reconcile his fears
for the future with a faith so masterful. For if the
experience of the past bears witness so convincingly
to Divine plan and agency, this surely might seem to
carry the suggestion that the political theories of
radicalism, especially if they be as ill-grounded as
he declares them to be, are not likely to seriously
turn aside the march of the providence of God. Is
the arm of omnipotence to be shortened ? Is
Divine control to cease with the eighteenth century
of the Christian era ? Is Whig ascendency the one
way given under heaven and among men for political
salvation ? If the essence of religion be, as it has
been well defined, a ' faith in the conservation of
values,' why all these dire forebodings that all that

102 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

is most precious in England, and even in civilisation,
will crumble and perish before radical assault ?
These are questions that cannot be repressed. Nor
are they questions which it is easy to answer. For
if Divine agency in human affairs is to be invoked
at all, it must be supposed to operate continuously
and throughout. And if it be affirmed, as by Burke
it is affirmed, that it has operated all through the
past, so that its achieved results are the object of
all but idolatry, it might not unreasonably be
inferred that it would need something more deadly
than radicals and radical ideals, which after all
Burke himself not seldom treats with contempt,
to plunge the future in a godless anarchy.

Burke's inferences, however, took a different

| direction. *At an early stage he had come to the

{conviction, which steadily grew upon him to the

| end of his days, that the Revolution was something

I far more formidable than a merely political move-

! ment. In its inspiration, in its leaders, in its aims,

! he believed it to have struck an unholy alliance

j with infidelity and atheism. He calls it 'atheism by

establishment.' I Nor did he entertain the shadow of

a doubt that, were it suffered to run its course, it

would not only subvert political institutions but rob

the world of its religious faith. And whatever he may

have thought of the avowed theism of Rousseau or

Price or Paine, of which he cannot have been ignor-

1 Regicide Peace, Letter i.

THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS 103

ant, it certainly did nothing, even in the slightest
degree, to qualify this forecast. The result followed.
His religious faith in the providence of God in his-
tory, which we might expect would have allayed
his fears, had an opposite effect. It intensified
them. As the manifest object of revolutionary
assault, it gave a deeper and more menacing signi-
ficance to the radical attack upon political insti-
tutions. For it is never to be forgotten that a
religious faith was, for Burke, far more than ' the
source of all hope and all comfort ' to private lives ;
it was also, and always, the foundation ' upon which
all our laws and institutions stand as upon their
base.' This must be already evident ; but it
will be more evident still when we turn to his\
uncompromising insistence upon the limits of
Discussion and Toleration.

CHAPTER VII

THE LIMITATIONS OF DISCUSSION AND TOLERATION

(a) The Limits of Political Discussion

There is much in Burke's life to encourage the ex-
pectation that he would prove himself an apostle
of free discussion. Few men of his day, not even
Johnson, indulged in discussion more than he. We
know from Boswell how discussion ranged and raged
at the club : the sound of it re-echoes still. And
none of us can forget that tribute, wrung from the
dictator who nightly bore all down before him,
though to be sure it was only because he felt himself
below par when he made the admission : ' That
fellow calls forth all my powers. Were I to see
Burke now, it would kill me.' Nor were these
evenings of the gods limited to topics political. For
though the keen wits and good-fellowship that
gathered together at the Turk's Head were in a
measure restrained from the audacities, irresponsi-
bilities and levities which, among the illuminati of
French salons, as well as in the obscurer circles of
the English free-thinkers, of whom Godwin and his
friends were typical, pushed argument and epigram

DISCUSSION AND TOLERATION 105

freely into the spiritual world, even a cursory glance
at Boswell's pages is proof that the range was wide.
And, when we turn to politics, we have already seen
how, all his life through, Burke could not deal with
any question without pushing it far into the region
of principles. No man, it is safe to say, ever dis-
cussed politics as he did, none so persistently, none
with such eloquence and penetration, none with
more determination to go to the root of the matter.
In his later years, when the Revolution had still
more freely opened up the ways of utterance, he
could hardly discuss anything else than the very
foundations of civil society. Whatever the topic, it
was always, in these later days of fiery controversy,
sure to return to that.

And yet it is not to Burke that we must go to
find the case for freedom of discussion. He is not
to be classed, in this respect, with Milton or Mill.
Not freedom to discuss, but the limits which dis-
cussion is bound to recognise — this is the central
theme.

This was doubtless due, in part at any rate, to
what he saw on a visit to France. For he had gone
over to Paris in 1773, and had seen there at close
quarters the spectacle of a society in which every-
thing was discussed — a society which, to use Lord
Morley's words, ' babbled about God and state of
nature, about virtue and the spirituality of the soul,
much as Boswell may have done when Johnson

106 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

f complained of him for asking questions that would
make a man hang himself.' x The impression left
on the reverent spirit of Burke was indelibly re-
pulsive. And, in due season, though not without
a reinforcing revulsion against similar tendencies
in England, it bore its fruit in the decisive declara-
on : 'It has been the misfortune (not, as these
ntlemen think it, the glory) of this age that
ery thing is to be discussed.' 2 00000J

Why did he think so ? Why did this protagonist
in discussion thus lift up his testimony against
discussion ?

Partly, one can see, it is simply that familiar
phenomenon, the practical man's impatience of end-
less debate, born of the perception that the zealot
for criticism and discussion, in his fanatical in-
ability to know when to desist, may, by the assertion
of freedom to discuss, fatally obstruct that freedom
to act which is of the essence of all liberty that is
not to be volubly barren of deeds. Burke has put
the point in a passage which might with advantage
be engraved on the lintels of all latter-day legis-
lative assemblies. Is it because it is so well known
and taken for granted, that it has been so seldom
quoted ? ' I must first beg leave just to hint to
you that we may suffer very great detriment by
being open to every talker. It is not to be imagined
how much of service is lost from spirits full of

1 Morley's Bouseeau, p. 130. 2 Reflections.

DISCUSSION AND TOLERATION 107

activity, and full of energy, who are pressing, who
are rushing forward to great and capital issues,
when you oblige them to be continually looking
back. Whilst they are defending one service, they
defraud you of a hundred. Applaud us when we
run ; console us when we fall ; cheer us when we
recover ; but let us pass on — for God's sake let us
pass on.' * Seldom has the case against verbose
obstruction and obstructive verbosity been so
forcibly put.

This, however, is rather a question of common
sense and tactics than of principle. It is a different
and a more serious matter when we turn to the
kind of discussion that takes the form of political
casuistry ; for of political casuistry Burke has not
only a rooted but a reasoning suspicion. Not that
he could, or would, rule it altogether out. Like every
student of history and every man of affairs, he is
well aware that cases occur — difficult cases, critical
cases, casuistical cases, in which it seems impossible
to do the right without doing violence to some time-
honoured obligation. It is so, clearly enough, in
the hour of impending revolution, when men are
asking themselves fearfully if the Rubicon has to
be crossed ; and, far short of this, it is so also when
the honest citizen finds himself in conscientious con-
flict with the behests of his party, the policy of his
country, and the law of the land. None knew

1 Speech at Bristol, 1780.

108 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

better than Burke that such emergencies must be
faced and dealt with. He was not blind to the fact
that even revolutions must sometimes come. How
could he be, when from first to last he was the
pologist of 1688 ? How could he be, when he dis-
ussed the whole question of the revolt of the
merican colonies as it never has been discussed ?
d when the catastrophe of 1789 burst upon
Europe, least of all men did he fail to face it, and
discuss it to the uttermost. The thing he feared and
hated was, therefore, not that even supreme issues
should be discussed, when events had forced them
to the front, but that they should be rashly raised
and cried upon the house-tops by irresponsible
politicians (or those he took to be such), who, without
the justification of dire emergency, were ready to
raise questions that went to the roots of political
allegiance. This was the accusation he fastened

ton the radicals. They were all alike in his eyes,
traffickers in extremes and rash dabblers in a
pernicious political casuistry. They were for ever
calling in question the fundamental obligations of
civil society ; for ever preaching up the rights of
revolution ; for ever arguing in ultimatums ; for
ever eager to administer the extreme medicine of
the state as if it were its daily bread. This was
what Burke denounced with an unsparing invec-
tive. He had a horror of it that is all but morbid ;
for, in his eyes, it could eventuate in only one

DISCUSSION AND TOLERATION 109

result. It would destroy for ever that unsuspecting/
confidence in the law and the constitution, upon]
which all political stability reposed. It would leave
nothing that was not to be called in question. It
would habituate men's minds to the thought of the
violation of obligations which ought never to be
shaken, except when the worst comes to the worst.
It would end, to use his own pregnant words, by!
' turning men's duties into doubts.' At a later I
day, Mill was to plead for all but unlimited dis-J
cussion as the great vitaliser of convictions, and asl
the one adequate security against 'the profound!
slumber of a decided opinion.' But Burke could\
see little of this. The ' prpfrmn^ , filmy *^r nf » de- 1 . ""
cided opinion ' was so far from carrying any terrors I
for him that it was rather welcomed as a symptom!
of political health. ThjvHj^Rfi fthnnlri hg^gmf^-ftftn1
victions, and convictica^sj^ijnejits^na^xeyen that
sentiments should p««« ip*n prejudi m (if the pre-
judices were just)— this-wa^ tho oondition of moral
and social stability. And, by consequence, to
shake~^Ehis wholesome settledness of mind by the
doubts and discussions of political casuistry, was
the sure path to the undoing of the State. ' I con-
fess 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 valetudinarian ; it is taking periodical

110 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

doses of mercury sublimate, and swallowing down
repeated provocatives of cantharides to our love
of liberty.' *

Yet this is not the whole of Burke's case for
the limitation of discussion, for the passion of
his protests is not to be explained merely by the
fact that his conservative instincts and convictions
recoiled from calling in question fundamental
institutions. It turns on the further point that
these institutions, and the loyalties they evoked,
were always regarded by him as the work of that
1 stupendous wisdom ' by which the Disposer of all
things has been marshalling the human race not
according to their will, but according to His. For
from this it followed that, as soon as criticism and
controversy touched the fundamentals of the con-
stitution, they became by implication an attack
on that faith in the Divine government of the world,
which, as we have seen, was the foundation of Burke's
political religion. For it is characteristic of the
religious mind to resent and resist assaults upon
its settled valuations even more than upon its
dogmas. And when, as in Burke's case, these
valuations are political, two results are apt to
follow — the radical onslaught upon venerated in-
stitutions comes to be viewed as if it were an attack
upon religion itself ; and sceptical assault upon
religious faith to be reprobated as undermining the

1 Reflections.

DISCUSSION AND TOLERATION 111

basis of the constitution. Both results appear in
Burke. He resents and resists radicalism when it
would push discussion into constitutional principles
which (he thinks) ought never to be called in question,
because they stand sponsored not only by experi-
ence, but by Divine wisdom ; and he measures out
short shrift to atheists and infidels, because, by
striking at religious faith, they shake the foundations
of civil society. The first of these results appears
in his case for the limitations of political discussion ;
the second will appear when we turn to the well-worn
topic of toleration. The limitations upon it are not
less firm. Few great thinkers, indeed, have gone so )
far in using incomparable powers of discussion in
proving that toleration, as well as discussion, ought !
to have its limits.

(b) The Limits of Toleration

There is no writer in whom, were we free to select
some passages and to reject others, toleration finds
a nobler voice than in Burke. ' In proportion as
mankind has become enlightened, the idea of
religious persecution, under any circumstances, has
been almost universally exploded by all good and
thinking men.' * So he wrote in his tolerant Tracts
on the Popery Laws. Nor would half-measures
content him. Keenly alive to the distinction \
between the persecution of an ancient faith and the /

1 Tracts on the Popery Laws, c. iii. /

112 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

more excusable suppression of new opinions such as
might possibly initiate bitter civil dissensions, he
is not in the least disposed to palliate what he
calls the ' rotten and hollow ' policy of a ' preventive
persecution ' of the latter. The same spirit breathes
in other passages : | I take toleration to be a part
of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice.
I would keep them both.' * And in the spirit of
that utterance, he was ready to see some truth in
all forms of religious creed, and to recognise even
superstition as ' the religion of feeble minds.'
1 Toleration,' he elsewhere declares, in words that
might seem conclusive, * is good for all or it is good
for none.' 2 ]

And yeffhe same hand which wrote these catholic
avowals penned also two other sentences which have
a different ring. ' Against these ' (i.e. infidels) ' I
would have the laws rise in all their terrors. ... I
would cut up the very root of atheism.' This is
one : the other is not less emphatic : ' The infidels
are outlaws of the constitution ; not of this country,
but of the human race. They are never, never to
be supported, never to be tolerated.' 3

Those are ferocious sentences. But they are
not to be read on that account as if they were an
outburst of personal intolerance of atheistic or
infidel opinions as matter of private conviction.

1 Speech on relief of Protestant Dissenters, 1773.

2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.

"\

DISCUSSION AND TOLERATION 113

True though it be that Burke detested atheism and
infidelity, he was nevertheless in private life con-
spicuously tolerant in matters of religion. He
hated bigotry. He hated persecution. He prided
himself upon so doing. ' If ever there was anything
to which, from reason, nature, habit, and principle,
I am totally averse, it is persecution for conscien-
tious difference in opinion.' Such is his avowal.
And in the light of it, and the story of his life, we
need not entertain a doubt that had he believed
atheism and infidelity to have no further signifi-
cance than as matters of private opinion, he would
never have called upon the laws to rise in their
terrors, and cut them up by the root. It is a long
stride from hating opinions, with even a perfect
hatred, and invoking the law courts to extirpate
them.

But this is precisely what Burke never could
believe. Theism and Christianity were, in his
eyes, things more momentous far than the concerns
of private consciences. Not only was man, in his
psychology, ' by his constitution a jreligious-animal,'
and not only was atheism ' against not only our
reason but our instincts,' religious belief was (as
we have seen) a central fact in his conception of the
life of the State ; ' the basis of civil society, and the
source of all good and all comfort.' 1 ' On that
religion,' we have already heard him say, referring

1 Reflections.
B

114 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

to Christianity, ' according to our mode, all our
laws and institutions stand as upon their base.' *
These are his premisses, and in due course comes
the conclusion, drawn with an unfaltering confid-
ence : ' Religion is so far, in my opinion, from being
out of the province or duty of a Christian magis-
trate that it is, and ought to be, not only his care, but
the principal thing in his care ; because it is one of
the great bonds of human society.' ■ And should
it happen that this magisterial care should take the
form of visiting the terrors of the law upon the
atheist and the infidel, the justification must be
sought on the public ground that this is the needful

\ check upon a peculiarly insidious and deadly form
of political incendiarism.

Burke's position here, it may be granted, has,
now for some time, happily become untenable.
Of all methods for strengthening the religious bond
of human society the prosecution of free-thinkers
is the most forlorn. Conviction in a court of law,
whatever be the pains and penalties it carries in
its train, is impotent to turn the atheist into a
believer ; and the religious faith which claims as
its peculiar glory that it rests on the spontaneous
and unconstrained devotion of the soul to God, is
not likely to be recognised as the source of all good
and all comfort by seeking the ill-starred alliance
of fines and imprisonment. Nor is the Christian

1 Regicide Peace, Letter iv. * Speech, May 11, 1792.

DISCUSSION AND TOLERATION 115

magistrate to be envied who betakes himself to
that ' refutation by criminal justice,' which Burke
declared to be the refutation that the writings of
Tom Paine best deserved. He would quickly, in
our modern world at any rate, find himself hewing
a Hydra. The crafty and dishonest would easily
evade him. The sincere and outspoken unbeliever
would gain the dignity of the martyr for conscience'
sake. The sceptics would rise in protest in the
name of honest doubt. The constructive thinkers,
strong in their faith in reason, and conscious it
may be of the magnitude of their own departures
from orthodoxy, would catch alarm at the substi-
tution of force for argument. And, not least,
society, in whose best interests this persecution by
prosecution is, in Burke's view, justifiable, would
be continually plunged into all the disintegrating
embitterments of those conflicts between law and
private judgment, law and conscience, law and
individual reason, law and liberty, which furnish
some of the most miserably memorable, as well as
glorious chapters in human history. In truth, the
case for a toleration wide enough to include even the
aggressive atheist and the obtrusive infidel has,
under the hands of the apostles of freedom of thought
and discussion, become so strong, and almost so
much a matter of course, that the wonder grows
that a mind so rational as Burke's, and an experi-
ence so wide, should have advanced, and reiterated,

116 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

so monstrous a doctrine as that it is the duty of
the civil magistrate to cut up the root of atheism
and to brand infidels as outlaws of the constitution.

I If only he had held fast, and enlarged, his own great
declaration, that toleration is ' good for all or good

I for none ' !

There is, however, an explanation, and it appears
to he in two considerations.

1. The first is that, notwithstanding all his
rationality, Burke never adequately recognised the
place and value of speculative truth, and the con-
ditions of its pursuit, in national life. Though his
own reason, in alliance with imagination, was, in
the political sphere, essentially constructive, this
seemingly never suggested to him that free-thought
in its larger range was constructive in its essence
and results. We have already seen that his esti-
mate of ' modern philosophers ' was far from flatter-
ing ; and the same spirit appears in his belittlement
of the English deists. ' Who,' he contemptuously
asks, ' born within the last forty years, has read
one word of Collins and Toland and Tindall and
Chubb and Morgan, and that whole race who call
themselves Free-thinkers ? ' x All his experience
apparently suggested that speculative reason makes
for the disintegration of belief. It raised questions ;
it shook the unsuspecting confidence of time-
honoured convictions ; it turned men's duties into

1 Reflections.

DISCUSSION AND TOLERATION 117

doubts ; it bred l refining speculatists ' and danger-
ous atheists ; it led to Serbonian bogs. This was
what he had seen in Paris ; and this was what he
dreaded for England. And, against it all, he had
no faith in speculative philosophy to set as counter-
weight and corrective. He had early, and by
proclivity magnificently justified of its results,
turned away decisively from the speculative to the
practical life, and again and again he makes haste
to disclaim all pretensions to be a ' philosopher ' or
1 professor of metaphysics.' And not without
reason. For, so far at any rate as appears in life
or writings, he had but little acquaintance with
the great constructive efforts of Greek philosophy,
and still less with the philosophical systems of the
Continent, which indeed were still far below the
horizon of the English mind. Neither with the
Scottish philosophers (despite the passing project
of refuting Hume) nor with the English moralists
did he much concern himself ; and if, on occasion,
we might trace the influence of Locke, it is the
Locke as the apologist of 1688, and not the Locke
of the Essay on the Understanding. In short he had
nothing wherewith to meet the solvents of the
' French philosophy ' he dreaded, except his own
reflections upon life, fortified by a wide outlook on
history, a large knowledge of literature, and a com-
prehensive experience of men and affairs. And
these had seemingly convinced him, once and for

118 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

all, that the pursuit of truth may be dearly pur-
chased, if the price for it is the clash of controversy
and the unsettlement of convictions. ' I will not/
he writes in a significant passage, * enter into the
question how much truth is preferable to peace.
Perhaps truth may be far better. But as we have
scarcely ever the same certainty in the one we have
in the other, I would — unless the truth were evident
indeed — hold fast to peace which has in her company
charity the highest of the virtues.' x The passage
might, on a first glance, seem to breathe the spirit
of toleration ; for does it not speak of charity %
But in reality it tells in the opposite direction. For
when a man is ready to sacrifice truth to peace, he
is not likely to do justice to that assertion of freedom
to think, even at risk of atheism and infidelity,
which the pursuit of truth inexorably demands.

2. To this, however, we must add the further
point that the beliefs which the infidel and the(
atheist denied were never viewed by Burke as
merely religious : they were always regarded as
politically indispensable. Rightly or wrongly, he
was wholly convinced that the institutions he most
valued, however strongly buttressed by authority,
prescription, and traditional loyalty, could not sur-
vive the disintegration of religious faith. /The axe
was laid to the root of the tree from the moment
when political allegiance was divorced from those
1 Speech, Feb. 6, 1772.

DISCUSSION AND TOLERATION 119

religious beliefs and sentiments which are of the
essenoe of man as ' a religious animal.'

This is the ultimate ground of his intolerance.
Convinced that the religious consciousness of a
people could not be undetermined without shaking
the foundations of the commonwealth, he was not
content to urge that it was the duty of the states-
man to foster religion by Church establishment
and comprehensive toleration of all religious faiths.
He went on, in an evil hour for his reputation for
tolerance and charity, to erect the civil magistral
into the defender of the faith against
atheists. The best that can be said for
within his limits, he was tolerant enouj
a cheerful change to turn from these fulminations
against freedom of thought to the declaration that
all sorts of religion that exist within the State are to
be tolerated because * there is a reasonable worship
in them all.' ■

Even this catholic declaration, however, is to be
understood with two reservations : —

(1) The first is that Burke was always peculiarly
suspicious of any covert introduction of political
propagandism under the mask of pleas and claims for
religious liberty. Of this he furnishes significant
proof. In 1773 he had supported a Bill for the relief
of Protestant dissenters. He did this on the just
and reasonable ground (among others) that it is bad

1 Speech on Relief of Protestant Dissenters, 1773.

:epuiarion ior
vil magistrate
t infidels and^ \
>r him is that, *
Lgh ; and it is

120 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

policy to make difficulties for conscientious and
honest dissenters which ' atheists ' may only too easily
evade. ' These atheists,' he says, illustrating his
point from history, ' eluded all that you could do :
so will all free-thinkers for ever. Then you suffer,
or the weakness of your law has suffered, these great
dangerous animals to escape notice, whilst you have
nets that entangle the poor, fluttering, silken wings
of a tender conscience.' l But the scene changes.
In 1792 he opposes a similar petition from the Uni-
tarians ; not, however, because he had changed his
views on toleration, but because, rightly or wrongly,
he was convinced that the petition was, in its real
impelling motive, a political movement with poli-
tical designs behind it. It was, in short, all too
closely linked with the militant radicalism and
radicals of whom he was the irreconcilable foe.
His line of argument is hardly convincing ; and a
critic might suggest that it is not less intolerable
that political hostility and conservative fears should
develop opposition to the relief of the religious
conscience than that the religious conscience should
become politically aggressive. But it is character-
istic. Discerning in the Petition of 1792 a veiled
attack on the constitution, already menaced by
the spread of Jacobinism, and in particular on the
Church of England, to which the petitioners were
anything but friendly, he withstood it to the face,

1 Speech on Relief of Protestant Dissenters, 1773.

DISCUSSION AND TOLERATION 121

as, on his own avowal, he never would have dreamt
of withstanding it, had he regarded it as nothing
more than a movement for the relief of aggrieved
consciences.

(2) The second reservation is that toleration
-never meant for Burke, even in his most tolerant
mood, anything approaching to abstract religious
equality. He was ready, as we have seen, to tolerate
all religions ; he was willing to urge relief of Non-
conformist consciences ; he did not hesitate to
incur bitter odium, and even to sacrifice his seat,
by pleading, with an extraordinary persuasiveness,
for the relaxation of the penal laws that weighed
heavily on his Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen
in Ireland. But there he stopped. 4 Dissent not
satisfied with toleration,' he once said, ' is not con-
science but ambition.' * For it was, in his eyes,
ambition and not conscience that grudged the
Church of England as by law established either
her privileges, her national dignity, her endowments, i
or (we must add) her tests.

To understand this, however, we must turn to
his well-known plea for the political value of re-
ligion, and for Church establishment in particular.

1 Speech on the Acts of Uniformity, Feb. 1772.

CHAPTER VIII

RELIGION AND POLITICS

Burke's political religion has its roots deep in
three convictions. The first is that civil society
rests on spiritual foundations, being indeed nothing
less than a product of Divine will ; the second, that
this is a fact of significance so profound that the
recognition of it is of vital moment, both for the
corporate life of the State and for the lives of each
and all of its members ; and the third, that whilst
all forms of religion within the nation may play
their part in bearing witness to religion, this is
peculiarly the function of an Established Church,
in which the ' consecration of the State ' finds its
appropriate symbol, expression, and support.

On the first of these convictions it would be
needless to enlarge. Enough to reinforce what
has been already said by a single sentence which
contains the sum of the whole matter : ' They ' —
he is speaking of both reflecting and unreflective
men — ' conceive that He who gave our nature to
be perfected by our virtue, willed also the neces-
sary means of its perfection. He willed therefore
the State. He willed its connection with the

122

RELIGION AND POLITICS 123

source and original archetype of all perfection.' 1
It follows that the problem how to unite the secular
and the sacred in the life of the State, much as it
may perplex many minds, is not one that, in its
general aspect at any rate, troubles Burke. As
the product of Divine will and of the ' stupendous
wisdom ' that operates throughout the ages, the
State is in itself inherently and inalienably sacred.
It is not an institution, secular in its nature and
then made sacred by an ' alliance ' with a Church.
This is the very fallacy he rejects when touching
incidentally on the large and thorny topic of Church
and State : ' An alliance between Church and State
in a Christian commonwealth is, in my opinion, an
idle and a fanciful speculation. An alliance is be-
tween two things that are in their nature distinct and
independent, such as between two sovereign States.
But in a Christian commonwealth, the Church and ^
the State are one and the same thing, being different
integral parts of the same whole.' 2 And this
1 whole,' this State in the larger and more compre-
hensive sense of the word, is always, in its entire
constitution, and not merely in its ecclesiastical
institutions, however important and august, the
result of that ' Divine tactic ' which presides over
the evolution of a nation. It is needless, however,
to labour this point further. For if civil society
does not rest on theistic and (we may add) on

1 Reflections. 2 Speech, May 11, 1792.

124 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

Christian foundations, if it be not vitalised through
and through by the spirit of God, it must be evident
by this time that Burke's political, teaching is false
precisely where he most passionately believed it to
be true.

But if this be fact ; if God, Providence, stupen-
dous wisdom, Divine tactic, be of a verity thus
operative in the growth and gradual organisation
of civil society, it is not a matter to which the
citizens of any State can afford to shut their eyes.
On the contrary, its recognition by every citizen,
small or great, is fraught with results of momentous
significance. So, at least, Burke will have it.
And if we grant his premisses, his inference is un-
impeachable. It is not credible that the citizens
of any commonwealth can see the will of God in
the history of their country, in the institutions
under which they live, in the civic functions they
discharge, in the ends to which they give their
lives, without their attitude being influenced there-
by. With the belief that 'J>od willed the State,'
if it be indeed a real, and not a merely notional
belief, there inevitably comes a reverent and duti-
ful, and even at times a quietistic spirit, such as
can hardly be expected where the social system
is regarded as begotten, sustained, and sanctioned
by merely secular forces and a merely secular
utility. For however true it may be — and happily
there is no need to deny it — that even the most

RELIGION AND POLITICS 125

secularly minded of citizens may love his country,
respect its laws, and if need be lay down his life for
it, there must always be a difference in political
motive between him and his genuinely religious-
minded neighbour. For, of course, political motive,
like all motive, reflects the nature of the object that
evokes it ; and, so long as this is so, it is idle to
suppose that the citizen who accepts his station and
its duties as prescribed by the supreme object of
human worship will not be profoundly influenced
thereby. As man and as citizen, he will most cer-
tainly be different ; and there are no differences
between man and man that go deeper than differences
in constitution of motive.

But Burke goes much further than this. Not p
only did he believe that religion makes a difference ; |
he was convinced that it makes a better citizen. >
And the peculiar interest of his writings here lies, I ,
not in mere eloquent generalities, but in his specifi- /
cation of the quite definite ways in which thel
vitality of the religious spirit must influence the)
citizen's outlook on the world of politics.

The difficulty of doing full justice to him here
is that the glowing sentences of his rhetoric lose
so much by translation into the cold and cut-and-
dried statements of abbreviated exposition. But,
per contra, it is just because critics are apt to think
eloquence is not argument, that it is important to
note how definite and how forcible are the reasons

126 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

which here, as in so many of Burke's pages, under-
lietbe rhetoric. First and central is the bold asser-
lon that it is only a religious consciousness that
can appreciate in its true significance the persist-
ence and continuity of national life. This sounds
audacious. But on no point is Burke more insistent,
one passage we have the affirmation that, were
the religious consciousness destroyed, 'no one
t generation could fink with another,' and ' men
become little better than the flies of a summer ' ; 1
and in another the sweeping prediction that * the
.^commonwealth itself would, in a few generations,
j crumble away, be disconnected into the dust and
- / powder of individuality, and at length dispersed to
v all the winds of heaven.' 2 Words can no further
go. If these be true, the conscious dependence of
the human on the Divine, and the continuity of a
nation's fife stand and fall together.

Not that Burke was unaware that there are other
resources by which generation may be made to link
with generation. ' Prescriptive constitution,' ' en-
tailed inheritance,' ' bank and capital of the ages,'
1 experience of the species,' and other phrases of
like import, are all of them conceptions sugges-
tive of ways in which political continuity may be
(sustained and fostered. The point is that Burke,
though himself the prolific author of such phrases,
is convinced that more is needed. They may

1 Reflections. 2 Ibid.

RELIGION AND POLITICS 127

suggest that the national life is a legacy : they do
not, or at any rate not sufficiently, suggest that it is
a supreme trust. They bear witness to the fact
that a nation has a history : they do not enough
convey the still more strengthening reminder that
it has an assured leading and destiny, in the light
of which its traditions and achievement gain an
enhanced significance. For it is never enough for
Burke that social organisms should be thrust for-
wards to an astonishing pitch of development by
the mere vis a tergo of natural evolutionary forces,
which, so far as evolutionists can tell, may quite
possibly be fortuitous and aimless. He craves for
more. To illuminate the struggles of the past, to
dignify and intensify the responsibilities of the
present, and to guarantee the future against the
decadence and defeat with which, in a world of
turbulent human wills, it is constantly menaced, it
seemed to him the sheet anchor of a true political
faith that the whole great drama of national life
should be reverently recognised as ordered by a
Power to which past, present, and future are organi-
cally knit stages in one Divine plan. ' There is an
order that keeps things fast in their place ; it is
made to us, and we are made to it,' * so runs his
creed.

Results follow. For a belief such as this trans-
figures at a stroke the idea of the service of the
1 Speech, May 7, 1782.

128 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

State ; and it does this, he tells us, especially in the
case of ' persons of exalted station.' There is a
paradox in Plato which declares that it is in vain
to expect any man to be a great statesman unless
he cares for something greater than politics. And
though it may seem foolhardy to apply it to Burke,
to whom politics were as the breath of his nostrils,
it is none the less applicable. For both thinkers see
the pitfalls that all too obviously lie in wait for the
* mere secular politician — the absorption in affairs,
the greed for power, the sinister promptings of self-

r interest, the spirit of faction. And both would I
look for remedy in the same direction — in thatj
purification of motive that springs from the ele-j
vation of the vocation of the statesman into nothing
less than a ministry of the unseen. ' All persons
\ possessing any portion of power,' so run the words,
I ' ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with

Ian idea that they act in trust ; and that they are
to account for their conduct in that trust to the
one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.' 1
The words are in the very spirit of Plato, if we do
but translate the language of a theistic faith into
the reasoned terminology of Platonic metaphysics.

But it is not to ' persons of exalted station '
alone that this line of thought applies. In truth,
it never applies with so much force and urgency as
in democracies, where political power has been cut

1 Reflections.

RELIGION AND POLITICS 129

up into minute fragments and portioned out in wide
franchises. For it is just the wide distribution of
political power that may disastrously impair the
sense of individual responsibility. Burke has some
weighty sentences here. The people, he points
out, are, to a far less extent than are princes and
other persons of exalted station, ' under responsi-
bility to one of the greatest controlling powers
on earth, the sense of fame and estimation. The
share of infamy that is likely to fall to the lot of
each individual in public acts is small indeed ; the
operation of opinion being in the inverse ratio to
the number of those who abuse power. Their own
approbation of their own acts has to them the appear-
ance of a public judgment in their favour. A per-
fect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing
in the world. As it is the most shameless, it is also
the most fearless. No man apprehends in his person
he can be made subject to punishment. Certainly
the people at large never ought : for as all punish-
ments are for example towards the conservation of
the people at large, the people at large can never
become the subject of punishment by any human
hand.' »

Few will deny that in this passage Burke touches
with a sure hand one of the dangers of democracy.
It is so much easier for human nature to be eager to
share power than to take its share of responsibility [

1 Reflections.
1

130 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

in using it. Nor would it be difficult to point the
moral by reference to the capriciousness, or the
levity, or the indifference that is too often found in
the democratic electorates which have come into
being since Burke's day. The question with many
is to find the remedy. And the remedy to which
Burke would have us turn is characteristic. The
nly adequate safeguard against these dangers of
popular power is to be found in the vitality of the
ligious spirit in the class or classes whose will is
w. For that, and that alone, can bring the
itizen to realise that, in the giving of vote or the
duties of office, he is fulfilling what Burke does not
hesitate to call a ■ holy function.' The words, no
doubt, must sound extravagant to secular minds,
to whom politics altogether is nothing more than a
matter of most mundane business, and very far
indeed from being ' holy.' But they are not the
less on that account significant of the civic import-
ance of religion as understood by one of the greatest
of all its exponents. Reverently religious in his
own fife, convinced by his diagnosis of human
nature that man is ' a religious animal,' and insistent
always that religious institutions are an organic
element in the body -politic, it was inevitable that
Burke should recoil from a merely secular citizen-
ship as unequal to the demands and burdens which
the State imposes on its members. Secular minds
may reject his teaching. To them it can only seem

RELIGION AND POLITICS 131

a devout imagination. But they can be in no
doubt, if they have read his pages, that to leave
this aspect out would make his political message a
wholly different, and, in his eyes, an impoverished
thing.

Nor, perhaps, is it rash to assume that the vast
majority of the religious world would be in sub-
stantial sympathy with Burke's insistence on the
political value of religion, so far at any rate as we
have considered it. Presumably all religious organ-
isations, including such as are frankly, and even
bitterly, hostile to established Churches, unite in
the aspiration that the religious spirit may permeate
life, of which political life is not the least part, from
end to end. Even those who protest that politics
ought to be kept separate from religion, and religion
from politics, must be aware, no matter how sharply
they distinguish secular and religious organisations
and their work, that they carry their religion with
them in the constitution of their motives, as these
operate in the performance of all important work
done by them for the world. That any citizenXr
should be religious, and that he should not be influ- )
enced thereby in motive, even in the most secular /
of transactions, can only mean that in certain
departments of life he is not religious. Fullness of
life, and of strife, may have made the Churches
many, yet one must do them the justice of sup-
posing that they all alike desire to leaven the

132 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OP BURKE

entire social system with Christian conscience and
Christian charity. And if this be so, they can
hardly fail to sympathise with the spirit of Burke's
teaching as a plea for the alliance of citizenship and
religion.

Burke, however, as is well known, would have his
readers go a step further. Neither the sanctuaries
of the heart nor the sanctuaries of voluntary Churches
are enough for him. For, as he found the Church
of England in possession of its prescriptive inherit-
ance, material and spiritual, he insists, with all the
argument and eloquence in his resourceful treasury,
that it ought to stand as a recognition of religion
by the nation in its corporate capacity. Convinced,
^as we have seen, that civil society as an organic
\ whole is a sacred institution, he pled for a national
I and visible recognition of that fact. The ' corpor-
ate fealty and homage ' of the State to religion was
to him simply the public acknowledgment that
1 God willed the State.' And this general principle
was backed by arguments as definite as they are
forcible.
f One is the claim, which controversy has made
\ familiar, that religion — and not least because of the
intimacy of its connection with education — is too
momentous a national interest to be left to what he
calls ' the unsteady and precarious contribution of
individuals.'
^ Another is the plea that the clergy of an estab-

RELIGION AND POLITICS 133

lished Church occupy a position which effectively
strengthens their hands as upholders of morality
and moral valuations. Not only can they bring
the consolations of religion to the hapless and I
heavily burdened poor ; not only can they minister,
no less, to ' the distresses of the miserable great ' ;
they can also, from a position of independence,
such as he thinks is not enjoyed by a clergy directly
dependent on popular support, instruct ' pre-
sumptuous ignorance ' and rebuke ' insolent vice,'
whether in high estate or low. ' The people of
England,' he declares, ' will not suffer the insolence
of wealth and titles, or any other species of proud
pretension, to look down with scorn upon what they
look up to with reverence ; nor presume to trample
on that acquired personal nobility which they in-
tend always to be, and which often is, the fruit,
not the reward (for what can be the reward ?) of
learning, piety, and virtue.' * And it is but an
extension of this democratic demand for an inde-
pendent aristocracy of the spirit that leads him
on to welcome the ' modest splendour and un-
assuming state, the mild majesty and sober pomp '
of religious ceremonial, and to justify an ecclesi-
astical hierarchy such as may (to quote a phrase
that has become familiar) 'exalt its mitred front
in courts and parliaments.'
A third point is that it is when a clergy enjoys

1 Reflections.

134 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

the recognised position, and the financial inde-
pendence which the establishment of religion
gives, that they are best placed to resist all temp-
tations to yield to tyrannical pressure either from
above or from below, and, by consequence, peculiarly
well fitted to stand for a genuine political liberty.
1 The English,' he says, c tremble for their liberty
from the influence of a clergy dependent on the
Crown ; they tremble for the public tranquillity
from the disorders of a factious clergy, if it were
made to depend upon any other than the Crown.
They therefore made their Church, like their king
and their nobility, independent.' *

Nor, finally, could he regard it as other than a
good application of public money, and not least
in the interests of the poorer classes, that it should
be devoted to religious purposes. He puts the
point with unqualified directness : ' For those
purposes they (i.e. those who believe that God
willed the State) think some part of the wealth
of the country is as usefully employed as it can
be in fomenting the luxury of individuals. It is
the public ornament. It is the public consolation.
It nourishes the public hope. The poorest man
finds his own importance and dignity in it, whilst
the wealth and pride of individuals at every moment
makes the man of humble rank and fortune sensible
of his inferiority, and degrades and vilifies his con-
1 Reflections.

RELIGION AND POLITICS 135

dition. It is for the man in humble life, and to
raise his nature, and to put him in mind of a
state in which the privileges of opulence will cease,
when he will be equal by nature, and may be more
than equal by virtue, that this portion of the
general wealth of his country is employed and
sanctified.' *

Nor does it in the least shake him in this that
the Church, thus supported by the general wealth,
should have its own tenets and tests, and that
these should exclude the conscientious noncon-
formist. Invoking the Lockian principle, which
no one is likely to dispute, that a voluntary society
can exclude any member she thinks fit on such
conditions as she thinks proper, he transfers the
principle, with a surprising indifference to the
significance of the transition, to the Church that
claims to be national.2 It is precisely on this
ground, indeed, that he argues, in 1772, against
the petition, in which not only certain of the clergy
of the Church, but doctors and lawyers, claimed to
be relieved from subscription to the Articles. And
the fine he took here is all the more remarkable,
because he was far from thinking that the Church
was perfect. Both Articles and Liturgy, he frankly
admits, are ' not without the marks and characters
of human frailty.' 3 This was, of course, to be

1 Reflections. ' Speech on the Acta of Uniformity.

■ Ibid.

136 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

lamented ; but it was not enough to precipitate a
change. Against a change he urges that there is
no real grievance — none for the petitioning clergy,
who may easily find pulpits and congregations to
suit their views in one or other of the many Churches
that are tolerated ; and none for the taxpayer, who,
if he be one of a minority who dissent from the
creed of the Church, is not to be supposed to sub-
scribe to the creed because he consents to pay his
tax. Nor has he much difficulty in showing that,
in suggesting subscription to Scripture as substitute,
the petitioners were opening up as many difficulties
as those they wished to escape. Some test of
membership, he insists, every Church must impose ;
men must not expect to be paid by taxation ' for
teaching, as Divine truths, their own particular
fancies.' And this being so, he would rather have
subscription to the Articles, with all their imper-
fections, than anything that can be put in their
place.

There is much in this that will no doubt invite
criticism in days when both Church establishment
and Creed subscription are more burning questions
than they were then. But it is not necessary to
embark here on either of these highly controversial
topics. Enough if what has been said makes it
clear how far Burke carried his repugnance to any-
thing that savoured of the secularisation of the
State.

RELIGION AND POLITICS 137

For it is not Burke's defence of Church establish^
inent that is the central interest in his apologia for
religion in politics ; it is rather the grounds on
which this rests — grounds which will appeal to
many besides those who stand for established
religions. Is it true that the belief that God has
willed the State is fraught for citizens with these
momentous issues which Burke ascribes to it ? Is
it a fact that the State is a sacred thing ? Is it
incontrovertible that the trite distinction between
secular and sacred is a pernicious and false dualism ?,
Is it the case that religion is the basis of civil society ?
These are questions that go deeper far than the vexed
controversy about Church establishments. For it
is not the adherents of established Churches alone,
it is the whole religious world that finds itself nowa-
days in the presence of critics and assailants more
numerous, more formidable, more scientific than
the atheists and infidels of Burke's abhorrence and
denunciation. For the nineteenth century has
seen the advent, not to say — for not a few would say
it — the triumph, of naturalism. And in political
theory naturalism, of course, means not only that
the social organism, like other organisms, comes to
its maturity through the action of biological laws,
but that the prolonged process of struggle and sur-
vival through which it emerges, finds all the ex-
planation available in the operation of quite secular
conditions and causes, possibly in the last resort

138 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

mechanical, but at any rate such as leave no room
for the agency of any final cause or providential
agency whatsoever. Nor is it doubtful that any
such notion as that the course of history and the
evolution of nations are ' the known march of the
providence of God,' would receive but a chilling
welcome at the hands of naturalism. If so, the
practical inference is obvious. Ill would it become
the statesman to cherish one thought, or utter one
word, about a - Divine tactic,5 ' a stupendous wis-
dom,' a ' Divine Disposer,' or what not. Let the
will of evolution be done ! Enough for him to be
content, as the naturalistic thinkers are content, to
learn from experience what the facts and forces are
that are thrusting on his country he knows not
whither. Enough for him to shape these facts and
control these forces in the interests of the public
good, or whatever other end he can find, and suffi-
ciently believe in, to vitalise the civic will to strenu-
ous service. Nor presumably would either theo-
retical or practical naturalism resent the imputa-
tion that it leads to a thoroughgoing secularisation
of the State.

Nor can it be denied that it would be in vain to

seek for a refutation of naturalism in the pages of

j Burke. He does not prove, he never dreams of

\ proving that man is a religious animal, or that the

\ object of religious faith is real. His religion is a

l faith, not a philosophy ; and those who wish to find

RELIGION AND POLITICS 139

these fundamentals of the faith made good by proof,
must go, not to Burke but to the theologians, or to
the idealistic philosophers who are not afraid to give
the world a philosophy of religion. And yet Burke's
teaching has its claims upon the thinker. It sug-
gests a problem which is theoretically, as well as
practically, of the first rank. For, by the passionate
conviction and definiteness of statement wherewith
he specifies the ways in which the vitality of the
religious consciousness influences the attitude of
the citizen of all ranks and grades towards his
station and its duties — a matter on which he could
speak with the voice of experience — he prompts the
question as to what is likely to happen should re-
ligious belief suffer eclipse. Will that consciousness
of imperious political obligation, which so often has
had its root in theism, survive ? Will the faith that
men and nations have a destiny no less assured and
divinely guided than their past history, still play
its part in fostering that belief in ideals in which lies
the nerve of political struggle ? Will an unselfish
devotion to the public good still persist ? Hardly
can it be denied that hitherto the resolute and
dutiful civic spirit has thriven, not only in illustrious
instances, but amongst masses of the people, in close
alliance with religion. To quicken and sustain it,
more has seemingly been needed than the conscious-
ness of ties to home, to comrades, to neighbourhood, to
nation, to humanity. The appeal to altar has been

140 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

as potent as to hearth. ' It is in the form of imagina-
tion,' says a writer on political obligation, who
never ventured on a statement till he felt that his
foot was planted on experience,1 ' the imagination
of a supreme, invisible, but all-seeing ruler that, in
the case at least of all ordinary good people, the
idea of an absolute duty is so brought to bear upon
the soul as to yield an awe superior to any personal
inclination.' If this be true, how is the gap to be
filled should this article of practical faith become
in the eyes of ' all ordinary good people,' as doubt-
less it already is to naturalistic scrutiny, no better
than an imaginative figment best relegated to the
scrap-heap of past, or passing, phases of meta-
physical illusion ? For the strength and vitality of
motives depends ultimately upon the objects to
which they attach themselves, and by which they
are fed and fostered. And so long as this is so, it
would seem something of a venture to remove a
God, a * Divine Disposer,' a 'Providence,' a 'Divine
tactic,' from the human horizon without finding
some substitute.

This, indeed, seems to be well recognised, for
naturalistic minds do not revolt against political
theism without putting something in the place of
the deity deposed and the ' Divine tactic ' super-
seded. Sometimes it is the Nation which, following
a French lead, they set on the secular altar of civic

1 Professor T. H. Green.

RELIGION AND POLITIC 141

devotion.1 And sometimes, and not by any means
only amongst avowed positivists, it is Humanity.
Nor is it to be doubted that both are great and
enduring objects to which the minds and hearts
of men will never look in vain for incentive and
support.

This, however, is not a statement that Burke of
all men would have been likely to challenge. There
is abundant room in his scheme of life, as we have
already seen,2 both for the nation and humanity.
No writer in our language, or in any language, is
less open to the charge of underestimating the
strength of the patriotic motive. To this we need
not return. But then it has to be remembered
that it was not the nation as a merely secular in-
stitution that aroused this passion of patriotism, but
the nation consecrated in his imagination as product
and instrument of the Divine will. It is not worth
asking whether his patriotism would have survived
the destruction of his theism, because in his mind
the two things are one and indivisible.

Similarly with the larger, though far less close!
knit, object, humanity: Burke was not blind to
it. Despite! his denunciations of French fraternity,
he never~Tailed, as we have seen,3 to recognise that
his own country, and all countries, were parts of
larger whole. But this larger whole was not th

1 E.g. Pearson in National Life and Character.
8 P. 23 et seq. » P. 27.

142 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

umanity of positivism or naturalism ; it was
y the great mysterious incorporation of the human
Irace ' ; and the mystery that encompassed it was
not the mystery that, to the agnostic, shuts out the
faith that the fortunes of the race are shaped and
controlled by spiritual forces, but the mystery which,
however dark and inscrutable (the words are his
own), is still compatible with the belief that the
course of civilisation is ' the known march of the
ordinary providence of God.' Certainly for the
mind of Burke there could be no ultimate rest
in the idea of humanity. How could there be,
when it was to him of the essence of humanity,
by the perennial vitality of the religious con-
sciousness, to bear its witness to the dependence
of the human on the Divine ? It needs no words
to prove that if man be ' a religious animal,' if
atheism be against both human instincts and
human reason, as Burke declared it was, ' hu-
manity ' was ill fitted to be offered to the world
as a substitute for God. For, though it may need
few words to prove that, if humanity be severed
by the sword of science from divinity, and God
left out as but an ancient idol, the apotheosis of
humanity is the deposition of divinity ; it is not
less obvious that the idea of a humanity, in
every individual soul of which the belief in God
is eternal and ineradicable, is the strongest of
all securities against the secularisation of human

RELIGION AND POLITICS l U

life. Yet nothing less than this was the creed of
Burke, to whose profoundly religious spirit the
attempted secularisation of history and politics was
nothing less than a conspiracy to denationalise the
nation and to dehumanise the race.

CHAPTER IX

GOVERNMENT

Fierce and inveterate as is Burke's hostility to the
revolutionists, there is one cardinal point upon
which he and they are at one. Both he and they
believe that, behind the struggles and the flux of
politics, there is an objective order which (to revert
once more to Burke's words) holds all things fast
in their place, and that to this objective order men
and nations are bound to adapt themselves. ' It
is made to us, and we are made to it.'

For the radical thinkers of that day were neither
unbelievers nor utilitarians, but dogmatists. They
dogmatised the natural rights of man, in which they
saw an order of things, not made by man and never
to be destroyed by man, to which all politics were
bound, sooner or later, and sooner rather than later,
to conform. Nor was this faith shaken ; it was only
put to the proof by the fact that, in all existing
states — except the new American republic and the
still newer French experiment — these eternal rights
were ignored and outraged. So much the worse
for existing states. It followed from this that,
when these radicals came to theorise on government,

144

GOVERNMENT 145

they laid its foundations in the rights of man inalien-
able, imprescriptible, not to be questioned by the
sons of men. This was the one way of political
salvation. For whatever government could or
could not do, it remained its paramount function
to enact and uphold natural rights, with as firm a
faith as though they were the ordinances of the
Most High, which indeed to many, to Price, for
example, or Paine, they were.

From this dogmatism, however, Burke (as must
be by this time evident) dissented, and his words
are direct and explicit : ' The foundation of govern-
ment is there ' — he is speaking of the Reflections —
' laid, not in imaginary rights of men (which at best
is a confusion of judicial with civil principles), but
in political convenience, and in human nature ;
either as that nature is universal, or as it is modi-
fied by local habits and social aptitudes. The
foundation of government (those who have read •
that book will recollect) is laid in a provision for '
our wants, and in a conformity to our duties ; it.
is to purvey for the one ; it is to enforce the*
other.' *

Nor does the interest of this passage He only in its
refusal to build on the ' imaginary ' foundation of
natural rights. Obviously, in its appeal to 'politi-
cal convenience ' and ' human nature,' it is well
fitted to carry the suggestion that the writer of it

1 Appeal.
K

146 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

had repudiated the false foundation of rights only
to adopt the foundation of utility. And, in a
sense, this is true. We have already seen the
stress Burke lays upon the happiness of the whole
people as the paramount end of all political en-
deavour. So much so, that it might easily appear
as if, here in his handling of government, he had
simply, like any Benthamite, taken his stand on
expediency, and, equally like any Benthamite,
quite lost sight of what the utilitarians would
probably have called the ' transcendental ' founda-
tions of his political creed as these stand written in
his political religion. This, however, is far from
the fact. The foundation of government is not
laid in utility. And this will quickly become
evident, if we revert to his attitude to the dogmatists
of natural rights. For in holding to his political
theism, with a faith so passionate that it drove him
to urge the persecution of atheists and infidels, he
never laid claim to any immediate revelation of the
eternal laws of justice and reason at all comparable
to that which was so confidently written in the cut-
and-dried codes of the rights of man. He was
more modestly content to interpret the will of God
as written in the gradual revelation of his country's
history. However firmly he believed in a divinely
ordained objective order that holds all things fixed
p their place, he never dreamed of dogmatising a
priori as to what this objective order is or prescribes.

GOVERNMENT 147

The very attempt was hateful in his eyes. He
preferred to consult experience as unfolded in that
long and gradual process of historical evolution
in which, as he believed, the dispositions of a
stupendous wisdom were to be discerned. This was
for him the one way of sober thought and sound
statesmanship. To take the other path, to dog-
matise abstract codes of rights as if they were a
direct revelation from Heaven, and then to pro-
ceed to realise them forthwith as if history and
experience had nothing to reveal — this was the way
of fanatics.

But if this divides Burke from the revolutionists,
it also divides him from the utilitarians. For it
has always been what some folk think the strength,
and others the weakness, of Benthamism that,
repudiating the uncongenial alliance of Paley, it
stood for a political philosophy that was unmiti-
gatedly secular. It has ever fought shy (to say the
least) of metaphysics. And though in J. S. Mill
(who was after all a kind of heretic from its faith)
it began to do justice to the past, it was never much
concerned to interpret either past, present, or future
in the light of a larger and more cosmic philosophy.
On the contrary, having discovered what it mistook
for bed-rock in its ideal of a Greatest Happiness of a
Greatest Number, it was well content to build on
that and to sink no deeper shaft. It was reserved)
for the younger Mill to try to prove — and with

148 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

indifferent success — the Benthamite position. And
it is, of course, on that position that their theory of
government, and much else besides, stands or falls.
It is here that Burke parts company from them.
We have seen that, in a sense, he was utilitarian — in
the sense that the happiness of the people was
always his paramount practical end, as it was
theirs.1 But we have seen also that his conception
of a people was not theirs.2 Their conception was
arithmetical ; his was biological : their conception
was that of an aggregate of units working for the
happiness of the largest possible sum of units ; his
was that of an organic whole : their conception
that of a community in which ' each was to count
for one,' and where the value of the units was to
be estimated by nothing but susceptibilities to
pleasures and pains ; his was that of an inequali-
tarian partnership in which the value of the units
varies through many degrees according to the
station, functions and capacities which are assigned
to the inevitably unequal members of every civil
society by ' the discipline of nature ' : theirs, in
short, was the conception of a society which recog-
nised no higher law than the dictates of expediency
construed in the light of a hedonistic psychology ;
his of a society in which the appeal to political
convenience and human nature was sufficiently
strong to constrain the human will only when it
1 P. 45. 2 P. 56.

GOVERNMENT- 149

understood as carrying in it a deeper reference
to the Divine government of the world.

If therefore it be said — and it is certainly true —
that the end of all government for Burke, as for
Bentham, is the happiness of the people, this admis-
sion must find room for these vital differences. For
in Burke's eyes it is no part of the end of government,
because it is wholly at variance with what a peoplej
is, that the inequalities between class and class orl
man and man, should be reduced to a minimum. |
The point he singles out for special admiration iir
the philosophers of antiquity is the care they be-
stowed in discriminating the various classes or
orders of which a state consists. And it is but the
same thing from the other side that, of all the
larger ideas that move the political world, equality
appeals to him the least;/ Political equality and '
social equality were alike illusions and fictions.
He was content instead with that moral equality,
that * true moral equality of mankind ' as he calls
it, which is within the reach of all classes, because
depends neither on franchises nor wealth nor rank,
but on the happiness that is to be found by virtuef
in all condition^ And though he stood firm, no
man firmer, for equality of civil rights, it was in
the conviction that these were the just and neces-
sary conditions on which the endlessly varied in-
equalities of capacity, opportunity, and achieve-
ment were certain to emerge. The interests of the

Us ►

150 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

people were always paramount, and the interests
of the poor were second to none ; but these interests
were never so safe as in a sooial system which
perpetuated class distinctions, and, we may add,
never so much imperilled as in a society of levellers.
Burke could indeed come to no other conclusion.
It followed from his principles. Grant that the
people means the organised people ; grant that the
organisation of a people, in the only true sense of
that all-important word, comes by the gradual
evolution of a nation's life ; grant that the course
of the evolution, ' the discipline of nature,' is a
sifting process through which a society comes to
be differentiated into varied ranks, classes, orders,
vocations, interests ; grant, finally, that this great
historical drama is religiously accepted as ' the
march of the ordinary providence of God ' — what
else can befit the statesman who holds to the happi-
ness of the people as the supreme end of government
than to do his best to perpetuate class distinctions
rather than to demolish them ; especially if he be
convinced that the march of the levellers leads
straight to misery and ruin ?

This may prepare the way for the further question :

I In what hands, then, is the trust of power to be

^reposed ? And for the answer that the organ of

government is a hereditary monarch, a herec

peerage and aristocracy, and a representative

GOVERNMENT 151

chamber holding its tenure by the votes of an'
exceedingly^ jg]fifit-«iedtrfO rate. This was the political
constitution Burke found at work ; he thought it
had worked admirably well, so well that he set
himself to defend it against all comers with a resource
and eloquence which have made him, in this aspect,
by far the greatest of all conservatives.

Not that he is to be classed, not by any means,
amongst the worshippers of kings. He looked up
to kings, he would have all men look up to them
' with awe/ He clothed them with that dignity
which all that was ancient and august always wore
to his historic imagination. And he was far from
wishing to strip them of real power, and least of all
as intermediaries of foreign policy, admirably fitted
to prevent pernicious foreign intrigue with political
factions.1 He was convinced that monarchy was
the best of all governments. But he was none the
less minded to keep kings in their place. Not only
did he brush contemptuously aside those ' old
exploded fanatics of slavery/ the apologists of
Divine right ; he spent the years of his prime (as
we have seen) in resisting, with infinite resource
oy. rggfioning and rhetoric, the insidious revival of
royal prerogative in the hateful form of corrupt
Georgian influence. Few factions in the State have
ever had to stand BO mercile.-s a lire as ' the king's
friends ' of those fighting years. Nor would it be true

1 Reflections. Cf. Observations on the Conduct of the Minority.

152 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

to say of Burke, except perhaps in his chivalrous
and pathetic tribute to hapless Marie Antoinette,
that the throne was invested with that glamour
which it wore to the romantic imagination of Scott.
There was a practicality about him that prevented
it. Indeed, we even find the startlingly unflattering
remark that ' kings are naturally lovers of low
company,' 1 with the still more unflattering infer-
ence that they need a dignified and well-paid, even
if idle, court aristocracy to stand between them
and their possible ' flatterers, tale-bearers, para-
sites, pimps, and buffoons.' \ His case for monarchy
is, in fact, historic and practical, rather than senti-
mental and romantic. It rests on the conviction
that a hereditary king has been, is, and ought to
continue to be, an essential element in the pre-
scriptive constitution, ' the keystone that binds
together the noble and well-constructed arch of our
empire and our constitution,' 2 and on the generalisa-
tion, for which surely there is much to be said,
that, even granting — for he concedes so much —
that a republic might, in rare cases, be justifiable,3
it ought ever to be borne in mind that — as Boling-
broke had remarked — it is always easier to graft
democratic elements on monarchy than any
monarchical element on democracy.

On this ground he takes his stand with a firm-.

1 Speech on the Economical Reform.

2 Speech at Bristol, November 3, 1774.

3 Reflections.

GOVERNMENT 153

ness and a combativeness that know no faltering.
If, in a sense, a king may be called * the servant of
the people,' it is only in a sense.1 Emphatically
1 servant ' is not the word, if it be taken to suggest
that like a menial he obeys the commands of a
master, and were removable at pleasure. The
King of England at any rate holds by another
tenure. He is ' a real king and not an executive
officer.' 2 As such his power is, and ought to be,
equally real. ' The direct power of the King of
England,' he writes (in 1791), ' is considerable. His
indirect and far more certain power is great indeed.
He stands in need of nothing towards dignity ; of
nothing towards splendour ; of nothing towards
authority ; of nothing at all towards consideration
abroad.' 3 Indeed, it was just because he knew
how great could be the real power of a Crown
that is hereditary, personally irresponsible, and
firmly established since 1688 as 'the keystone of
the constitution,' that he declared, in one of his
latest writings, that ' jealousy of the Crown ' is an
inherent principle of the British constitution — a
principle, he adds, which must be kept ' eternally
and chastely burning.' 4 No one did more to keep
that flame alight than Burke. But this never
touched his convinced acceptance of the principle

1 Reflections.

* Letter to a Member of the National Assembly.
■ Ibid.

* Regicide Peace, Letter iv.

154 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

that the king holds his place of dignity and power,
not indeed in defiance of his people — for had not
the people in 1688 interfered with the succession ?
— but, still, independently of them, inasmuch as his
tenure is indubitably hereditary, and such as could
only by a gross abuse of words and facts be described
as dependent on the choice of his subjects. To
argument he adds derision, to derision contempt,
and to contempt invective, in his zeal to convict
Dr. Richard Price and the other ' gentlemen of the
society for revolutions ' of talking a ' confused
jargon ' ; because, though ' they had not a vote for
a king amongst them,' they made bold to claim the
right ' to choose their own governors,' and ' to
cashier them for misconduct.' Whether the con-
stitutional history that lay behind his diatribes
against Price and his following was sound is a
question on which we need not enter. He was
aware himself that he was writing as combatant,
as advocate, rather than as judge. Enough that
the controversy makes it sufficiently clear that the
Whig respect for government by consent never
brought him within measurable distance of the
damnable heresy that the Crown was, or ought to
be, elective. It is an interesting exercise for
students of Constitutional Law to follow the plead-
ings of his arguments, perhaps not quite convincing,
that 1688 was a revolution * not made but prevented,'
\ and that the substitution of William for James was

GOVERNMENT ir,r,

carefully carried through as a necessary deviation
which was never meant to be the basis of a general
principle.1

The same whole-hearted acceptance of the heredi^
tary principle appears, as might be expected, in his;
many pleas for an aristocracy of birth, possessions^
and privilege. For not only was an hereditary nobil-
ity (as we have all read) ' the Corinthian capital of |
polished society,' it was a symbol of permanence, and,
like a church establishment, one ot tne'best securities
for continuity and Stability In a nation's life, ' the
chain that connects the ages of a nation/ The power
of perpetuating property in a family, by primo-
geniture or otherwise, was just one of those ways
in which private ambitions may become tributary
to public good. The assailants of landed property
and inheritance were the worst enemies of the State.
He calls them the worst enemies of the poor. Nor
did he think it in the smallest degree a sacrifice of
liberty, or any contradiction to government by
consent, that social rank and aristocratic connec-
tion and broad acres should enjoy a favoured
position in political power. Only envy and little-
ness of mind would grudge it to them.

Of this he gives a striking proof. When the
Whig party at last came into brief tenure of power
it does not seem to have so much as crossed his

1 See Reflections and Appeal.

156 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

mind that it was other than in the nature of things
that he, who had given up to his party what was
meant for mankind, should be excluded from the
Cabinet. The modesty, the humility of his words
is astonishing : ' I am not a man so foolishly vain,
nor so blindly ignorant of my own state and con-
dition, as to indulge for a moment the idea of my
becoming a minister.' * There was no affectation
here, and subserviency is not a word to be coupled
with the name of Burke. For his relations with
the nobility were, in the main, those of business.
He did not covet their society. He had no appetite
for the life of courts, or of fashion, and not much
for the pageantries of public ceremonial. He pre-
ferred Johnson and Garrick and his friends and
comrades at the club, and the quiet life of his home,
and his cheerful intercourse there with his work-folk
amongst the tilth and pastures of Beaconsfield. And
his estimates were in keeping with his life. ' I
am no friend to aristocracy,' he once said, ' in the
sense at least in which that word is usually under-
stood. If it were not a bad habit to moot cases
on the supposed ruin of the constitution, I should
be free to declare that, if it must perish, I would
rather by far see it resolved in any other form than
lost in that austere and insolent domination.' 2
It is not an isolated utterance. When many years

1 MacKnight's Life, vol. ii. p. 488.
8 Thoughts on the Present Discontents.

GOVERNMENT l >7

had gone by, he repeated the same thing in even
stronger phrase : ' I am accused of being a man
of aristocratic principles. If by aristocracy they
mean the peers, I have no vulgar admiration, nor
any vulgar antipathy, towards them ; I hold their
order in cold and decent respect. I hold them to
be of absolute necessity in the constitution, but
I think they are only good when kept within their
proper bounds.' x

Nor can there be any doubt at all that for what
Carlyle called ' a gracefully going idle in Mayfair
aristocracy,' he had in full measure the strenuous
worker's withering contempt. In his Letter to a
Noble Lord he said some stinging things which
must have gone home to many another besides the
raw and inexperienced aristocrat against whom
they were levelled. ' Whatever his (the Duke of
Bedford's) natural parts may be, I cannot recog-
nise in his few and idle years the competence to
judge of my long and laborious life. . . . Poor
rich man ! He can hardly know anything of public
industry in its exertions, or can estimate its com-
pensations when its work is done.' ' I was not,'
he adds, ' like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and
rocked and dandled into a legislator.'

For it is here as elsewhere. Burke looked on
aristocracy primarily with the eye of the man of
affairs. Much as he respected old families and
1 Speech on Repeal of the Marriage Acts, 1781.

158 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

many of their living representatives ; eloquently
as he has written of pedigrees and illustrating an-
cestors, of bearings and ensigns armorial, of galleries
of portraits, monumental inscriptions, records,
evidences and titles ; and though it had been a
hope — pathetic in its frustration — ' to be in some
fashion the founder of a family,' it was not on
these things that his settled estimates and senti-
ments really rested. They had other and more
solid grounds. As he read history, aristocratic in-
fluence had done great things for England ; and
he preferred, as he was wont to prefer, the per-
formance of the constitution to the untried substi-
tutes of theorising levellers ; he realised that aristo-
cratic connection was an immense actual force in
the politics of the present ; he regarded landed
property as ' the firm base of every stable govern-
ment ' ; * and he held it a sound principle that
large masses of property in few hands needed for
its security a correspondingly larger share in politi-
cal power ; not least, he was convinced that in-
herited rank and inherited acres and their con-
comitants opened up for their fortunate possessors
opportunities for dealing with affairs upon a large
scale which, if rightly used, would prove perhaps
the best of all preparatives for the work of public
administration. That aristocracies have their de-
fects he was well aware. He was not blind. No

1 Regicide Peace, Letter in.

GOVERNMENT 159

one saw with clearer vision the idleness, indifference,
self-seeking, arrogance, incapacity, and vice which
in many an instance defaced ' the Corinthian
capital of polished society.* ' The fat stupidity
and gross ignorance concerning what imports
men most to know which prevails at courts ' is
not a flattering phrase. But these things — and
there were aristocrats before his eyes whose re-
putation was quite as spotted as that of John
Wilkes — never shook his political estimate of the
class, nor gave pause to the suggestion that it
augurs some defect of character to grudge to it its
dignity, advantages, and influence.

Nowhere, indeed, does this appear with greater
clearness than in the sentences where he is urging
the claims, not of rank but of ability and virtue, to
place and honour : ' You do not imagine that I wish
to confine power, authority, and distinction to blood
and names and titles. No, sir. There is no quali-
fication for government but virtue and wisdom,
actual or presumptive. Wherever they are actually
found, they have, in whatever state, condition,
profession or trade, the passport of Heaven to
human place and honour.' * This is sweeping. But
we are not permitted to find in it, as we might ex-
pect, and most of all as coming from ' an Irish
adventurer,' a protest against the Whig exclusive -
ness which shut out this greatest of Whigs, this

1 Reflections.

160 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

' John Wesley of politics,' from more than subor-
dinate office.1 The inference Burke draws follows
a contrary direction. The ordeal which all but
broke him down is not resented as a grievance.
Rather is it welcomed as a touchstone by which it
is good that, in all ages, the statesman should prove
his quality. ' I do not hesitate to say,' so runs
this most eloquent and least envious of all apologies
for social disadvantages, ' that the road to emin-
ence and power from obscure condition ought not
to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of
course. . . . The temple of honour ought to be
seated on an eminence. If it be opened through
virtue, let it be remembered that virtue is never
tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.' 2
Who will deny that the words and the thought
are noble ! Who can doubt that they are much
nobler and more generous than the monopolistic
spirit of aristocratic Whig exclusiveness, which we
are not bound to resent the less in its treatment
of Burke, because Burke did not resent it at all.
Burke's plea for an aristocracy of birth is how-
I ever not to be fully understood without two further
considerations : he never feared aristocracy, and
he did fear democracy. For he could see no signs
that the aristocracy — the genuine as distinguished
from the backstairs aristocracy — was likely to
menace the Crown. Nor did he think they had it in

1 Paymaster of the Forces. 2 Reflections.

GOVERNMENT 161

them to be a menace to the people. * Would to
God ! ' he once exclaimed, ' that it were true that
our peers have too much spirit.' And in accord-
ance with the aspiration, the effort of his life was
rather to adjure the nobility to stand in and do
their duty to the State than to stir men's fears of
aristocratic usurpation. His apprehensions were of
a different kind. First he feared the Crown, the
Crown that, in the person of George m., was so
determined not only to reign but to govern ; and,
when that fear was allayed, there followed that
mixture of fear and fury with which he regarded
the rising spectre of a revolutionary radicalism.

To understand this, however, we must turn to his
views on representation and electorates.

Burke's statements about the place and import-
ance of the people in government are so many and
emphatic, that the hasty reader might think him far
more democratic than he is. Here are some of them :
' If any ask me what a free government is, I answer
that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people
think so ; and that they, and not I, are the natural,
lawful, and competent judges of this matter.' *

1 There is no such thing as governing a people con-
trary to their inclinations. They are not votes and
resolutions, they are not arms that govern a people.' 2

1 The people are the masters.' 3

1 Letter to the Sheriffs. a MacKnight's Life , i. 305.

s Speech on the Economical Reform.

L

162 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

' The forms of government, and the persons who
administer it, all originate from the people.' 1

' The general opinion of those who are to be
governed ... is the vehicle and organ of legislative
omnipotence.' 2

1 The desires of the people, when they do not mili-
tate with the stable and eternal rules of justice and
reason (rules which are above us and above them),' —
a significant qualification of which more hereafter —
1 ought to be as a law to a House of Commons.' 3

* The people may be deceived in their choice of
an object. But I can hardly conceive any choice
they can make to be so very mischievous as the
existence of any human force capable of resist-
ing it.' 4

1 Let us give a faithful pledge to the people that
we honour, indeed, the Crown ; but that we belong
to them ; that we are their auxiliaries, and not
their task-masters ; the fellow-labourers in the
same vineyard, not lording over their rights, but
helpers of their joy.' 5

Nor would it be in the least difficult to reinforce
these passages by others, especially if we drew them
from the days when he was rallying the Whigs
to resist the Crown and ' the king's friends,' or
when he was telling the House that it had neither

1 Thoughts on the Present Discontents.

2 Letter to the Sheriffs. 3 Economical Reform.
4 Letter on the Duration of Parliaments.

6 Economical Reform.

GOVERNMENT 163

right nor reason on its side in flouting John Wilkes
and the electors of Middlesex.

Yet these utterances are not really democratic.
For, in the first place, by the voice of * the people,'
he means the voice not of the majority but of the
organised people — the people in his own sense of
the term, as sifted by ' the discipline of nature,'
not only (as already said) into many ranks, classes,
and interests, but into many grades of political
capacity — and incapacity. And as the area of
political incapacity is wide in the extreme, the
inference he would have us draw is that the elector-
ate, if it is to reflect the people (truly so-called),
must be exceedingly select — a mere handful, indeed,
if we compare it with the millions who have come
into power under a democratic franchise. Some
words of his own reveal how very select on his idea
of it, was not only the electorate, but the effective^
political public altogether. They show conclu-
sively how far removed was the conservative Whig
of the eighteenth century from the reforming Whig
of the nineteenth, and still more from the twentieth-
century Radical. ' I have often endeavoured to
compute and to class those who, in any political!
view, are to be called the people. . . . In England!
and Scotland I compute that those of adult age, not
declining in life, of tolerable leisure for such (i.e.
political) discussionsTanbT^orsomemeans of informa-
tion, more or less, and who are above menial depen-

164 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

dence (or what virtually is such) may amount to
foout four hundred thousand. There is such a
thing as a natural repr^afintative of the people.
This body is that representative ; and on this body,
more than on the legal constituent, the artificial
representative depends. This is the British public ;
and it is a public Very Wmerous. The rest, when
feeble, are the objects of protection ; when strong,
the means of force.' x

With this state of things he was content. He
says so : '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.' 2 It is clear that Burke's
version of government by ' the people ' is far removed
from popular government, commonly so-called.

Hence his lifelong resistance to any popularisa-
tion of the franchise, which, indeed, has never had
a more unfaltering opponent. From first to last
he opposed parliamentary reform in any shape,
and even declared that he would prefer ' to add to
the weight and independency of the voters by
lessening their numbers.' 3 He, could sound a warn-
ing note, when pleading for relief of the Irish
Catholics, that ' half-citizens ' may be made * whole

1 Regicide Peace, Letter i. 2 Ibid., Letter in.

3 He at any rate says that such is the view of ' most sober
thinkers. ' — Observations.

GOVERNMENT 165

Jacobins ' ; 1 but a similar fear seems never to have
disturbed his mind in regard to the masses of his
unenfranchised countrymen whether Catholics or
Protestants.

We have here, in fact, in undiluted form, the Whi
theory of political trusteeship. A British public
of 400,000 souls ; within that a select electorate ;
within that, again, a still more select body of repre
sentatives of constituencies ; and the peers to com
plete the representation (for he sometimes at any
rate 2 claimed that they were truly representative
of the people) with the king as keystone of the
arch — these were the hands into which the trust ol
the nation's destinies was, and ought to be, con-
fided. Whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil. ]

Nor does the matter rest here. For there is a
further aristocratic note in the demand that the
representative, however select his constituency,
must never be degraded into the delegate. There
is nothing in all his writings on which Burke more
vehemently insists than this. By all means let
electorates express their grievances, wants, and
demands, both on their own account and on that of
the larger British public behind them ; by all means
let them watch how their representatives vote,8

1 Letter to William Smith.

* Thoughts on the Present Discontents : ' The King is the
representative of the people ; so are the lords ; so are the judges.
They are all trustees for the people.'

* Thoughts. It was at this time he urged the importance of fre-
quent and correct lists of the votes given in all important divisions.

166 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

but let them never presume to dictate to the men of
their choice how these things are to be dealt with
and remedied. It was his boast that he was the
first man who, on the hustings, rejected the author-
ity of instructions from constituents.1 And he
proved the sincerity of his words by the sacrifice of
his seat at Bristol. ' Depend upon it the lovers of
freedom will be free ' — this is what he told his
constituents. And the freedom he claimed was
nothing less than the liberty to serve them by the
exercise of his own judgment — a judgment un-
pledged and unmortgaged not only, be it noted, on
points of detail, but on matters of general policy.
He stoutly refused to admit that he ever followed
the sense of his constituency ; he prefers to say that
his opinions ' met theirs upon the way.' 2 * No
man,' he once declared, * carries further than I do
the policy of making government pleasing to the
people. But the widest range of this politic com-
plaisance is confined within the limits of justice.
I would not only consult the interest of the people,
but I would cheerfully gratify their humours. We
are all a sort of children that must be soothed and
managed. I think I am not austere or formal in
my nature. I would bear, I would even myself

1 Appeal.

2 Speech on the Economical Reform. Cf. Speech, Feb. 6,
1772. ' The ground for a legislative alteration of a legal estab-
lishment is this and this only : that you find the inclinations
of the majority of the people, concurring with your own sense of
the intolerable nature of the abuse, are in favour of a change.'

GOVERNMENT 167

play my part in, any innocent buffoonery to divert
them. But I never will act the tyrant for their
amusement. If they will mix malice in their
sports, I shall never consent to throw them any
living sentient creature whatsoever, no, not so much
as a kitling, to torment.' ■

Hence not only a hatred of pledges such as would
shock a modern caucus, but an unbending antagon-
ism to shortening of parliaments, and to every other
democratic device whereby the lovers of freedom
could be transformed into the slaves of constitu-
encies. 4 To minimise confidence — to maximise
control ' — this was afterwards the panacea of
Bentham. Burke would reverse the formula. His
policy was to maximise confidence — to minimise
control. The good citizen after Bentham 's heart
was to deem it a civic duty ' to make public func-
tionaries uneasy ' : this is his version of responsi-
bility to the people. One wonders if he had read
Burke's trenchant judgment, that to dream of
securing genuine and honourable service by that
kind of responsibility is worthy of ' none but idiots.' 2

It is important, however, to bear in mind upon
what this plea for the independence of the repre-
sentative rests. Not, as it sometimes does, on the
notion that an elector is not necessarily a statesman,
which indeed is obvious, but on the deeper ground
that it is essential to all statesmanship to act on

1 Speech at Bristol, 1780. * Reflections.

168 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

principles, and on the final resort upon ' the eternal
rules of justice and reason,' which he has told us
are above not only the will of electorates, but above
all orders in the State.1 For it is not only because
he has to deal with problems far beyond the powers
of the average elector that the representative must
be free. He must also enjoy the far higher freedom
of setting his feet, independently, on principles which
have a deeper source than popular verdicts. No-
thing can be more explicit than his statements here.
' The votes of a majority of the people, whatever
their infamous flatterers may teach in order to
corrupt their minds, cannot alter the moral any
more than they can alter the physical essence of
things.' 2 A second sentence is even more specific.
1 Neither the few nor the many have a right to act
merely by their will in any matter connected with
duty, trust, engagement, or obligation.' 3 For the
final appeal in politics lies, not with the voice of
electorates, but with the lessons of history, and the
eternal laws of reason and justice, of which all
human laws are but declaratory.4 It is essential to
remember this, because otherwise some of Burke's
more democratic sentences would be misleading. ' I
reverentially look up to the opinion of the people,'
he once declared, ' and with an awe that is almost

i P. 162. 2 Appeal. 3 Ibid,

4 Tracts on the Popery Laws. All human laws are, properly
speaking, only declaratory : they may alter the mode and applica-
tion, but have no power over the substance of original justice.'

GOVERNMENT 169

superstitious.' * So he did, if by ' opinion of the
people ' be meant their feelings, their wishes, their
sense of grievance or their sense of justice. Did he
not say that he did not know the way to draw up
an indictment against a whole people ? Did he not
say that in all disputes between the people and their
rulers ' the presumption is at least upon a par in
favour of the people ' ; and add that ' where popular
discontents have been very prevalent . . . there
has been generally something found amiss in the
constitution, or in the conduct of government ' ? 2
Yet, when ' opinion ' be taken to mean a definite
judgment on a matter either of principle or policy,
it is not reverence that describes his attitude : it
is something that savours of contempt : ' We are
not to go to school to them to learn the principles
of law and government. ... As to the detail of
particular measures, or to any general schemes of
policy, they have neither enough of speculation in the
closet, nor of experience in business, to decide upon
it. They can well see whether we are tools of a
court or their honest servants. Of that they can
well judge, and I wish that they always exercised
their judgment ; but of the particular merits of a
measure, I have other standards.' 3 Hardly could
there be a more explicit repudiation of the notion
that a parliament of freemen can ever be made
out of an assembly of delegates.

1 Speech on the Duration of Parliaments.

1 Present Discontents. a Ibid.

170 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

' If this be Burke's attitude to the electorate, we
can easily understand why he should view the
existence of an immense non-electorate with equa-
nimity. Sometimes he will have it that it is just
\ as good for these subjects who are not citizens, nay,
■ better, to be virtually represented by the men chosen
by a limited electorate in which they have no part.1
Sometimes he would persuade them that nothing
is more certain than that their lives would be no
happier with votes than without them. And
sometimes he frankly, though with the utmost
goodwill, pronounces them altogether incapable
of exercising political functions. ' 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 ? ' — he
quotes the words,2 and there is no mistaking the
sincerity of his approval of them.

And yet it was from no lack of sympathy with
men, even though their talk was of bullocks, that
Burke would thus shut the door of citizenship in
the face of the great mass of his fellow-countrymen.
He was one of the most human-hearted of all our

1 Virtual representation plays so large a part in the Whig
scheme of things that it is interesting to have Burke's definition :
' Virtual representation is that in which there is a communion
of interest, and a sympathy in feelings and desires between those
who act in the name of any description of people, and the people
in whose name they act, though the trustees are not actually
I chosen by them.' — Letter to Langrishe.
Reflections.

GOVERNMENT 171

great men. None has ever more consistently lived
up to his own demand, that the statesman ought
to love and respect his kind. Once, in a speech,1
he had occasion to refer to the wish of Henry rv.
of France that he might live to see a fowl in the
pot of every peasant in his kingdom. ' That senti-
ment of homely benevolence,' so runs his comment,
1 was worth all the splendid sayings that are re-
corded of kings.' Few men of any kind, be their
radicalism never so keen, have had in equal measure
the gift of being personally at home with all sorts
and conditions of men. And he carried these
feelings into his politics. Though he could not
value the votes of humble men, he never could
forget their interests. * When the smallest rights
of the poorest people in the kingdom are in ques-
tion, I would set my face against any act of pride
and power countenanced by the highest that are
in it ; and, if it should come to the last extremity
and to a contest of blood, God forbid ! God forbid I
— my part is taken ; I would take my part with
the poor and low and feeble.' 2 This was not the
voice of rhetoric. It was the expression of a pro-
found sympathy with humble life, which began in
early years in his Irish home, and lasted till the
end. All his experience of life convinced him that
human happiness and worth were by no means

1 On Fox's East India Bill.

* Speech on the Marriage Act, 1781.

172 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

oftenest found along the paths that lead either to
riches or distinction or power. We have already
met the declaration that * the true moral equality
of man ' lay in the happiness that was to be found
by virtue in all conditions ; and in the same strain
is his retort upon certain persons who, with a
patronising and ' puling jargon ' (or what he re-
garded as such), had been talking of ' the labour-
ing poor.' ' I do not call a healthy young man,
cheerful in his mind and vigorous in his arms, I
cannot call such a man poor : I cannot pity my
kind as a kind merely because they are men.' *

But moral sympathy with men is one thing, and
the political sympathy that takes the form of
giving them votes is another ; and, in Burke, the
two he far asunder. As in some other Conservatives
of genius, Scott or Johnson or Wordsworth (in his
later years), the love of men goes hand in hand
with a hatred of wide franchises. His disbelief in
count of heads is as inveterate as Carlyle's. Neither
in right nor in reason is the verdict of numbers
justifiable. Not in right, because as the natural
right of every man to a vote is a sheer fiction, the
units can never claim, on grounds of right, that they
are each and all to be counted as participants in
any decision whatsoever. And not in reason,
because, when the principle that the majority
ought to prevail is adopted (as of course is often

1 Regicide Peace, Letter in.

GOVERNMENT 173

enough the case), this, as matter of fact, implies a
civil society already constituted. And a civil
society is so far from being constituted on the
arithmetical plan that it is of its essence to reflect
inevitable distinctions between man and man, or
class and class, such as render it absurd to ignore
their inequalities. And amongst these differences
none are, in Burke's eyes, more pronounced than
the having, or the lacking, capacity for the exercise
of political power. We have seen already how
convinced he was that the qualities that fit a man
for even the passive citizenship that does no more
than go to the poll, were far from widely diffused,
and how decisively he consigned the multitude to
the two large categories, ' the objects of protection,'
and ' the means of force.'

The other side of this distrust of the multitude is
his pronounced faith in the leadership of the few.
For leadership is, in the very nature of things, a
comparatively rare thing even amongst those who
are within the pale of the constitution. It is in fact
the natural monopoly of that limited number who
enjoy opportunities for the experience of affairs, /
and for that face-to-face contact with those practical I
problems of public moment which are the seed-plot
of that ' prudence ' which is the supreme virtue of/
the statesman. And if this path be closed, as
closed it is, in Burke's estimate of human nature,
to the vast majority of the British public, to them

A-^

174 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

the needful political wisdom will never come. It
- will not come even when there are opportunities of
birth, leisure, wealth, or natural gifts, if these oppor-
tunities be not utilised. Burke was far enough
from thinking all noblemen Solons, or all nabobs
statesmen. But he never doubted that, from those
classes where such opportunities were forthcoming,
there would always emerge a supply of ' men of light
and leading ' (the phrase is his), in whose hands the
government of the nation could be confidently re-
posed. Tor it is an article of his political faith that,
4by the .constitution of human nature, and by the
laws of social struggle and growth, every society
may be counted upon to produce a ' natural aristo-
cracy.' Inevitably the inborn and ineffaceable in-
equalities of men assert themselves ; inevitably
opportunity evokes practical ability ; inevitably
he 'discipline of Nature/ working throughout the
generations of a nation's life, sifts out the classes and
he men who are fit to lead and govern from the
test whose lot it is to follow and be governed. The
result is the emergence of that ' natural aristo-
cracy,' of which the aristocracy of birth and wealth
is only a part. And fortunately, Burke has set
down his conception of what this larger aristocracy
can be in words of which it is not too much to say
that they exalt our idea of human nature. ' A true,
natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the
State, or separable from it. It is an essential in-

GOVERNMENT 175

tegrant part of any large body rightly constituted.
It is formed out of a class of legitimate presumptions,
presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be
admitted for actual truths. To be bred in a place
of estimation ; to see nothing low and sordid from
one's infancy ; to be taught to respect one's self ;
to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the
public eye ; to look early to public opinion ; to
stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled
to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely
diversified combinations of men and affairs in a
large society ; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to
converse ; to be enabled to draw the court and
attention of the wise and learned wherever they
are to be found ; — to be habituated in armies, to
command and to obey ; to be taught to despise
danger in the pursuit of honour and duty ; to be
formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight,
and circumspection, in a state of things in which
no fault is committed with impunity, and the ^
slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous conse-
quences ; — to be led to a guarded and regulated con-
duct, from a sense that you are considered as an
instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest
concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between
God and man ; — to be employed as an administrator
of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the
first benefactors to mankind ; — to be a professor of
high science, or of liberal and ingenuous art ; — to be

\

176 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

amongst rich traders, who from their success are
presumed to have sharp and vigorous understand-
ings, and to possess the virtues of diligence, order,
constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated
an habitual regard to commutative justice : — these
are the circumstances of men that form what I
should call a natural aristocracy, without which
there is no nation.' *
/"* It was to the light and leading of this class, sup-
[ ported by a limited electorate, and a larger, though
j still limited, 'British public,' that Burke was well
content to entrust the happiness and government
of the British people. Tt wa.a thp , samps ppsiti™1 nA-
he had taken up in one of his earliest writings 2
when he declared ' the natural strength of the king-
dom ' to he in ' the great peers, the leading landed
gentlemen, the opulent merchants and manufacturers,
the substantial yeomanry.'

For government thus constituted, Burke has a
profound respect. It is a great art : it is ' an agency
of beneficence,' it is 'a contrivance of human
wisdom to provide for human wants.' But these
and many other similar words must not convey the
impression that he was by any means of the number
of those who think that even the best of governments
can do everything. On the contrary he sometimes

1 Appeal.

2 Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents.

GOVERNMENT 177

estimates the functions of government surprisingly
low. ' To provide for us in our necessities/ he
writes in the Thoughts on Scarcity, ' is not in the power
of government. It would be a vain presumption
in statesmen to think they can do it. The people
maintain them, and not they the people. It is in
the power of government to prevent much evil ; it
can do very little positive good in this, or perhaps
in anything else.' ' Laws,' he says elsewhere, ' can-
not make men rich or happy, that they must do for
themselves.' * There are pages, indeed, in which he
is almost Cobdenite in his jealousy of interference
with trade : ' My opinion is against an overdoing
of any sort of administration, and more especially
against this most momentous of all meddling on
the part of authority, the meddling with the sub-
sistence of the people.' 2 And, in the same spirit,
4 wise and salutary neglect ' would be his policy
in governing the colonies. Nor is it the least of
his indictments of the radical reformers that they
recklessly excite vain expectations which political
reform is impotent to fulfil.. He was, indeed,
always convinced that the happiness of a people
has its springs in many sources which lie quite
beyond the competence of either legislation or
administration. Though ' a society without govern-
ment,' that aspiration of Godwinian circles was in
his eyes no better than the vagary of a metaphysical

1 Letter to Nagle. J Thoughts on Scarcity.

M

\V7iy POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

madman ; he was far from the thought that govern-
ment and society are co -extensive.

In one respect, indeed, he would limit the province
of government quite narrowly. Seldom, almost
never, ought a government to take upon itself the
task of any large reconstruction of the constitution.
For reasons we have seen.1 In the first place it
could not do it, were it to try. For that most
complex and delicately balanced mechanism or
organism, the constitution of a civil society, is so
great a miracle of gradual experimental contrivance
and workmanship, that it defies the utmost skill of
any man or group of men, to refashion it de novo.
And, in the second place, it ought not to try, because
it is of the essence of political wisdom to regard the
constitution as it stands, as the product, not only
of human wisdom working through the centuries,
but of that Higher Power which presides over all
human affairs, and, by its guidance, not only justi-
fies, but consecrates the achievements of historic
peoples. It follows that it is the paramount duty
of men in power to accept the constitution as it
stands as an ' entailed inheritance,' and to transmit
it, substantially unaltered, to their successors.

Hence it would seem that there is nothing left for
governments to do but to administer this constitu-
tion as a trust, and to bring its administration to
the highest pitch of justice and efficiency. Nor can

1 P. 68 et aeq..

\

GOVERNMENT 179

there be a doubt that this is, in effect, the net
result of Burke's teaching. The line he draws
between constitutional and administrative reform
is deep and final ; and whatever may be done in
the province of administration, the constitution of
his eulogies, again and again reiterated, must stand
unchanged in all essentials. Strange doctrine this
for latter-day radicals, and even for nineteenth-
century Whigs, who have seen the constitution
again and again reformed within a century, and
seem even yet to be far from satisfied that they have
touched the forever-flying limits of finality.

There are, however, some considerations which
greatly modify this otherwise unbending, not to
say impossible, conservatism. In the first place,
it does not follow that government need find its
occupation gone. A truism perhaps — yet a truism
that needs resuscitation. For, since the middle of
the nineteenth century, the activity of legislatures
has become so conspicuous a fact that the citizens
of all progressive states run some risk of falling
victims to the fallacy that, if a government does not
produce legislative novelties, it exists for no purpose :
so much so, that parliamentary criticism and control
of ministers, in their administrative capacity, is not
seldom resented as if it were flagitious waste of
time subtracted from the carrying through of organic
reforms. The needful reminder is that, without
prejudice to organic legislation (which doubtless

180 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

has its claims), governments exist to administer, and
that no time, trouble, or industry can be too great
to ensure that their administration be just, efficient,
and pure. For constitutions are not reformed only
by reform of the constitution. Constitutions are
made to march. Nor is this trite reflection ever in
more need of resurrection than in days when party
is tempted to bid against party, and partisan against
partisan, in the competitive auction-room of con-
stitutional agitation and reform.

This was a point that Burke realised. It was not
because he hated reform that he resisted reform of
the constitution. Partly, at any rate, it was because
as a man of affairs he saw how much might be done
by reform of administration. He proved this by
his deeds. For when his party at last came into
power, he grappled with administrative reform with
a tenacity and thoroughness which can never be
forgotten, because happily they stand recorded in
that speech on Economic Reform, which is a monu-
ment of reforming statesmanship. And this was
but one enterprise among many. Buckle's cata-
logue of his reforms, already quoted,1 is proof
enough not only that he found reforming work to
do, but that the spirit of reform was in him, and
that it burned with so strong a flame that the wonder
grows that he could restrain it so effectually within
limits, and stop short, with an all but absolute non
1 P. 77.

GOVERNMENT 181

posaumus, the moment reform would touch the
constitution. This, however, is precisely what he
did. Not because of the spectre of the French
Revolution, as is sometimes supposed, but from
convictions formed long before it was so much as
above the horizon, he stood throughout his life,!
firm, not to say fierce, in his antipathy to constitu-
tional reform. To organise and to purify adminis-
tration ; to exercise administrative powers ; to
safeguard civil rights ; to ensure toleration (except
for infidels and atheists) ; to be ready to wage war,
and to wage it with courage and pertinacity ; to tax
with wisdom and equity ; to free trade from re-
strictions ; to redress grievances and correct abuses ;
to call public servants to account ; and, not least,
to jealously prevent any element in the body-politic
— king, lords, commons, populace, landed interests,
or landless interest or any other interest — from
usurping more than its appropriate place and func-
tion— these things, and such as these, are within
the scope of government. But to remake the con-
stitution, or even to touch it with radical hands —
this is folly, fanaticism, and sacrilege.

Whatever be the justification of this attitude in
theory, or relatively to the circumstances of the age,
it was not, as every schoolboy knows, found tenable
in practice. Even whilst Burke was reiterating in
many a glowing page his liturgy to the English
constitution in all its unreformed perfection of Whig

182 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

franchise, rotten burghs, and corrupt representatives,
forces which have proved irresistible were beginning
to shift the centre of political gravity. The expan-
sion of industry and commerce, sometimes called
the industrial revolution, was rapidly multiplying
and bringing to the front a new aristocracy of
wealth and middle-class comfort, with whom the
landed aristocracy and their dependents were con-
strained in 1832 to share their supremacy. History
was deaf to Burke's appeal to the old Whigs. And,
after no long interval, the new oligarchy of lords,
squires, capitalists, and well-to-do shop-keepers was
in its turn persuaded, without much resistance, to
take into partnership, first the artisans in 1867, and
then the agricultural labourers^ in 1884. The
' glorious constitution/ which Bentham declared
1 needed to be looked into,' was ' looked into ' to
some purpose, and the constitution of Burke's
idolatry transformed to its foundations. Much
of this the reforming Whigs of the nineteenth
century themselves recognised as reasonable as
well as inevitable. Macaulay is typical. For
though Macaulay is as zealous to preserve the
continuity of the constitution as Burke, he had
come to think (with Lord Holland) that ' large
exclusions would destroy the constitution if it did
not destroy them.' Hence in his oration in support
of the Reform Bill of 1832, his impassioned appeal
to the Tories takes the form of telling them that

GOVERNMENT 183

if they would conserve the constitution they must
reform it. Nay, he was quite prepared to sur-
render the Whig illusion of ' finality,' and to declare
for the reopening of the settlement of 1832. kWe
shall make our institutions more democratic than
they are,' he wrote in 1852, * not by lowering the
franchise to the level of the great mass of the com-
munity, but by raising, in a time which will be
very short when compared with the history of a
nation, the great mass up to the level of the fran-
chise.' The words point the contrast between the
reforming Whig of the nineteenth, and the con-
servative Whig of the eighteenth century. For
though Burke was in many directions as zealous a
reformer, and a far greater force in politics than
Macaulay, he had nothing but an iron welcome for
reformers of the constitution. To conserve the
constitution by reforming it, and to reform it
by raising the great mass up to the level of the
franchise, were things that were only dreamt of
in his philosophy as a monstrous usurpation. ' Well
to know the best time and manner of yielding what
it is impossible to keep ' — this was his own criterion
of a wise government.1 But, then, he never had a
doubt that it was as possible as it was desirable
to keep the constitution of the eighteenth century.

The difficulty of justifying Burke's position here
is of his own making ; for it does not arise from

1 Economical Reform,

184 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

his desire to perpetuate the old Whig constitution,
which might be allowed to have its merits, but
from his determination to do this, and, at the same
time, to find a place; and that a large place, for
reform. For though it is obvious enough that much
may be done for a country by reforms which do
not seriously, or at all directly, touch its political
constitution, nothing is more certain than that such
reforms, if they be reforms, must alter the actual
strength of social and political forces. And once
these forces are altered, it is only a matter of time
that the change should reflect itself on the political
constitution. Reforms that make for the freeing
of trade, or for the recognition of combinations
of workmen, are not constitutional reforms. They
might be carried through by constitutional conser-
vation. But if the results be the growth of an
influential class of rich traders, or the rise of organ-
isations of labour, it is not in the nature of things
that the members of either of these classes should
for long sit down content under a political system
which denies them adequate political power and
representation. Sooner or later the cry, so dear to
Bentham, of ' No Monopoly ' is raised. The ' mono-
poly ' might vary. In the sixteenth century it
had been the monopoly of Catholic against Protes-
tant, and in the seventeenth the royal monopoly
of Divine right. In the nineteenth it was to be the
monopoly of Protestant against Catholic, of Tory

GOVERNMENT 185

and Whig borough -mongers against non-electors,
of landed food-producers against food-consumers,
of capitalists against labour. And once that cry
is caught up and re-echoed by large classes who have
come to a consciousness of their social value and
influence, the hour has come when, in Macaulay's
words, the political constitution must destroy
exclusions, or exclusions will destroy it. With
this spirit Burke went a certain length. He hated
any revival of royal prerogative ; he hated a domin-
eering House of Commons ; he hated religious intoler-
ance ; he hated the penal code that crushed the
Irish Catholics ; he hated negro slavery ; he hated
the restrictions that strangled commerce. Nay,
he has himself left words which are obviously the
source of Lord Holland's remark : ' Our constitu-
tion is not made for great general or proscriptive
exclusions ; sooner or later it will destroy them, or
they will destroy the constitution.' * When he
wrote these words, his thoughts, we must suppose,
did not travel beyond the question that evoked them
— the admission of the Irish Catholics to the fran-
chise. But their wisdom is so unimpeachable, and
their wider applications so natural, that they come
with something of a surprise from the greatest of all
the apologists of Whig monopoly.

And yet there need be no surprise, not at any
rate for the reader who recalls the many passages

1 Letter to Sir H. Langrishe.

186 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

in which Burke expresses the conviction that, in
all civil societies worthy of the name, the individual
must expect to find himself committed to many-
ties and obligations not of his own making, and yet
not to be repudiated without a breach of the funda-
mental duties of life. ' Look through the whole of
life,' he says, ' and the whole system of duties.
Much the strongest moral obligations are such as
were never the results of our option.' * And these
duties were not limited to the private relationships
of life, those, for example, of parents to children
and children to parents, which he cites in illus-
tration ; they extend to the public duties as well.
4 If,' so runs the context, ' the social ties and liga-
ments, spun out of those physical relations which
are the elements of the commonwealth, in most
cases begin, and always continue, independently of
our will, so, without any stipulation on our own part,
are we bound by that relation, called our country,
which comprehends (as it has been well said) all
the charities of all.' 2 Nor does he cease to press
the point till his sentences read Almost, if not alto-
gether, as if they were a plea for finding the whole
duty of man in an acceptance by the individual
of his divinely allotted station in a social system,
which it was not for him to alter or even criticise.
Two results follow : the first, that duty and will,
duty and option, duty and choice, are thrown into

1 Appeal. 2 Ibid.

GOVERNMENT 187

such antithesis that duty and will are said to be
* even contradictory terms ' ; l the second, that
government by consent, if it is to be accepted, as
it was accepted, by all good Whigs, must not be
held to imply — as radicals might suggest — that the
members of a society are not really free until the
laws and the constitution under which they have
to live, have become a matter of will, choice, or
option. Such choice, such option is, in Burke's
eyes at any rate, neither practicable nor desirable.
Nor can it be denied that, within limits, this line
of argument is forcible. Government by consent,
if consent means individual choice, option, or explicit
contract, is an impossible thing. Even in the most
democratic state the citizen must expect to find him-
self accepting much to which he is not, in this sense,
consenting. He may be one of a minority that
accepts measures passed by a majority from which
he vehemently dissents. He may be represented
by a man whom he detests, and has done his best to
defeat at the poll. He may be wholly out of sym-
pathy with some of the leaders of his own party,
from which he is nevertheless by no means ready
to revolt. He may even — who can deny it ? — be
sorrowfully convinced that reforms of great abuses
are still, by the force of circumstances, quite beyond
the horizon of practical politics. He may still, of
course, believe that the government under which he

1 P. 91.

188 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

lives is government by consent, but it is, all too
clearly, likewise government bound up with much
to which he is not consenting. Similarly, though
in greatly magnified degree, with Burke. He saw
that government by consent must needs involve
for individuals many obligations to which they
are not consenting. Only, having made this point
good, he went on to include within its scope the
whole system of Whig trusteeship, with its limited
franchise and prescriptive aristocratic ascendency.
It may be that, in insisting upon this, he makes
his position untenable. To this we shall return.
But this is no reason for supposing him to have
ever parted company with his orthodox Whig
faith in government by consent. The correct
inference is that he was convinced that govern-
ment by consent was, beyond all doubt, more sub-
stantially realised under Whig trusteeship, with
its * virtual representation,' than under any sub-
stitute which innovating radicalism, with its untried
democratic franchises, was likely to put in its
place.

It has been said by some that the Whigs had
no foundations : Johnson said so when he called
his friend a ' bottomless Whig.' It has been also
said that they did not even miss the absence of
foundations : Carlyle said as much when he dubbed
them * amateurs ' and ' dilettanti ' ; and James
Mill said something more when he indulged all the

GOVERNMENT 189

pleasures of malevolence in fastening upon the
whole hateful connection the imputation of * trim-
ming,* * see-sawing/ ' Jesuitry of politics,' and much
else to the same effect. But whatever truth may
underlie the impeachment, the Whigs are not without
their rejoinder. It is always open to them to point
to the fact that if ever any statesman had foun-
dations it was Burke, and that Burke's theory of
government, be its value what it may, had its
foundations deeply laid in his conception of a
people, and in the profoundly conservative prin-
ciples deducible therefrom.

CHAPTER X

RIGHTS

(a) What are the Rights of Man ?

Government and rights are, needless to say, things
closely related ; and the relation is at its closest
and simplest in Bentham. For to that great law
reformer, as is well known, all rights were derivative.
They were the creatures of legislation, and as such
could not so much as exist prior to a legislating
government. ' Real laws give birth to real rights.' *
And from this it followed that all other ' rights '
not thus derived, and in particular the ' rights of
man ' of the radicals of the Revolution, were no
better than the flimsiest of fictions. For, if these
rights of man are dignified as antecedent to all law
and all government, they would be prior to their
own creator. It was thus that this great radical
showed himself so eager to convert the world to the
radicalism of utility, that he did not hesitate to
overturn the radicalism of ' natural rights ' to its
foundations.

Now, if we compare this doctrine with that which

1 Theory of Legislation, p. 85.
190

RIGHTS 191

may be gathered from many pages of Burke,
nothing is easier than to develop a contrast. No-
where do we find Burke committing himself to a
doctrine so extreme as that there are no real
rights but legal rights ; and nowhere do we find him
asseverating that the natural rights of man do not
so much as exist except as the ' anarchical fallacies '
of fools and fanatics. On the contrary, he not only
asserts, but reiterates in explicit terms, that man
does possess rights, even before civil society comes
into being. Not only does he say that rights are
1 natural ' and that natural rights are ' sacred ' a —
an admission that perhaps counts for little so long
as the ambiguous word ' natural ' is undefined — he
does not dispute the doctrine, that very doctrine
so dear to the hearts of Rousseau and Paine and all
their following, that men have ' primitive ' rights,
and that, in becoming members of a civil society,
they may be regarded as surrendering certain of
these rights in order to secure the right of citizens
who live under the protection of the laws of the
State. His words admit of no other interpretation :
' One of the first motives to civil society, and which
becomes one of its fundamental rules, is that no
man should be judge in his own cause. By this
each person has at once divested himself of the first
fundamental right of uncovenanted man, that is,
judge for himself, and to assert his own cause. H<

1 Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill.

/^92J)pOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

abdicates all right to be his own governor. He in-
clusively, in a great measure, abandons the right
to self-defence, the first law of nature. Men cannot
enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state
together. That he may obtain justice, he gives up
his right of determining what it is, in points the most
essential to him. That he may secure some liberty,
he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it.
Government is not 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 defeat.' *
' Liberty,' he says in another passage, ' must be
limited in order to be possessed.' 2

From sentences like these (and there are others
to the same effect) it is evident that conservative
Burke is by no means so flatly hostile to the doctrine
of the natural rights of man as radical Bentham.
He does not, like that ' great subversive,' shake
the very dust of the doctrine off his feet.

And yet, as all the world knows, Burke's anti-
pathy to this doctrine is extreme. In the bitterness
of his detestation of it he out - Benthams Ben-
tham ; nor can all the records of political contro-
versy furnish stronger language than that which
he hurls at its apostles. Almost he would persuade
us that they and it are Antichrist. This being so,

1 Reflections. - 8 Letter to the Sheriffs.

RIGHTS \ 193

the question that emerges is obvious. If he ad-
mits, as we have just seen he does admit, that men
possess ' primitive rights,' ' rights of unco venan ted
man,' rights that belong to persons ' in total inde-
pendence of government,' rights that have to be
surrendered in passing into civil society, why this
bitterness, this implacable hostility, this denun-
ciation ? Manifestly he does not hold, as Bentham
did, that these rights have no existence. Why, then,
should he cry havoc on the men who made it their
business to declare them to the world ?

In answering this question it is essential, to
begin with, to bear in mind that Burke does not
attack the doctrine as a theorist denouncing a
theory, but as a politician whose interest is fixed
on the application of the doctrine to politics. Had
the theory of natural rights been merely academic,
as many theories are, we should have heard little
about it from him. For abstract theorising he de-
clared that he had neither inclination — which was ,
partially true ; nor competence — which was mani- I
festly false. Therefore, it was not for him to enter
upon abstract arguments, and far less to construct
an abstract theory of natural rights. Not without
an edge of irony, he left all that ' to the Schools,'
and to the high and reverend authorities who lift
up their heads on one side or the other, only to end
by floundering in ' the great Serbonian Bog, where
armies whole have sunk.' This was his consistent

N

194 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

attitude. But, then, this theory was not like other
theories. It was a theory that had been adopted
as a political gospel. It was the inspiration of a
proselytising movement, and the watchword, not
to say the ultimatum of a party in the State. Far
from being meant for the consumpt only of pro-
fessors, theorists, and students, it was the core of
the political evangel of Rousseau, the inspiration
of the incendiary Bights of Man of Paine, and the
text of sermons preached to * the gentlemen of the
Society for Revolutions.' It had descended, and
it was meant by its votaries to descend, from the
study to the market-place, and had become the
daily bread of radical reformers who seemed bent
upon transforming society to its foundations, not
in France alone or England, but over the length
and breadth of Europe ; and the inferences of its
zealots lay in their passions. It has often enough
been said that the theory of the rights of man is
the most convincing proof that theory, so far
from being impotent, as fools and Philistines aver,
is capable of revolutionising the world. This was
what Burke saw ; this was what he feared.1 He
was not, in his assault upon the rights of man, criti-
cising a theory ; he was resisting a political propa-
ganda which seemed to him to be fraught with

1 See Thoughts on French Affairs : ' It is a revolution of
doctrine and theoretic dogma. It has a much greater resem-
blance to those changes which have been made upon religious
grounds, in which a spirit of proselytism makes an essential part:'

RIGHTS 19

>sFls I
, notlr
im.

catastrophe for Europe. His dominant interest
always practical. Clearly we must, therefore,
expect a theoretical discussion of rights from him.

Nevertheless he is forced, almost in his own despite,
if not to cross the line that parts practice from
theory, at any rate to press into the interesting
borderland where these two meet. For when a
controversialist has to encounter a theory that is
also a political programme, he cannot separate the
programme from the theory. He finds himself in
the presence of urgent demands which claim to be
rights, and of which the validity has to be discussed.
It is so here. Burke found himself in the presence
of many claims which the revolutionists declared
to be rights, and which he believed not to be rights
at all. And in resisting these with all the forces of
his reasoning and rhetoric he takes up a line of argu-
ment which is in no slight measure theoretical.

This line of argument is quite firm and definite.
Refusing, as he always refused, to be drawn into an
academic discussion of the abstract rights of man
pure and simple — he ' hates the very sound of
them,' — he plants himself on the conception of
man as essentially a member of a civil society. * I
have in my contemplation,' he declares, ' the civil
social man and no other.' * In other words, the
only rights, or claims to rights, he was prepared, or
even had the patience, to discuss, were those rights

1 Reflections.

196 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

which were either actually enjoyed, or could be
enjoyed, or ought to be enjoyed by the members
of an actual organised society. That there were
• natural ' rights, ' original ' rights, ' rights of un-
co venanted man,' ' rights held in total independ-
ence of government,' he did not deny. He affirms,
as we have just seen, that such rights exist. He
even specifies what some of them are (the right of
self-defence, for example). But the right of self-
defence, as it appears in its empty generality in
the abstract and hypothetical code of a theorist is
one thing, and the same right, as it appears articu-
lated, defined, modified, abated in the eyes of a
man of affairs who is working for the concrete
happiness of an actual people under given conditions
of place and time — this is quite another thing. And
it is this second thing, this definition of rights with
reference to the actual social situation, that is always
in Burke's eyes by far the most important matter,
and, indeed, the only question of real political
moment. To keep ever before his eyes ' the civil
social man and no other,' and in the light of this
to discriminate between the claims that are to be
justified and upheld and the claims that are to be
resisted and discredited — this is of the essence of
Burke's entire treatment of rights.

It is this that explains his decisive divergence
from the apostles of the rights of man. JHjs-attitude-
is not Bentham's. He does not meet their asser-

RIGHTS 197

tion that all men have natural rights by the blunt
counter-assertion that no man has any. His quarrel
with them turns not on their general assertion that
men have natural rights, but on the impeachment that
first they went to work to dogmatise a whole abstract
a priori code of rights, and then, having formulated
this to their own satisfaction, went on to announce it
to the world as a political ultimatum which it was
the duty of every reformer and the central function
of all law and government to enact quam primum.
On both points he joins issue. He believes that for
any practical or statesmanlike purpose it is a barren
enterprise (even though it may interest some
1 metaphysical ' minds) to theorise a code of rights
in abstracto and without reference not only to
social conditions in general, but to the specific
conditions of some actual society. And he equally
insists — indeed it is only the same point in another
aspect — that a given civil society is so far from
being an agency for realising a code of rights already
framed and formulated in abstraction, that it is
only in and through his participation in the life
of an actual society that an individual, be his
abstract hypothetical rights what they may, can
acquire any rights that are definite, substantial,
and worth the possessing. Hence the antithesis
that the ' abstract perfection ' of a right, such as
the right of self-defence, is its practical defeat. It
is only a forcible way of saying that the more per-

198 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

fectly any right, by process of abstraction, escapes
from the limitations of concrete circumstances,
the more are the limitations which it must en-
counter in finding realisation in any given actual
social system. Similarly with the kindred assertion
that every man ' surrenders ' or ' abdicates ' the
rights of uncovenanted man in becoming a member
of a civil society. For this, too, is but another way
of saying that an absolutely unrestricted liberty of
self-assertion is manifestly incompatible with the
fact that any such impracticable liberty must be
1 limited in order to be enjoyed ' by the members
of a civil society who must needs stand in limiting
relations one to another.

Nor is this * surrender ' or ' abdication ' to be
deplored as if it were a calamity. For the liberty
that is surrendered is after all an empty, just because
it is a purely abstract liberty, and the liberty for
which this is exchanged is the liberty of enjoying
all the liberties and rights of an actual civil society.
And it is these, these rights of the civil social man
and none other, that are the real concern of states-
men, legislators, judges, and citizens.

For when the question, What are the legitimate
rights of men ? is raised, not by abstract theorists,
whose interest is speculative, but, as in Burke's day,
by practical politicians who are dealing with the
happiness of an actual civil society, there are two
widely divergent directions in which an answer

RIGHTS 199

may be sought. If we take the one, we go to the
dicta of dogmatists, or to the codes, declarations,
or preambles of constitutions which these dogmatists
inspire, and which simply set down the rights of
man as if they were a revelation that stood in need
of no further examination and proof, and as if
every descendant of Adam were defrauded of his
birthright, so long as one single right thus dogma-
tised is denied or withheld. If we take the other,
we follow the lead of the more cautious and reflective
minds, whose prime concern is the civil social man
and none other, and with whom it is a settled prin-
ciple to refuse to accept any claim whatever as a
right, until by a scrutiny of human nature and the
social system with which they have to deal, they
have satisfied themselves on the one hand that
their fellowmen have the capacity to enjoy it, and
on the other that the enjoyment of it is consistent
with the conditions and the ends of the given society
in which their lot is cast.

Needless to say that it is in the second of these
directions we must turn if we follow the lead of
Burke. For from the many pages of his invective
against the radicalism of the rights of man there
emerge two articles of indictment which, if true,
convict his adversaries of two inexcusable and
blundering omissions. The one is that, in thinking
so much about man's abstract rights, they did not
think enough about his nature. ' That sort

otj
of

200 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

; people,' he says, ' are so taken up with their theories
about the rights of man that they have totally for-
got his nature.' l In other words, they dogmatised
about rights when they had been better occupied
in studying the fitness of actual men to enjoy and
use them. The second impeachment is that, in
their fanatical impatience to force their cut-and-
dried code of rights, their ' little catechism of the
rights of man,' upon the world, they could not, or
would not, stop to inquire if the realisation of their
programme was consistent with the fundamental
facts and conditions of the existing social order.
1 How,' he asks, ' can any man claim, under the
conventions of civil society, rights which do not so
much as presuppose its existence. Rights which
are absolutely repugnant to it ? ' 2 On both these
points, as indeed must be already evident, his own
position is irreconcilably antagonistic. He thought
he knew something about human nature, and one
of the facts which he saw written on its very fore-
front was endless inequality of powers, capacities,
and achievement, and, not least conspicuous, in-
equality in political capacity. This alone was
enough to demolish, in his eyes, the ' monstrous
fiction ' of equality of political rights. It was
against all reason to assert that all men have a right
to the franchise, if, by virtue of the imperfections
that cleave to their human nature, ignorance, for

1 Reflections. 2 Ibid.

RIGHTS 20

example, or indifference or absorption in toil, they J
were inherently incapable of exercising it. So far
was it from being inconsistent, in his eyes, that many
men should enjoy civil rights and be denied political
rights, that the enjoyment of both by the multitude
was in glaring contradiction to the pronounced
gradations between class and class and man and man,
as these are to be found in human nature all the
world over. * Men,' he roundly declares, 'have no
right to what is notjgasonable, and to what is not
for their benefit.' *

A similar conclusion followed from his conception
of society. £jyj]jgoveniment is not called into being
as a mere instrument for realising rights already
possessed. It has a larger scope. It is ' an institu-
tion of beneficence.' It ;s ' made for the advantage^
of man.' 2 And it fulfils this beneficent task, not
by a wholesale enactment of codes or declarations of
rights fashioned in abstraction for Utopia, but by
the gradual realisation of those conditions of civilised
life which can be won only by degrees, and by the
labours of successive generations. Amongst these
conditions are some so fundamental, some which
so manifestly lie upon the very threshold of social
well-being, that the happiness of a people demands
that they should be secured by law. Such are the
ordinary civil rights of a well-constituted state.
But Burke does not limit his view to these. He

1 Reflections. * Ibid.

202 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

even goes so far as to venture, and to repeat, the
sweeping assertion that ' all the advantages for
which civil society is established become man's

''right.'1 'Whatever each man can separately do,'
.so he runs on in expanding this dictum, ' without
trespassing on others, he has a right to do for him-
self ; 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.' 2 But having said this,
he is quick to add that the right to political power
is another matter. Conceivably, this too might be
one of the advantages that are rights. For this
1 right ' is not to be dogmatically and a priori
repudiated any more than dogmatically and a priori
admitted. The whole question is ruled by con-
vention and convenience, and these are always
conditioned by circumstances. Yet two points

. emerge with perfect clearness, j The one, that in
society as he conceives it, a share in political power,
authority, and direction, is not an essential ; or (as
he phrases it) not one of ' the direct original rights
of man in civil society ' : the other, that in the
particular civil societies which were more especially
before his eyes, France and England, the right to
the franchise was, in his estimate, so far from being
an advantage, either to its possessor or to his
country, that it was much more likely to produce
«w_a social cataclysm. Hence, as we have already

1 Reflections. 2 Ibid,

RIGHTS 20:*

1

seen, Burke is as firm in denying political rights
to all except the comparatively few who have the
capacity for exercising them, as he is in recognising
the civil rights that are indispensable for all. And
his grounds for the denial are equally his grounds
for the recognition. Needless to repeat that they
are not to be found in his recognition of abstract
natural rights. He admits, as always, that these
exist. But they appear only to make it evident
how small a part they play in settling what rights
ought to be given, and what claims to rights resisted,
in the actual politics of civil societies. ' The moment
you abate anything from the full rights of men
each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial
positive limitation upon those rights, from that
moment the whole organisation of government
becomes a consideration of convenience.' 1 And
what ' convenience ' dictates — a thing most difficult ;
to compute — is only to be determined in the light !
of a comprehensive conception of the happiness of
the people as an organic whole.

Burke's attitude to abstract rights appears there- c
fore to be this. He explicitly affirms that abstract
rights exist ; he even specifies what some of these
purely abstract rights are (the right e.g. of self-
defence). But he sets little value upon any attempt
to formulate these rights at length in a code of
rights applicable to all places and all times. He

1 Reflections.

204 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

prefers to concentrate his attention upon such rights
as can and ought to be enjoyed by ' the civil social
man, and no other.' And the point he here insists
upon is that rights must always be relative to the
human nature of the persons who claim to enjoy
them, and to the constitution of the social system
in which they are to be enjoyed. By doing this he
shakes himself free from the dogmatism of the
authors of purely abstract codes of the rights of
man, and commits himself to the position that all
rights with which statesmen (as contrasted with
theorists) are concerned, must be madegood by
argument and proof. In this respect he is at one
with Bentham. For it is one of the most valuable
features of both Bentham and Burke that, as
against the dogmatism of Paine and his allies, they
insist on proof. On the other hand, however, he
escapes the untenable narrowness of Bentham ;
for the existence of a right, as he conceives it, does
not rest on its legal enactment, nor even on the
mere political utility that justifies enactment in
Benthamite eyes. Utility comes in : it comes in
inasmuch as the happiness of the people is recog-
nised as the supreme end. But as there neither is,
\ nor ever can be, any such thing as the happiness of
a people which does not include the conservation
|of the prescriptive experience of the past, and not
jleast of prescriptive rights (which were less than
nothing to Bentham), it is obvious that the kind of

RIGHTS 205

proof that would satisfy Bentham would not by
any means satisfy Burke. He is not minded to
brush the past aside, nor count it as of no account
that a right has been long acknowledged and enjoyed.
Nor is he in the least disposed to regard the claim to
a right not hitherto enjoyed (the right to the fran-
chise, for example) as either just or reasonable, in the
absence of proof that it could be grafted on the gradu-
ally developed organic unity of the body-politic.

There is a sense in which this conservative caution
in the handling of rights is undoubtedly to be
deplored. We have seen that Burke set little value
on the dogma of the rights of man, with its codes and
declarations. We have seen that, as against it,
he concentrated his interest upon the civil social
man and no other. But there was nothing in
either of these things to have prevented him, had
he been so minded, from giving the world some
general scheme of the rights to which human nature,
being what it is, might reasonably aspire under
the normal conditions of civilised social life. For,
so far from being out of harmony with his avowal
that the centre of his interest was ' the cjjiL^ocial
maQ and no other,' such an enterprise Would only
have been a discourse on the rights of the civil
social man as he ought to be, and might hope to
be, in the gradual evolution of a nation's life. It
would, in other words, have been a theory of social
rights. Nor, with his insight into human nature

206 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

and his grasp of social conditions, was any man
better fitted to execute such a task. This, however,
is but an idle wish. His hostility to abstraction
in any shape and form was too inveterate. His
inclinations did not lie in that direction. His
career plunged him deep into the concrete and the
practical. And he had early developed a distrust
of all plans and projects, and still more of all theories
divorced from immediate conditions of place and
time. Hence his relegation of all discussion of
abstract rights ' to the schools.' Hence his refusal
to discuss what is not rigorously practical. Hence
his disposition to rest on rights that are real, because
sanctioned by law, prescription, and consensus, in
preference to the rights that are still in the region
of innovating claim and argument. Yet here, as
elsewhere, we meet the usual result. In arguing
against theory he himself theorises, and in resisting
the radical claim to this or that specific right, he is
led on to define the conditions upon which rights in
general ought to be conceded or withheld. Hence 7
the fruitfulness of his pages even for the reader
whose interest in rights is purely theoretical. That
rights are not to be dogmatised but proved : that
all discussion of rights must recognise the nature
of man and the constitution of civil society : that
the real (not the merely hypothetical) rights of man
are not mysterious gifts of nature which the indi-
vidual needs only to be born in order to possess :

RIGHTS 207

that, on the contrary, they are ' advantages/ or (as
we might prefer to say) opportunities which the
beneficent action of society and government gradu-
ally wins for the members of a community, that
each may fulfil the duties of his station to man and
to God : that if rights are to be given, or denied,
gift or denial must derive from the happiness of the
people as an organic whole : that no rights are to be
more jealously guarded than those which by ' the dis-
cipline of nature ■ have been woven into the consti-
tution of a people — these, with the reasons annexed,
are Burke's legacy to the theorist about rights.

The value of the legacy, and not least the demand
for proof, is unimpeachable. It is so easy to call
a desire, or even a greed, if only it be sufficiently
strong, or a claim if only it be sufficiently confident,
a right without its really being so, that a thinker
in pofitics can hardly render a more needed service
than to point out the conditions which must be satis-
fied before a demand, however passionately pressed,
can become a right that can justly be demanded.
No student of Burke's pages is likely ever again to
fall into the ' anarchic fallacy,' as Bentham dubbed it,
of confusing an inclination with a right. For to
Burke, as to Bentham, all rights, in so far as they
are substantial,1 are not ultimate but derivative.
Their justification is possible, not because they are

1 Tho qualifying clause is necessary because, of course, the
abstract and empty ' rights of uncovenanted man,' which Burke
affirms (p. 196), are obviously original and not derivative.

~)

208 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

original, self-evident, incapable of further proof,
but because they can be shown to be conducive to
the happiness of a people as this is construed in the
light of the facts and laws of human nature and
social existence. Nor is it a bad description of a
right — though philosophers would doubtless wish
to push the description to definition — to say, as in
effect Burke says, that it is a position of ' advan-
tage ' in which, as member of a civil society, the
4 political animal ' man either actually is, or ought
to be secured, especially by law and prescription,
in order that he may contribute to the happiness of
his country by fulfilling the duties of his divinely
allotted station.

Nor, it may be added, are rights in Burke's eyes
any the less ' natural ' because they are the rights
of a highly civilised society. There is more than
one passage in which he refuses, as stoutly as Aris-
totle, to identify the natural with the primitive,
or to regard mankind as more natural, in propor-
tion as they are less developed. For, though the
rights which the members of a well-developed state
enjoy are in a sense artificial, being as they are the
product of the political art by which the constitution
of a state is slowly fashioned, it is equally true that,
as Burke himself reminds us, ' Art is man's nature,'
and that nature is never more truly herself than
in her grandest forms.' * And if this be sound, it

1 See p. 53,

RIGHTS 209

follows obviously that there can be no rights more
truly natural, because none more truly characteristic
of human nature at its best, than the rights enjoyed
in a civil society. The point may seem to some no
more than a matter of words. And it may be ad-
mitted, to the relief of the reader, that it is un-
desirable to stir the controversies that have raged
around ' nature ' and ' natural.' None the less it
may serve to suggest how decisively Burke set the
rights of the citizen above the ' natural ' rights with
which the protagonists of the rights of man were so
ready to endow even the savage who, whatever be
his other endowments, knows nothing either of the
enabling advantages or the advantageous restraints
of civilisation.

(b) Rights and Circumstances

Burke's contribution to the subject of rights is,
however, by no means limited to thus suggesting a
criterion by which the rights that are reasonable
and real may be distinguished from the ' rights ■
that are false and fanatical. Many of the greatest,
and some of the best known, of his pages are given
to the further, and hardly less interesting, question
of the justice and expedience of enforcing right
even when their existence is not in dispute.

This is best illustrated by his attitude on the fate-
ful quarrel between the mother country and the
American colonies. For readers of his pregnant

o

"J

210 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

words on the American crisis — Lord Morley goes
so far as to call them ' the most perfect manual
in our literature, or in any literature, for one who
approaches the study of public affairs, whether for
knowledge or for practice ' 1— Iwifl^ not find him
either denying the existence of the abs^raStZng^t
of the mother country to tax the colonies,2 or
affirming the abstract right of the colonists as in-
dividuals to resist the obnoxious taxation J Putting
the question of the right of taxation ' totally out
of the question,' he pleads for the necessity of
raising the whole controversy to a higher level, and
urges, with an extraordinary persuasiveness, that
the possession of an abstract constitutional right,
however well grounded, is far from justifying the
policy of asserting and enforcing that right up to
the hilt. In the name of ' prudence,' that mother
of all the political virtues, such a thing is not to
be so much as thought of. For the vital matter in
a political crisis is not what a political lawyer tells
us may be done ; it is what humanity, justice, and
expediency tell us ought to be done under the con-
crete conditions of the given case. Nor does he
hesitate to affirm that the consciousness of having
an abstract right in one's favour is so far from
furnishing a justification for exercising it, that it
ought to make its possessor peculiarly careful lest,

1 Burke, p. 81, in ' English Men of Letters.'

2 On the contrary he was quite prepared to affirm it as an
abstract principle.

RIGHTS 211

in exacting his right, he may be perpetrating an
oppressive and disastrous wrong. This runs through;
out. With a grasp of the situation beyond any
man of his time, he argues that the practical in-
sistence on the right to tax is to the last degree
irrational and, in a deeper than the legal sense,
unjust. From first to last his eyes, like those of
the utilitarians after him, are fixed on the public
good, and to him, as to them, the happiness of the
people (though in his own sense of the word) is
paramount in politics. Nor would he suffer a single
right, no matter what constitutional authorities
could be cited in its favour, to become the basis of
action, till it had proved its claim to descend from
the parchments of constitutional lawyers into the
concrete realities and expediencies of practical
politics. It is here in short that he stands forward,
in what is probably his best known character, as
great apologist of^lcJEjujas^gces/ — circumstances
which impose upon all rights whatsoever their in-
evitable and, rightly looked at, their reasonable
limitations and abatements. ' Sir, I think you
must perceive that I am resolved this day to have
nothing at all to do with the question of the right
of taxation. ... It is less than nothing in my
consideration. . . . My consideration is narrow,
confined, and wholly limited to the policy of the
question. . . . The question with me is, not whether
you have a right to render your people miserable,

212 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

but whether it is not your interest to make them
happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do ;
but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I
ought to do.' x ' What is the use,' he elsewhere
asks, ' of discussing a man's abstract right to food or
medicine ? The question is upon the method of pro-
curing and administering them.' Call in the farmer
and physician, not the professor of metaphysics.2

The sanity of these sentences, and of many others
like them, was, of course, proved by the event.
Deaf to Burke's counsels, England tried to enforce
a right and lost a continent. But this is not our
present concern. The point is that, in these and
all similar utterances, Burke once and for all ex-
posed the folly of all policy, from whatever source
it may emanate, that takes its stand upon rights,
and shuts its eyes to those larger considerations
by which the enforcement of any right, public or
private, individual or corporate, ought always in
the name of the public good to be qualified, re-
strained, and regulated. It is not that rights in
law may not exist, nor that they may not have to
be enforced. Burke would be the last person to
dispute it. No writer in our language has a pro-
founder respect for law. All that he insists upon,
Jwith a passionate reasonableness, is the need for
/proof — proof that the enforcement of a right, or the
( refusal to enforce a right, is justified under existing

1 Speech on Conciliation with America. 2 Reflections.

RIGHTS 213

circumstances in the highest interests of the nation J
as a whole. '

The same attitude repeats itself in the handling
of the rights of individuals. When Yp°-9- m ms
sermon,1 tabulated his version of the fundamental
rights of the citizen, one of these was the right
to resist power where abused, .purge goes not
deny the right, even though it may carry in its
train the dire necessity of dethroning a king.
How could he I Was he not a Whig ? Neither did
he doubt that this formidable right of resistance
might, in emergency, have to be translated into acts
of resistance and even of revolution. For, as a J
Whig, he was not likely to repudiate the men of /
1688 and their deeds, however anxious he is to pare
these- down to Aa revolution not made but pre-
vented.' But, then, there comes the characteristic
reminder that the step from abstract right of re-
sistance to concrete act of resistance is not to be
taken without convincing evidence that the situation
is so dire and deplorable as to justify resort to this
extreme medicine of distempered commonwealths.
And, least of all, was such a doctrine to be cried on
the housetops by men such as (much too rashly it
must be confessed) he took Price and his friends to
be — men ' who have nothing of politics but the
passions theyexcile? 'The question of dethron-
ing KUigS,1 He" Says, Hi guarded phrase, ' will always

1 The sermon referred to in the Reflections.

214 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

be a question of dispositions and of means, and of
probable consequences rather than of positive rights.
vAs it was not made for common abuses, so it is
not to be agitated by common minds. The specu-
lative line of demarcation where obedience ought
to end, and resistance must begin, is faint, obscure,
and not easily definable. It is not a single act
or a single event which determines it.' *

This reminder, this reasonable plea for caution
and proof in the exercise of rights, is never out of
date. Fanatics for rights are to be found in all
civilised communities. The world seems never
weary of producing them. Nor are they less fan-
atical when the rights they press to extremes are
entirely legal. For this makes them only the more
formidable, as giving them a solid, i.e. a legal, ground
for their immoderation. They number in their
ranks the strainers of prerogative, the zealots for the
rights of legislatures and governments, the pro-
tagonists for orders and institutions, the irrecon-
cilables who press the rights of individual liberty
against authority or the rights of authority against
the individual conscience, not to say the pernicious
pedants who push to the letter of the law ' the
right to do what they will with their own.' Such
traffickers in extremes are not to be met by challeng-
ing their rights. This cannot silence them. It only
exasperates them into an even more extravagant

1 Reflections.

RIGHTS 215'

assertion of rights whioh are, or may be, indubitably
legal. It only confirms them in the fallacy that their
immoderation is justice because it gives them an
opportunity of appealing to * justice ' in their
immoderation. The truly effective line of attack
is Burke's : it is to bid them, in the name of sanity,
think less of what, in the letter, is just, and more
of what, on the actual merits of the situation, is
humane and public-spirited. To vary the phrase,
it is to tell them that it is a poor tribute to the cause
of rights to forget that there are duties and utilities
towards the public good, by which the exercise of
all rights, however justifiable in the eye of the law,
must always be qualified and controlled.

Such, in brief, are Burke's main contributions to
a doctrine of rights. As may now be evident, they
fall under two heads. Under the first, he discusses
what rights can be legitimately claimed by the
members of a given civil society ; and the point
that emerges here, with utmost clearness, is that he
was always convinced that the rights enjoyable
under law and government, the rights of c the civil
social man,' are immeasurably more valuable and(
substantial than any ' primitive ■ rights (and, asj
we have seen, he recognises such) which mankim
may have to surrender to secure them. Under the
second head, he preaches his doctrine of * circum-
stances,' with its perpetual refrain that it is sheei

216 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

// folly and fanaticism to turn a right into an ulti-
// matum. ' There is no arguing,' he once said, ' with
these fanatics of the rights of man.' No, there was
no arguing with them, because having made up
their minds that to have a right and to press for its
realisation forthwith were one and the same thing,
they seemed to have shut their ears to those larger
considerations of humanity, justice, and expediency
which the practical wisdom of the statesman is
bound, in the name of the happiness of the people,
to recognise.

Hence it is easy to understand his antagonism to
the dogma of the equality of men which was commonly
put in the forefront of the revolutionary declarations
of rights. His position here may be summed up
] in his own formula : ' All men have equal rights,
I but not to equal things.' 1 Needless to say, it does
not mean that all men either have, or ought to have,
the same rights. For, as we have seen, it was of the
essence of his theory of government that political
rights were, or ought to remain, in the enjoyment
of the few. The dictum therefore means no more
than that, once rights are given, those who enjoy
them must be equal in the eye of the law. We have
seen how far he was prepared to go — even to blood —
in defence of the civil rights even of the poorest.2
And yet these equal rights are never ' rights to
equal things.' They are only opportunities (' ad-

1 Reflections. 2 P. 171.

RIGHTS 217

vantages,' as he called them) upon which as basis
endless inequalities may be developed. For, as it
is beyond doubt that men are born into the world
with all degrees of personal inequalities which cling
to them throughout, it is inevitable that, in the
sifting struggle of life, some make more of their
opportunities than others. By dint of vital energy,
force of character, and the incidents of that happy
chance which can never be eliminated, they stand
above their fellows on the strength of achieved
superiorities which equality of civil rights — and we
may add equality of political rights (though Burke
would have none of it) — can do comparatively little
to level. This was his consistent attitude. The
same line of thought that led him to his apologia
for a ' natural aristocracy ' in his handling of govern-
ment, has its natural sequel in the conclusion, that
whatever be the equal rights which the citizens of
a State enjoy, these equal rights are not, and never
can be, rights to equal things. Equality of rights,
however far it may legitimately be pressed, remains
at best no more than the foundation of those many
modes of inequality ' without which there is no
nation/

CHAPTER XI

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY

(a) The Unity of the State

It is safe to assume that no one, in the light of what
the nineteenth century has done for political thought,
is likely to quarrel with Burke for insisting that
the great ' partnership ' of society is an organic
unity. This is his merit, and the very ground on
which it has been so justly said that he was far in
advance of his age. There still, however, remains
an opening for criticism. For there is certainly
room for the suggestion that, as conceived by him,
society is not organic enough, and that it is not
organic enough, because it is not sufficiently demo-
cratic.
/There are doubtless quarters in which a criticism

/such as this, and in especial the last clause of it,
is not likely to command assent. Obviously enough
it conflicts with a notion which, since the dawn of
political thought in Greece, has again and again
come to the front, and not only in the camps of
conservatism — the familiar doctrine, namely, that

I democracy makes for disintegration. And this, it
may be admitted, is, in a sense, undeniably true.

>■ 218

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 219

For beyond gainsaying, democracy, in all its greatest
exponents, stands for the claims of individual free
choice. This is of its essence. And from this it is
no great step to the suspicion, and the fear, that it
is very certain to become a corrosive, if not a deadly
solvent of all those ties between ruler and subject,
class and class, man and man, which rest upon
authority, custom, and prescription. For is it not
inevitable that, as the claims of individual free
choice push their way, as indeed they must, into the
theory and practice of liberty of thought, discussion,
and action, there must needs be an end of the
unsuspecting confidence and unquestioning loyalty
with which the social rank and file, in the days
before democracy comes to trouble the waters,
accept the laws and institutions of the State as not
to be called in question ? Nor is it in the least
doubtful that there is a world of difference between
the ages of Status and the ages of Choice ; or (in
less technical phrase) between that condition of
things, so dear to the reverent mind of Burke, in
which the situation of the individual is the arbiter
of his duties, and that vastly altered democratic
dispensation under which the choice of the individual
would fain make itself the arbiter of his situation.
Momentous indeed is the transition. Nor is the
step likely to be taken by any people without social
and political upheavals which transform society to
its foundations. Small wonder therefore if con-

220 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

servative minds, with whom, as with Burke, it is an
article of faith that ties are not lightly to be broken,
should come to dread and denounce the coming of
democracy, as if it meant the destruction of all that
they and their forefathers have most valued, and
even as the dissolution of the bonds and ligaments
that hold society together. Such, at any rate, has
been the burden of the indictment of democracy
from the days when Plato 1 satirised the democratic
licence that masquerades in the guise of liberty to
our own times, when Carlyle derided ' nomadic
contract/ bewailed the rupture of all ties except
' cash nexus,' scoffed at the ' liberty — to leap over
precipices,' and roundly declared that there was
' no longer any social idea extant.' 2 Such also is
substantially the indictment we find in Burke, who
was, as we have seen, convinced that, were the
radicalism of the rights of man suffered to run its
course, it would disintegrate the State, and dissolve
the great partnership of civil society into the dust
and powder of individualism.

Nor is it for any one, however strong his demo-
cratic sympathies, to deny that these disasters
might happen. In political changes nothing can
obviate risks. It is beyond a doubt that disinte-
grating forces not a few exist and operate within
democracy. In many ways democracy divides.
There are individualists whose atomistic creed is

1 Republic, Bk. vra. * Sartor Resartus.

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 221

the negation of all government, and collects
who are the terror of individualists. There are
dissenters from dissent, and WMOTlCilable groups
and parties which are the torment and despair of
statesmen ; and not least there is the menacing
clash of economic interests. And these are natural
enough. Every type of political system has its
own perversion, and it is reasonable enough to think
that the perversion of democracy lies towards
anarchy. Yet there is neither reason nor justice
in judging any form of polity by its perversions
actual or possible. These may have their place as
warnings and danger signals. But they are no more
sufficient ground for an ultimate judgment than are
the possible or even actual vices of an individual
for a final estimate of his character. It is better
therefore, and fairer, to judge of democracy and its
tendencies in the light of its ideal and the forces it
has at its command for translating that ideal into
fact. And if it be so judged, it is hardly rash to
say that it is so far from making for social disinte-
gration, as its foes aver, that of all political types
it is the one which by its very nature makes for
organic unity.

For when is a civil society in the fullest sense"
organic ? Obviously it is when the institutions it
gathers up within it, and the orders or classes of
which it consists, stand related in that peculiarly
intimate fashion which has driven political thinkers

222 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

to indulge so freely in biological analogies. But,
then, these institutions and orders do not hang
together of themselves. The bond that binds them
into unity, as these biological analogies imply, is
life. And though, of course, we may often enough
talk of the life or soul or spirit of a people or nation,
it is difficult to see what this ' soul ' is, or where it
resides, if it be not as actualised in the lives of the
men and women of whom a people or nation must
needs consist. Where is the soul of a mill when its
looms are deserted, of a shipyard when its hammers
are silent, of a ship in dock, of a club when it has
closed its doors, of a homestead abandoned to dilapi-
dation, of a city (if in these days we can imagine
such a thing) from which its inhabitants have fled ?
That a society is made up of individuals may be a
false, or at any rate a halting, statement. It must
be a halting statement, if it fails to do justice to the
fact that the substance and content, the interests,
ideas, activities, which make the individual life
worth living, come into it in and through the
feeding and fostering actualities of the social en-
vironment. To become an individual, in the true
and not merely atomistic sense of the word, a man
must have already lived in organic union with his
fellows. Else would the social group, be it family,
village, city, or nation, lapse into a mere aggregate
or mass of units which is no longer really a society.
All this may be conceded. Yet, when we press the

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 223

question, when and in what form these organic ties,
which count for so much, are to be found, where can
they be found elsewhere than in the lives of the
actual men and women, the persons in the fullest
sense of the word, who generation after generation,
vitalise the institutions of a people by throwing in
their lot with them, and by instinctively, habitually,
purposefully giving such force as they possess to the
work of the community ? For, however true it
may be, and it is indisputably true, that the life of
a city or a nation (not to speak of many lesser
groups) is an infinitely larger thing than the life of
any individual, or any group of individuals, within
it ; however undeniable it may be, and it is un-
deniable, that the citizens of city or state are always
being led on to results greater than, or at any rate
other than, those they anticipate, so that their
destinies may seem to be controlled by a larger will
and plan, this does not alter the fact that there is
one condition without which that larger will and
wider plan would be reduced to impotence ; and
that condition is the striving and effort, be it instinc-
tive or deliberate, of actual human beings in whom
the breath of social life must needs be found, if it
is to be found anywhere. Always the unity, fitly
called organic, of every social group, from the least
to the greatest, is strong and real, and not merely
nominal or notional, in proportion as the ends or
interests for which the group stands, are reflected

224 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

and actualised in the lives of its members. For this
is of the essence of social vitality in all its modes.

We can see this clearly enough in some of the
lesser groups. What, for example, is a united
family, if it be not one in which the family traditions,
the family fortunes, the family hopes, sorrows, in-
terests, ambitions are shared, up to the limits of
their several capacities, by every one within its
well-knit circle ? What is a prosperous institution,
be it club, trades-union, church, university, poli-
tical party, or what not, if it be not one that is
instinct with life, because everything that seriously
concerns the institution as a whole, its objects, its
management, its reputation, its plan and policy, is
likewise the serious concern of even the least of its
members ? Institutions, no doubt, may sometimes
continue to exist — history is strewn with the wrecks
of them — long after the life has gone out of them.
They may endure, though they can hardly be said to
survive, when they no longer live in the lives and
loyalties of their members. In name, or in law, or
in tradition, or in outward appearance, they may
still possess a kind of unity. But such have no
longer an organic unity, because they have ceased
to be a meeting-point of human feelings and wills,
united in a partnership for the furtherance of those
common ends and interests which that partnership
is designed to subserve. For institutions live their
real life in the lives of men or not at all. Apart from

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 225

this, they may have a local habitation and a name ;
they may have imposing adjuncts and officials and
endowments, and a record that goes far into the past.
But they have no longer organic unity, because none
of these things have life, if there be no lives to vitalise
them. There is no future before any institution, iif
it be not, as generation succeeds generation, born [
again and ever again in the souls of its members. ^

So with the great comprehensive institution, the
State, Needless to say that it gathers up within it
many ends and many interests. Needless to add
that these ends and interests are so many and so
multifarious that there is room and to spare for
unlimited division of energy and effort in their
pursuit and enjoyment. So much so, that to ex-
pect that each member should actively participate
in all would be an extravagant absurdity. This
group or that, this class or that, will, of course,
always have its own peculiar concerns, into which
it turns the central currents of its energies ; though
it will always be found, on closer inspection, that
even the most sectional, fractional, or selfish of
these have, without exception, their far-reaching
social significance. Yet clearly enough there are
ends and interests that are salient and paramount.
We may call them common, public, collective,
national, imperial. And we rightly say that a civil
society has risen towards organic unity in propor-
tion as its members, whilst not neglectful of the

P

226 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

narrower ties, are in their wills and loyalties en-
listed in the service of those larger ends of which
the civilised State is the bearer and the sponsor.
And from this it follows that, if it should happen,
by the exigencies, accidents, or apathies of the
national history, that there are within the com-
munity groups or classes who do not, up to the
limits of their capacities, participate in those para-
mount ends for which a State exists, then that com-
munity must still fall short of organic unity in the
full sense of the conception. Failing this, it may
still be strong, so strong that it may present a secure
and formidable front to other nations. For an
autocracy enthroned on helotage has done this
before now. And it may also, within itself (for
otherwise it could not be strong), be far from loosely
knit in the system of its institutions. But the ties
and ligaments, the l spiritual bond ' of feeling, will,
and aim, will still be wanting, so long as there re-
mains a sharp dividing - line between groups and
classes who genuinely participate in the paramount
ends of national life and the groups and classes who,
for one reason or another, are debarred from identi-
fying their wills and fidelities with these. A slave
state may be great ; the slave states of the ancient
world were great ; but no state can be fitly called
one and organic, so long as it contains even any
considerable minority of men who have little or no
share in those large and supremely valuable ends

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 227

and interests for which it is the glory, as it is also
the responsibility, of the nation to stand. For
these ends and interests will not be the meeting-
point of the hopes, the fears, the pride, the effect,
the ideals, of all its citizens.

Now this is what, in its ideal at any rate, the
democratic state seeks and hopes to remedy. It
may, of course, fall short. In many ways, and for
many reasons, democracy, like every other form of
polity may, and indeed must, fail of its ideal. The
imperious urgencies of foreign policy, the exigencies
of increasing and even of perpetually reproducing
the national wealth, the intellectual or moral back-
wardness of its population, the weight of national
tradition and habit, the political apathy which
makes people content to be law-abiding subjects
rather than good citizens — these are some of the
many obstructions that defeat the hopes of the
impatient prophets of democracy. But wherever
the democratic spirit is alive, these things are not
frustrations : they are only hindrances. For demo-
cracy is more, and deeper than a predilection for a
form of government, though Sir Henry Maine has
tried to narrow it down to that.1 Burke had a truer
insight when he said — and it was one of the reasons
why he feared it — that the Revolution was akin to
a religious and proselytising movement. For the
democratic movement that has run its course

1 In his Popular Government.

I

228 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

during the past century has almost always found its
inspiration in certain convictions about the claims
and the worth of the individual, which will not suffer
those who hold them to rest till they have won for
all orders and classes the opportunity of effective
participation in the political life of the State.
This has been the democratic aim, as it is already
to no small extent the democratic achievement.
And the justification both of aim and achievement
lies, not merely in security against irresponsible
power, nor yet in the well-worn argument that a
democratic constitution brings public interests well
worth living for into private lives which otherwise
would be lamentably narrowed, but in the conten-
tion that there is no surer path to national strength
than that which leads towards a national unity
which is truly organic because none are left outside
of it. The truism, so true of many forms of social
organisation from the family onwards, that strength
comes of unity, is surely also true of the nation.

But this, it must be evident, is not the kind of
unity we find in Burke. When he speaks of the
well-compacted fabric of justice cramped and
bolted together in all its parts, the picture that rises
is that of the unity of a people in his own sense of
the word, t It is the idea of a people as it comes
into being by ' the discipline of nature,' differenti-
ated into many ranks, classes, orders, functions, and
permeated through and through with the spirit of

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 229

inequality. And as the fact of inequality is no-
where more unimpeachable than in disparities of
political capacity, the result to which he comes is
not a truly organic, but a bisected state. On the
one side of the dividing - line stands his * natural

flrigtnrrany-l.anppnrtftH hy tL nfaflft AW.tnrfl.fft and a

limited ' British public ' ; 1 on the other the great
mass of the population, who, whatever be the worth
of their private lives, are shut out, by inherent
incapacity, from political rights and functions. This,
to be sure, need not be fatal to the unity of a people. \
For society, as Burke has told us,2 is a partnership
in much besides political institutions in the narrower^]
sense of the words. Nor is it to be forgotten that
Burke always thinks of the unenfranchised multi-
tude as united with all their fellow-countrymen in
a common patriotism. He is far from claiming
patriotism as the monopoly of the privileged electo-
rate, or even of his ' British public' Yet the cleavage
remains. For the fc partnership ' of his glowing
words can never be so complete, nor can the unity
he glorified be so organic, so long as there is a mass
of men within the State, in whom political interests
and activities do not join hands with the many
other less public ends for which they live. The
result follows. Despite all those eloquent words
about the ' great partnership/ and (we might add)
despite the shining example Burke's own career
1 P. 163. » P. 59.

230 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

affords of the extent to which the ends for which
the nation stands can saturate the life of a citizen,
the State as he conceives it falls asunder, disrupted
into the few who share political power, and the
many whose humble rdle it is to be ' the objects of
protection or the means of force.' It is aristocratic
to the core ; and because it is so aristocratic it is
so much the less organic. Hence it is not too much
to say that Burke's conception of society fails just
where it is strongest. Its strength lies in its insist-
ence, so eloquent, so convincing, on the unity of the
whole : the weakness is that the unity is not
complete.

This line of criticism, however, it is safe to say,
would have made no impression upon Burke. He
was too firmly convinced that the breaking up of
political power into the multitudinous fragments of
a widely extended franchise was the straight road
to anarchy. And this conviction, from which he
never wavered, was not the child of prejudice. As
we have seen in the chapter on government, it rested
on twin supports : on his plea for c a natural aristo-
cracy,' and on his settled estimate of the political
incapacity of the multitude, whom he so decisively
ruled out of all share in political power. It rested,
in short, on the doctrine of Whig trusteeship. And
to this we may now turn.

There is a way of dealing with this aristocratic
doctrine of Whig trusteeship that is all too easy.

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 231

Burke, it has been said, died protesting against the
inevitable ; and the inevitable has come. Whig
trusteeship has, beyond question, been overthrown
in practical politics. And if so, what need for
further refutation ? Is this solvitur ambulando not
enough, now that a century and more has gone by ?
Nay, has not Burke himself told us that the course
of history is nothing less than ' the known march
of the providence of God ' ? A thousand years may
be as one day in the eye of God, but the verdict of
a century must surely count for much in the life
of a nation as seen by the eyes of men.

This, however, is far from enough. It is needful
to remember that the mere fact that a great political
movement has beaten down its opponents on the
plains of recent history is no sufficient proof that it
has won in argument. Even if we believe, with
Schiller and Hegel, that the history of the world
is the judgment of the world, this memorable dictum
is not to be applied except over large stretches of
Time. And even if it be argued, as well it may,
that the case for any social system is weakened by
the lapse of y^ars during which its reformers hold
their ground, and thereby become themselves after
a fashion prescriptive, it does not follow that, theo-
retically, at any rate, we are justified in adding it
to the forlorn catalogue of lost causes, till we are
satisfied that it has yielded ground before something
more rational than what may after all be nothing

232 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

more than the blind push of brute natural forces.
Democracy victorious may be a different thing from
democracy justified. The argument from success is
premature. The democracies of Europe are, in
fact, still new to their work, and are still upon their
trial. And when we turn to their publicists and
prophets, we find them sharply at variance. Indi-
vidualists are, to say the least, suspicious of socialists ;
and socialists, to say no more, impatient of indi-
vidualists. | Utilitarianism has long ago, to its own
complete satisfaction, demolished the radical dogma
of the natural rights of man ; and Herbert Spencer,
in his turn, hating socialism with a perfect hatred,
has denounced the Benthamite faith in the omni-
* potence of the majority as a political superstition.
Meanwhile the foes of democratic government have
not been silent. Carry le has satirised it with a
derisive humour unequalled since Plato. Sir Henry
Maine, from a world-wide survey of institutions,
old and new, has pronounced it to be to the last
degree fragile, and to be densely impervious to the
light of ideas — except the light, not from Heaven,
of the * broken-down theories of Rousseau and
Bentham.' And the naturalism of our day, in
some of its prophets at any rate, is greatly more
concerned to laud and magnify ' the superman '
than to hold a brief on any terms for humble worth
and the democratic rank and file, who, if Nietzsche
is to be believed, are good for nothing but to swell

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 233

statistics. Even John Stuart Mill, radical and'
optimist though he was, caught up the note of
alarm from De Tocqueville's Democracy in America,
and sounded a warning blast against the menacej
of that multiplied tyranny of the multitude which
made him the champion of enlightened minorities J
With facts like these in view, it is permissible to
think that, if Burke's theory of government is to be
laid on the shelf, it ought to be in deference to other
arguments than the dubious ' logic of accomplished
facts.' It has still a claim to be examined on its
merits. And as it involves two salient points, the /
affirmation of the political incapacity of the multi- I
tude and the plea for a ' natural aristocracy,' we \
may, as matter of arrangement, take these in turn. )

(b) The Political Incapacity of the Multitude

It is possible that, upon this fundamental point,
Burke's convictions may have a historical justifi-
cation. Let historians decide. It is for them to
say, from an exact and intimate knowledge of the
English people in the latter half of the eighteenth
century, if Burke was wrong, and if Pitt, not to say
Shelburne and Richmond (who went much further)
were right in advocating large measures of enfran-
chisement. Our concern is with Burke's arguments
only in so far as they have been generalised, as they
have often been, into a case against the democratic
movement of the nineteenth century and the demo-

234 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

era tic reforms which have followed in its train.
Are the friends of democracy in a position to say
that these arguments have been refuted \ Can
they specify where their weakness lies 1 This is
the challenge which must be met.

The challenge is, however, one which democracy
need not fear to face. For there is one aspect at
any rate in which Burke has made the case for his
uncompromising exclusions difficult by nothing so
much as by his own admissions. For his vein is not
the vein of Coriolanus. The rabble, the mob, the
common herd, the louts, the clowns, the rotten
multitudinous canaille, and suchlike are not exple-
tives characteristic of him. However bitter and
envenomed the words he flung at the sanguinary
proletariat of Paris — did he not call them ' a swinish
multitude ' ? * — it was far enough from his large
and sympathetic mind to think thus meanly and
savagely of the great mass of his humble fellow-
countrymen, for whose claims and virtues he had,
as we have seen,2 a sincerity of respect which many
a radical might imitate. ' He censures God who
quarrels with the imperfections of men.' Such was
his avowed conviction ; and it is entirely in keeping
with it that ' to love and respect his kind ' is one of
the marks of the statesman after his own heart.
But it is just this attitude of respect that goes far

1 It was explained as evoked by the inhuman execution of
Bailly, the historian of astronomy.
* P. 170.

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 235

to undermine his Whig exclusiveness. It gives the
democratic critic an opening. For however wide
the step from respecting a human being to the wish
to give him a share in political power ; and however
easy it be to point to men, even the best and the
greatest, like Scott or Carlyle, who have exalted the
peasant saint and abhorred the democratic voter, it
is none the less the fact that there is no idea, not
even liberty or fraternity, more fundamentally
fatal to all political monopolies and exclusions than
the idea and sentiment of respect for men. Nor is
it difficult to see why. For when one man genuinely
respects another, it is never merely because of what
that other may have actually succeeded in making
of himself and his opportunities ; it is, always in
part and sometimes mainly, because he believes
that the person he respects has capacities and powers
which, given more favouring conditions, would
find fuller realisation. If it be just and right to
estimate mankind by what they are, we can never
value them at their real worth, if we do not include
in what they are, the something more, be it much
or little, which they have it in them to become.
This comes to fight quite clearly, it is in fact a
commonplace, in all those cases where human
faculty and promise are manifestly obstructed by
disease, penury, or ill-fortune. Nor do we go one
whit beyond the facts in venturing the assertion
that the very nerve of social effort would be cut,

236 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

were it to happen that the more helpful and vigor-
ous members of a community were convinced —
could such a disaster befall them — that the mass of
their fellow-citizens were inherently incapable of
rising towards the opportunities of a happier lot
and a larger life. To believe men to be worth
helping implies some faith that they will respond
to what is done for them. And if this is true even
of the social stratum, where latent powers and
capacities are at a minimum, it holds with incom-
parably greater force where these are normal, and
by consequence more capable of response to larger
opportunities.

Doubtless these larger opportunities need not
include politics. Fortunately for all of us, there
are many other things to live for. It is equally
true that Burke and Scott and Carlyle were right
in holding that men might have much worth without
votes, and that demagogues are extravagant when
they speak as if enfranchisement is the one specific
for lifting mankind out of a pit of degradation.
But this is not conclusive. For the point in issue is
not whether ordinary men may not have much in
their fives to be thankful for, even though they
have never seen the inside of a polling-booth or a
political meeting, but whether, be their private and
personal worth what it may, they do not possess
likewise sufficient political faculty and promise to
justify, for their own sake and their country's,

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 237

their admission to citizenship. And once the ques-
tion is raised in this form, the presumption lies
not in favour of permanent exclusions but in the
contrary direction. For the object of respect as
between man and man is not mere qualities, not
even shining qualities : it is character. It is, in
other words, the principle of moral and social life
which, however grievously it may be stunted and
obstructed, is nevertheless discernible in every
normal human soul ; and this central principle of
life and worth is so far from being circumscribed
within fixed and unyielding limits that, as a matter
of common experience, it is often eagerly responsive
to new openings and opportunities. It was a doc-
trine of some of the Greek philosophers that, if a
man have one virtue he has all the virtues. So
stated it is, as it was meant to be, a paradox ; but
it is a paradox that embodies the truth, none more
fundamental in ethics, that he who has virtue in
those relationships in which he has been put to
the proof has within him a principle of virtue which,
if opportunity be given, will not fail to assert itself
in other directions. In other and more concrete
words, if an artisan or a peasant have principle
enough to be a good father, a true friend, a helpful
neighbour, a capable workman, a law-abiding sub-
ject, the presumption is in favour of his becoming
likewise a reasonably good citizen, if opportunity
to prove his quality be given him. To pay to

238 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

humble worth our tribute of respect, as Burke does ;
to say that its interests are sacred, as Burke does ;
to declare that we are ready to shed our blood on
its behalf, as Burke does ; and then to add that
it must on no account be admitted to political
power, as Burke does — this may well appear, as
indeed it is, something of a non sequitur. The
presumption lies the other way.

A presumption such as this, however, though it
may weigh with believers in democracy, could not
be expected to count for much (or for anything) with
Burke. He was too firmly committed to his con-

Iviction, from which he never swerved, of the per-
manent political incapacity of the multitude.
Now the question at issue here is not whether
political incapacity exists. It cannot be doubted
that it exists, and is likely to continue to exist, in
all communities over the face of the earth. It must
exist so long as ignorance, indifference, levity, reck-
lessness, and lack of common sense are found
amongst mankind. The truth is that it exists so
widely — and nature must bear some part of the
reproach — as quite to overpass the ordinary lines
of class distinctions, and to have its representatives
in all ranks, classes, or orders whatsoever. If many
a country cottager may be politically incapable, so
may many a well-born idler. If many an artisan
or small shopkeeper may be politically incapable,
so (though for different reasons) may be many a

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 239

votary of luxury or sport, of social excitement or
money. Never is it to be forgotten, in all contro-
versies about democratic franchises, that political
incapacity is certainly not the monopoly of the class
or classes upon which the aristocratic system of Whig
trusteeship, especially in Burke's version of it, so
decisively bolts the door.

The point that is here in issue, therefore, does
not turn essentially on the presence or absence of
political incapacity as between class and class, but
on the less depressing and more pertinent inquiry
whether the classes whom the old Whigs, or even
the new Whigs, would exclude from power are so
conspicuously lacking in the credentials for citizen-
ship as Burke supposed. 4 How,' we have heard him 1
ask,1 * shall he get wisdom who holdeth the plough j
and glorieth in the goad ; who driveth oxen and is !
occupied in their labours ; and whose talk is of
bullocks ? ' It is a pertinent question, and one
that might easily be expanded. How can he get
wisdom who wields the pick-axe, and drives the
rivet, who works the engine and stands behind the
counter, or who spends his years in office, foundry,
or factory ? For this, of course, is the question to
which democracy has to find its answer. Burke's
answer we have seen. His answer seemingly is,
Never. He relegates them all to the wrong side of
his bisecting line. The franchise is for none of
1 P. 170.

240 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

them ; and even if some of them might find a place
in his limited ' British public,' the vast majority are
dismissed as ' the objects of protection or the means
of force.' What then is the answer of democracy ?
In the first place it claims that the multitude
whom Burke would exclude have some important
qualifications for citizenship which are, not of course
solely but in peculiar measure, their own. It is
a mistake to assume that the arguments for citizen-
ship are in all points in favour of those classes who
enjoy the indubitable advantages of social position,
wealth, education, and leisure. Is it not something
that the less fortunate and less favoured (as they are
often called) have, on their side, one advantage that
counts for much ? They have direct experience,
in their own fives and by constant association with
men of their own station, of some of the gravest
hardships, grievances, and possibly injustices, which
parliaments and ministries exist to remedy or ex-
tinguish. They know, for example, what it is —
for in these latter days at any rate they can learn
by experience what it is — to have their children
saved from ignorance by the elementary school, or
safeguarded against the scourges of disease and
squalor by officers of public health. They feel in-
stantly and in their homes the pinch of industrial
depression and commercial crises, or the bitter ex-
periences of strikes and lock-outs. It is probable

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 241

enough that they can recall cases of some they have
known passing into the dreary degradation of
pauperism. And they have perforce, and far more
than their more prosperous fellow-countrymen,
been brought into repulsive contiguity with the
congested misery of great cities, and even with the
still more repulsive spectacle of vice and crime.
Nor ought it to be forgotten in this connection
that, though they may concern themselves but
little with international affairs or diplomatic action,
it is more than likely that the circle of their acquaint-
ance, possibly their own firesides, have furnished
the men who fight this country's battles by land
and sea.

Now of much of this Burke was well aware
(though some of the experiences specified were of
course beyond the horizon of his age). He had
always an open mind and heart for the hardships,
sufferings, and grievances of the multitude. Did he
not declare that, if need arose, he would take his
stand on the side of the poor, and shed his blood on
their behalf ? But, then, he could not think that
there was any necessary connection between the
experience of hardships and grievances and the
claim to be represented in the parliament with
which some redress of grievances and some allevia-
tion of hardships might be supposed to rest. Con-
vinced that legislatures and governments can, after

Q

242 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

all, do comparatively little for human happiness,
and firm in his Whig confidence in the actual and
possible achievements of virtual representation, he
was not only content but resolved to leave the
multitude politically inarticulate. Nor is this in-
flexible exclusiveness in the least softened by that
religious spirit which has sometimes led democratic
thinkers — Mazzini, for example, or T. H. Green — to
argue that if a man have worth in. the eye of God, he
ought to be allowed the opportunity of proving his
worth in politics as in other things. Far from it.
For Burke's thought, in this reference, moves far
more amongst the consolations than the incentives
of religion. Its message to the multitude, outside
the pale of the constitution, is to reverence the
powers that be, which are also the powers ordained of
God ; and, should their lives be hard and unsatis-
fying, to seek in ' the final proportions of eternal
justice ' the true consolations for the sorrows and
sufferings of an imperfect earthly lot.1

It is here, however, that democracy parts com-
pany with him. Needless to say, it does not affirm
so rash a proposition as that experience of griev-
ances and hardships, and nothing more, qualifies
for the franchise . It may even adopt with conviction
the words of its adversary : ' Great distress has
never hitherto taught, and whilst the world lasts
it never will teach, wise lessons to any part of man-

1 Reflections.

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 243

kind. Men are as much blinded by the extremes
of misery as by the extremes of prosperity. ' * Nor
does it stand committed to the equally extravagant
assertion that, because a human being is religious,
he is therefore fit to exercise a vote. No. Yet it
does insist that such experiences ought to count.
They ought to count because those who live through
them, whatever be their limitations otherwise, are
likely to possess an intimate, because real and
personal knowledge of social conditions which must
be understood, if legislators and administrators
are really to grasp the facts and needs of national
life. Doubtless the experiences as they come to
individuals may be limited and narrow enough.
And, of course, there is much else in the life of a
nation that lies quite outside of them. But they are
none the less of undeniable importance, because,
being widely shared, they concern the lives and
destinies of multitudes.

For it is a mistake to regard representative
government as if it aimed at nothing more than the
representation of opinions, or as if it were no more
than a passably good device for setting rival interests
by the ears in an assembly of the nation, in the hope
that out of the clash and conflict of discordant
demands, the public good will somehow come by
its own. Important though it be for the members
of a constituency to have their opinions expressed,

1 Letter to a Member of the National Assembly.

244 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

and their interests upheld by a man of their choice,
it is not less important that they should find a
representative who can sympathetically enter into
their life-experiences, so that thus equipped he
may be able, faithfully and with all the weight
of fact, to lay these in their reality before the
representative assembly of the nation. For the
weaknesses of statesmen and legislators too often
lie, not in failing to apprehend the social facts and
movements which come within their ken, but in
failing to apprehend these in their real depth and
significance. Hence, indeed, the demand one some-
times meets that all classes and interests in the
State — land, capital, labour, law, learning, army,
navy, and so forth — should, so far as is compatible
with the motley composition of constituencies, be
represented by men of their own order. The
demand is often impracticable ; and it easily
degenerates into a narrow forgetfuhiess that the
member for a mining or a commercial or agricultural
centre is, as Burke once reminded his constituents,
also a member of Parliament, and as such has much
else to do besides the holding of a brief for his own
constituents. Yet it is not unreasonable. To
borrow words of Burke's own : ' The virtue, spirit,
and essence of a House of Commons consists in it 3
being the express image of the feelings of the nation.'1
And ceteris paribus, it is always an advantage that

1 Thoughts on the Present Discontents.

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 245

a representative should not only know about the
life-experiences of his constituents, but know them,
if not from personal initiation, yet with something
of the intimacy and reality which they wear to
those who have actually lived through them. For
this, and nothing less than this, is one of the prime
ends which representative institutions are meant to
attain.

It is here most of all, more than in the voicing of
opinions, more than in the championing of class
interests (as the word is often understood) that the
' virtual ' representative of Whig trusteeship is at
a disadvantage. In many ways he may be excellent ;
but the hardships and grievances, the feelings and
hopes of the multitude are less likely to have justice
done to them by him. "Not from want of head or of
heart — it is far from necessary to follow Bentham
and James Mill in branding all virtual representatives
as sinister self-seekers — but for the simpler reason
that he is less likely to enter into the life -experiences
of those he claims to represent than the man of their
own choice who is bound to win their confidence in
seeking their support. However capable as man
of affairs, however honest in his patriotism, there
will still be something lacking, so long as the unen-
franchised mass have no effective means of articu-
lately bringing home to him the realities of their
lives and lot. Almost in his own despite, and very
easily if he be not blessed with uncommon insight

246 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

and sympathy, he will fall into the attitude — not
unknown in Whig circles — of viewing the grievances
he would redress, the hardships he would ameliorate,
the life -experiences he would represent, from with-
out and not from within. Nor can it be said that
even Burke is wholly exempt from this limitation.
There is a passage in Paine's Rights of Man in which
that mordant critic of the Reflections takes his enemy
to task : ' Nature,' he says, ' has been kinder to
Mr. Burke than he is to her. He is not affected by
the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the
showy resemblance of it striking his imagination.
He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.
Accustomed to kiss the aristocratic hand that hath
purloined him from himself, he degenerates into a
composition of art, and the genuine soul of nature
deserts him. His hero or his heroine must be a
tragedy victim, expiring in show ; and not the real
prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence
of a dungeon.' The words are extravagant. The
estimate is false. And it would be easy to retort
that, when all is said, Burke had not less independ-
ence of character, and immeasurably more of, the
milk of human kindness than Thomas Paine, and to
add that the happiness of the humblest was never
far from his thoughts. But there is perhaps enough
truth in them to suggest that, even to the broad
humanity and penetrating insight of Burke, the
wrongs and miseries of down-trodden subjects

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 247

lacked something of the reality and significance
which they wore to the eye of one who, with all his
bitterness and class-hatred, saw them from the
inside.

Nor can the well-worn argument from the politi-
cal ignorance of the multitude, which has always
done duty at every proposed extension of the
franchise, be any longer pressed. Even if it had
force in the days when Burke set his face as a flint
against all parliamentary reform, those days, if
they have not already passed, are swiftly passing.
Happily the opportunities for political knowledge
can no longer be said to be the monopoly of any
class in the State. The compulsory school, the
newspaper, the cheapened press, the platform, the
lecture, the organised effort of intellectual propa-
gandism, the rise and progress of universities in
great cities are rapidly bringing political knowledge
within all but universal reach. And though reach
is one thing and grasp another, and though obviously
enough ignorance has not departed, nor indeed is
ever likely to depart, it is beyond all question
steadily ceasing to be the badge of any class —
except the class of the ignorant in all classes.

It is, however, not on the score of political ignor-
ance only that Burke would exclude the multitude.
For, as we have seen, the quality that, in his scale
of valuation, is above all others needful in affairs

f

248 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

is not knowledge, indispensable though that may be,
but practical wisdom. It is, in other words, what,
on its more ordinary levels we call good sense, and
what, as found in the statesman, Burke calls ' pru-
dence,' and magnifies as the mother of all the politi-
cal virtues. For this, and this alone, is the faculty
which enables its possessor, not merely to know
facts and apprehend principles, but to apply prin-
ciples to facts in the thousand concrete decisions
which have to be made by politicians in their actual
contact with circumstances and conduct of affairs.
And we know — for he has left us in no manner of
doubt — where Burke believed this quality was to
be found, and also where it was not to be found. It
was to be found conspicuously in his ' natural
aristocracy ' and, though in greatly diminished
degree, in the close electorates that stood behind
them : it was not to be found in those ' whose talk
is of bullocks,' and suchlike. In the former his
faith is firm ; in the latter he has no faith at all.

Nor is this attitude unreasonable. Practical
wisdom, even in its more modest form of common
sense, is not to be lightly reckoned upon in mankind
at large. It is none too common. It is not the
gift of nature, nor can it be got from books, nor
imparted like knowledge in schools or lecture-rooms.
It comes, mainly at any rate, through practice and
the actual conduct of life. It is by making decisions,
sometimes by making blunders, that the blunders

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 249

come to be fewer and the decisions sounder ; nor
will wisdom ever emerge, not even when natural
gifts and knowledge are present in abundance, unless
there be experience to furnish the opportunities
for its exercise and slowly won development. And
should it happen, by the exigencies of a humble
lot and a contracted life, that such opportunities
are denied, it is in vain to look for ' prudence '
there, except in the non-political form that suffices
to deal with the small concerns of private life. This
is what Burke undoubtedly felt. It is not neces-
sary to place his estimate of men too low, by the
supposition that he would have denied the existence
of sagacity and common sense in the ordinary con-
duct of their private lives. But when it came to
the larger affairs of politics, it was different. These
were quite beyond the scope of the rank and file ;
beyond their experience, beyond their knowledge,
beyond their judgment, beyond their competence.
Hence their exclusion.

It is not for democracy to deny the strength of
this position. It cannot deny that, if the oppor-
tunities for the development of any human faculty
be absent, that faculty will never be found except
in meagre and inadequate degree ; and political
faculty is no exception to this rule. On the con-
trary, the fullest and frankest recognition of this
fact is precisely one of the points on which demo-
cracy must insist. It must insist upon it in order

250 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

that it may go on to affirm that, under the condi-
tions of our modern social life, these opportunities,
which rightly count for so much, are no longer
denied to those classes whom Burke excludes. For
in the modern state, the preparation for participa-
tion in political life has come to be far wider than
politics. That astonishing growth in social organ-
isation which has signalised the nineteenth century,
has covered the land with a vast network not only
of private enterprises, but of societies, leagues,
unions, combinations, clubs, whose name is legion.
Many of them are, of course, not in the stricter sense
political. They have not been organised for strictly
political ends at all : their aims have been com-
mercial, industrial, social. Yet none the less on
that account, they fulfil a political function of the
first importance, because they provide a school and
training-ground of civic quality. Be it trades-
union, benefit club, friendly society, co-operative
enterprise, charitable association, or what not, and
be they never so diverse in the ends or interests
for which they stand, they are all alike in this : they
lift their members out of a narrowing absorption
in private life ; they familiarise them with public
ends and the conduct of affairs on a large scale ;
and they teach them, through actual experience, the
value and the discipline of organised collective
effort. And if we add to this that reiterated strides
in parliamentary reform, with universal and com-

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 251

pulsory education as its ally, have opened the door
for participation in the many graded activities of
rural, municipal, and national politics, it is far from
Utopian to believe that, by the cumulative force of
all these influences, the rank and file of the demo-
cratic State must steadily advance, not only in
political information, but — a still greater gain — in
that capacity for affairs which in Burke's estimate,
and possibly enough in Burke's age, they so con-
spicuously lacked. This is that ' education in the
widest sense of the word ' on which J. S. Mill so
rightly relied — the education of actual participa-
tion in organised social and political work. It is
the only finally efficient school of political good
sense and practical wisdom.

It does not follow from this, however, that demo-
cracy has little to learn from the teaching of Burke.
On two cardinal points at any rate, it carries a
message that is greatly needed : the one, his con-
ception of a representative as different from a dele-
gate ; the other, his plea for a ' natural aristo-
cracy.' These are intimately connected, but we
may take them in turn.

(c) Representatives and Delegates

It is often supposed, and sometimes regarded as
inevitable, that in proportion as democracy runs
its course the represenTallve must needs dwindle

252 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

into the delegate. Not unnaturally. It would be
a childish ignorance to place a democracy in power
and to fancy that it is not certain to use it. Only
innocence or folly would put a weapon into ener-
getic hands without reckoning that it will certainly
be vigorously handled. And they live in a fool's
paradise who think, if there be any such, that a
democratic electorate will not be minded to take
its destinies into its own hands. Gladstone once
said — and significantly enough the words come in
a context in which he is pleading for the extension
of the franchise — that ' the people must be passive.'
He even said it was so ' written with a pen of iron
on the rock of human destiny.' x But the passivity,
if that be the word for it, must be understood with
reservations. For it is of the essence of the demo-
cratic spirit and ideal to strive to make the whole
community, not only in the occasional crises of
elections but in the not less important intervals
between elections, politically alive in the lives of
all its citizens. Its claim to foster, more than any
other form of government, the organic unity which is
the prime condition of a nation's strength, depends,
as has been already urged,2 upon its being content
with nothing less. Nor can there be a doubt that
this must vitally affect the relation of electorate and
representative. As matter of fact it has shattered
beyond recovery the Whig theory and practice of

1 Gleanings of Past Years, vol. i. 2 P. 226.

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 253

virtual representation, and insisted upon substitut-
ing actual representation. And democracy has
done this not because it has, like Bentham and
James Mill and the sectarian radicals who followed
them, come to regard virtual representatives as
plunderers of the public, but for the simpler and
less corrosive reason that the representatives of a
free people must be chosen, and expected to render
an account of their stewardship to their constituents.

/The responsibility of the representative to the
electorate is so fundamental to the democratic
creed that no genuine believer in democracy can
possibly abjure it ; not even although he may
cheerfully concede, what the utilitarians churlishly
denied, that many a virtual representative might
be a man of honour, probity, public spirit, and
wisdom. He cannot abjure it for the obvious
reason that, where democracy is real, it must assert
its will in the directing of policy and in the manage-

- ment of affairs.

It is one thing, however, to insist that represen-
tatives must be chosen and held to their responsi-
bility, and another thing to turn them into dele-
gates^And it is here that Burke has his message.
For none of all our publicists, as we have seen,1 has
more firmly and more passionately protested against
the fallacy that under representative institutions
the representative should be a delegate. He pro-
1 P. 165.

254 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

tested against this even under the close and pre-
sumably select franchise of his day/ Such faith in
constituencies as he had, vanished from the moment
when an electorate showed signs of presuming to
degrade the member of their choice into the mouth-
piece and agent of their instructions/ Like Macaulay
after him, he told his constituents to the face that
he meant to serve them with his labour, his judg-
ment, his convictions, or not at all ; and could even
administer to them the doubtful consolation that he
had ' maintained their interest against their opinions
with a constancy that became him.' 1

Such is his legacy. And to none is it so needful
as to the large and mixed electorates of democracy
triumphant. For it is not in parliaments of delegates,
enslaved to constituencies, caucuses, and parties, and
mortgaged in judgment, that the natural aristo-
cracy of democracy is likely to be found. Burke
goes to the quick, nor of all his pregnant utterances
is there one that is truer, when he says that the
lovers of freedom must themselves be free — free to
speak and to act upon their judgment. For of all
slaveries the most humiliating to any leader of men
is the slavery of the judgment, which is also the
subjection of the conscience ; and of all tyrannies
the worst is the tyranny of an electorate which,
exchanging confidence for distrust, would fain
transform a man of intelligence, honour, and patriot-

1 Speech at Bristol previous to the election in 1780.

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 255

isin into a conduit for instructions which he must
execute to the letter, on penalty of being driven
from political life. Democracy has long learnt to
hate the tyrants whose subjects are slaves : it must
learn with equal thoroughness to despise the elected
slaves whose tyrants are subjects. It has come to
repose its trust in the collective wisdom : it must
come equally to realise that collective wisdom will
never be wiser than in choosing leaders who can
le^ad, and reposing a large discretion in their hands.
/'For the fact is not to be evaded, being as it is in-
separable from the intricacy, complexity, urgency,
cross-currents, and baffling confusions of all great
political problems, that there are many decisions,
and not on matters of mere detail alone, of which
large electorates, by reason of their size, their lack
of time, their want of accurate knowledge, their
divided counsels, their passions, are inherently in-
capable^XNor is it their delegates that will help
them out — not so long as it remains the fact that
no democracy ever was, or ever will be, led by dele-
gates. It would be a contradiction in terms. For
there are two things which democracy can never
unite : the one is the leadership of a natural aristo-
cracy based on democratic representative institutions
— that leadership for which, by the very magnitude
of its legitimate equalitarian ambitions, and the
problems these have raised, it has intensified the
need ; the other is the perversion of the just and in-

256 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

evitable democratic claim to choose its own leaders
and to shape the destinies of the nation, into the
distrust and dictation which sterilise the political
wisdom, the ' prudence,' which is the greatest gift
which leadership can bring to the service of a people.
Nor need there be apprehensions that, by devolving
a large discretion on its leaders, democracy will
either weaken its case, or find its occupation gone.
It will strengthen its case. For it is when demo-
cracy becomes delegative that it lies open to assault.
It is, in truth, the easiest of tasks for its assailants,
Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke) for example, or Sir Henry
Maine, first to insist that political problems are
so complex, so intricate, so baffling, that they are
enough to tax the wits of the wisest, as they cer-<
tainly may ; and then to turn round and ask, with
many a flout and sarcasm, if questions such as these
are likely to be solved by the votes of a mob. But
this is not the question which representative demo-
cracy has to answer. It does not pin its faith to
vox populi vox del and nothing more ; nor does
its appeal to polling-booth and ballot-box rest on a
blind faith that majorities, however overwhelming,
can solve any political problem whatever by mere
weight of votes. Its hopes must always centre,
and the case for it must always turn, upon the men
whom polling-booth and ballot-box send up to
grapple with problems at closer quarters, and more
searchingly, than is ever possible for even the most

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 257

enlightened of electorates. To express needs and
grievances, to organise political associations, to hold
public meetings, freely to discuss both measures and
men, vigilantly to watch administration, and, above
all, to pronounce a verdict on measures or policies
when these come before them in their broad issues
after having been well threshed out in press, plat-
form, or parliament — these are the functions of the
electorate. Or rather they are part of its functions :
the other part is its choice of men — men whose task
it is to serve their constituents indeed, but to serve
them, as Burke served his, without sacrifice of
freedom, conscience, and independent judgment.
Grant that it is not an easy task. Just how far
a constituency may particularise its will ; just
when and where the member of its choice may
waive his personal judgment without compromising
his sincerity — these are matters incapable of exact
definition. No hard and fast lines can be laid down
for them which may not change with circumstance;
There will always be room for give and take on both
sides, /xhe vital matter is that electorates, if only »
for their own sake, should recognise that the man of
their choice is not fit to be chosen if he have not a
mind and will of his ownj^nd that a resolute re-
fusal to multiply pledges is, as Burke truly taught,
one of the prime conditions of securing energetic
and disinterested service. Nor is it ever to be for-
gotten that, under any form of constitution, it is

R

258 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

not service only that is needed : it is the service
that is also leadership. This, however, will be more
evident when we have considered Burke's conception
of a natural aristocracy.

(d) The Need for a Natural Aristocracy

For Burke's feet were never on surer ground than
when, as we have seen,1 he argued that a civil
society, by the very conditions of social struggle
and growth, must needs evolve ' a natural aristo-
cracy, without which there is no nation.' For a
natural aristocracy is neither a product of social
artifice, nor a parasitical growth : it is the inevit-
able result of the long and gradual process whereby
society passes from the looser groupings and cohe-
sions of primitive ages on to the larger and more
richly integrated forms of civilised organisation.
There is a striking passage in which Bagehot the
economist, when enlarging on what he calls the
necessarily ' monarchical structure ' of the modern
business world, puts this point with his wonted
animation : ' This monarchical structure,' he pro-
ceeds, ' increases as society goes on, just as the
corresponding structure of war business does, and
from the same causes. In primitive times, a battle
depended as much on the prowess of the best fight-
ing men, of some Hector or some Achilles, as on the
1 P. 173.

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 259

good science of the general. But nowadays it is
a man at the far end of a telegraph wire — a Count
Moltke with his head over some papers — who sees
that the proper persons are slain, and who secures
the victory. So in commerce. The primitive
weavers are separate men with looms apiece, the
primitive weapon-makers separate men with flints
apiece ; there is no organised action, no planning,
contriving, or foreseeing in either trade, except on
the smallest scale ; but now the whole is an affair
of money and management ; of a thinking man in
a dark office, computing the prices of guns or wor-
steds.' * If these words are true of war and industry,
they are not less true of politics. And they are
never truer than when the course of political evolu-
tion has given birth to the democratic state. Un-
fortunately this is often missed. Too often and too
easily it is assumed that democracy levels. And so,
in conspicuous ways, it does. It levels down the
superiorities of prerogative, privilege and mon-
opoly : it levels up the inferiorities of social dis-
advantage and political disability. But it does not,
nor can it ever, equalise. If it deposes a hereditary
aristocracy, not to say an aristocracy of Whig
1 trustees/ it is driven on, by the needs it itself
creates, to find a new aristocracy of its own. By the
very fervour and persistence of its passion for
equality it creates new inequalities in demolishing

1 Economic Studies, p. 53.

260 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

old ones. And this result follows from three causes,
so closely concatenated that they might be said to
furnish a kind of logic of democratic politics.

The first of these is that the passion for equality —
the ruling passion of democracy if De Tocqueville
is to be believed — creates problems. And not
political problems only, such as touch parliamentary
reform and government, but a crowd of social
problems which follow in the train of the demand
for more equality of opportunity and less inequality
of wealth. The second point is that these problems
have come to be of such magnitude that it has
now for some time been recognised that nothing
short of organised collective effort, private and
public, and the resources it can command, can hope
solve them. Hence that astonishing growth of
organisations which has steadily increased in defiance
of all pessimistic prophecies of social disintegration
(those, for example, of Carlyle), till at the end of
every vista we see a union, a federation, a league, a
society, a syndicate, a commission, a conference,
and what not. And the third consideration is that,
where there are organisations, there, as never
before, there are to be found the need and the
opportunities of leadership. It is an illusion to
suppose that social organisation, however demo-
cratic, abates, far less supersedes, the need for
leaders. It intensifies it. For these practical
problems, with which organised effort is needed to

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 261

grapple, are admittedly of a most intricate and
baffling complexity. Many a student of society has
felt the need of a life-time for their investigation.
And many a statesman must have felt that he would
give much, if only it were possible to suspend decision
and action till he had more adequately analysed
and grasped the conditions with which he has to
deal. Yet this is what he cannot do. The world,
the democratic world at any rate, does not suffer
him to do it. For the problems that face him are
not only complex : they are urgent. The hungry
spirit, the deep dissatisfactions, the equalitarian am-
bitions of democracy make them urgent, clamant.
Suspense of judgment, that privilege of the student,
is denied to the man of affairs who, all too often
for his own peace of mind, finds himself compelled
to move to his solutions by decisions which, to
the eye of the student, must seem to verge peril-
ously near a leap in the dark.

Hence the result, which brings us back again to
the teaching of Burke, that the solution of ail great
political questions demands nothing less than the
union of two qualities, both admirable, both in-
dispensable, but extraordinarily difficult to unite :
the searching, patient, analytic grasp of conditions,
and the virile practical judgment, the ' prudence '
of Burke's panegyric, which knows when to cut
deliberations short, to grasp the skirts of opportunity,
and to decide resolutely what has here and now to

262 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

be done. For it is the union of these two qualities
that is the passport to statesmanship. Nothing
less will suffice. The massive push of collective
effort is not enough. The deliberations and resolu-
tions of the collective wisdom of ordinary men,
however well intentioned and earnest, are not
enough. Wherever political questions are great,
complex, baffling, urgent, they will inevitably, no
matter what the form of government may be, prove
themselves to be both the touchstone and the whet-
stone of leadership. For organisations do not
work by a human automatism, nor are they self-
adjusting organisms such as political biologists
press upon us as analogies. If they are to achieve
the tasks for which they are called into being, they
must be vitalised, directed, and controlled by the
proximate efficient forces of exceptionally gifted
and well-trained human wills.

This is what Burke saw so clearly and expressed
so loftily in his description of a ' natural aristocracy.'
He had thought much about equality. He had
thought much about inequality. And one of the
conclusions to which he had come was that those
who attempt to level can never equalise. No ; they
can never equalise, because by the inborn and in-
effaceable inequalities of human faculty, by the laws
of social struggle and growth — the ' discipline of
nature,' as he called it — and by the nature of social
organisation, there must always emerge in every

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 263

civil society, and indeed in every serious enterprise
which tests the stuff of which men are made, ' a
natural aristocracy, without which there is no
nation.'

Nor does it much impair the value of Burke's
message here that his natural aristocracy is so mani-
festly aristocratic in the narrower as well as in the
wider and more literal sense of the word. It was
offered to the world as a plea for the Whig aristoc-
racy of the eighteenth century by one who, from a
lifelong knowledge of men and affairs, was convinced
that the England of his day could produce such
men ; and we must leave it to the historians to say
how well, or how ill, the original corresponded to
the picture. Nor need it be suggested that the
tribute — the greatest surely ever paid to the Whigs
— was undeserved. For the Whig leaders, be their
limitations what they may, were above all things
men of affairs. Yet Burke's delineation — perhaps
we should call it his ideal — has a far wider and more
lasting significance than as an apotheosis of Whig
ascendency. It may serve as a reminder that the
time has come when the feud between democracy
and aristocracy (rightly so-called) should cease,
and when radicalism itself, if it is to solve the
problems which by its masterful equalitarian am-
bitions it has thrust to the front, must find, on its
own terms, and by its own methods, a new natural
aristocracy of its own. Nor would it befit even the

264 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

most ardent radicalism, in the interest of the causes
it has at heart, to brush Burke's roll of leadership 1
aside, or even wish a single class or category ex-
punged. It would be better employed in making
additions to it. For the vulnerability of Burke's
conception lies not in what it includes, but in what
by its silence it excludes ; and criticism must
accordingly take the more sympathetic form of
insisting that it needs to be broadened to suit the
greatly altered requirements of a social system
which has, perhaps irrevocably, and socially as well
as politically, cast in its lot with democracy.

For it need hardly be said that since Burke died
(1797) the whole social and political situation has
been transformed. Industry and commerce have
become so vast a system that they have called into
being an endlessly diversified middle class whose
vocation is the management of affairs. The ' rich
traders ' who mark the lower limit of Burke's
inclusions do not cover a tithe of them. And the
same thing has happened, and seems likely to
happen in accelerated degree, in the ranks of labour.
For it is not the growth of labour in volume, though
it is vast ; nor its advance in specialisation and
mechanical skill that is the salient fact of political
significance. It is that progress in organisation,
so notable in our day, which has brought many a
man, sprung from the ranks, to find himself swaying
1 P. 175.

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 265

the policy and action of trade-unions and federa-
tions which number their members by millions.
These are facts which no one can doubt. Some
may view them with hope, some with alarm, some
with despair ; but none may dispute that, by the
steady pressure of economic and social forces even
more than by the redistributions of political power,
which these have again and again necessitated,
the ranks of leadership have been recruited from
quarters where Burke never dreamed of finding it.
For the whole framework of society has changed so
fundamentally that it would be a miracle if the
scope for leadership had not changed and widened
along with it. The excluded multitude, who were
still to Burke but ' the objects of protection and the
means of force,' have long ago been enlisted on the
effective British public : the ' British public,' which
on his computation were but 400,000 souls all told,
has now for some time been swallowed up in demo-
cratic electorates : the close constituencies, with
their handful of voters, with which he was so well
content, have been enlarged beyond recognition.
Is it wonderful if his ' natural aristocracy ' has been
expanded likewise ?

This, however, as we have sufficiently seen, was
precisely the fine of change which Burke abhorred
as pregnant with ruin. .His belief in reform, on
which he prided himself to the end of his days, de-
serted him on the moment when reform assumed

266 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

the fatal aspect of organic, constitutional innovation.
So much so, that amongst the many fears that haunted
his later years we may search in vain for the fear,
so transparent in the Whigs as well as in the Tories
of 1832, that unbending conservative resistance
might prove infinitely more disastrous than reform-
ing democratic adventure. At times, indeed, this
seems to have crossed his mind : we have seen him
invoking the very principle on which Macaulay
justifies the concessions of 1832 — the far-reaching
principle that, ii the constitution does not destroy
exclusions, exclusions will destroy the constitution.
>ut it was clearly not a principle which he was him-
self prepared to universalise. It would be truer to
say of him that his faith in the constitution, a faith
so strong and confident, that he is ready at times
to take his stand upon it and to defy radicalism to
do its worst, is, nevertheless, not strong and con-
fident enough. Faith in the constitution, as it stands
— yes, and all too much of it. But not faith enough
that a constitution may, and indeed must, live and
thrive upon those very constitutional reforms which
change its structure. And this is the more striking
because there is so much in his thought that might
seem to point towards this perception. Did he not
say that ' nothing can rest on its original plan ! ' Did
he not admit that change may be ' a principle of
conservation ' ? Did he not declare that to pre-
serve old establishments when the reason for them

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 267

is gone is no better than to burn precious incense
in the tombs, and to offer meat and drink to the
dead ? Did he not himself in his day press for
reforms ? He had no doubt that the English
people would be strengthened by these reforms.
Yet he could not believe that the constitution could
be similarly strengthened. For to the many excel-
lences which move him to rhapsodies of panegyric
he could not find it in him to add the excellence,
than which there is none greater, that a constitution
may have the vitality that emerges from the re-
formers' hands with a stronger life than ever.
Surely it is of the essence of life in all its modes that
it victoriously persists and develops through many
changes which may profoundly modify it both in
structure and in functions. It is a truism in biology :
it ought to be a truism in politics.

To this line of criticism Burke undoubtedly lays
himself open. He does this all the more because
he is never to be classed with the pedants who lose
sight of spirit in the worship of letter. On the con-
trary no political thinker whatsoever has had a
clearer perception that a constitution is alive. * Do
not dream,' he says, ' that your letters of office, and
your instructions, and your suspending clauses, are
the things that hold together the great contexture
of this mysterious whole. These things do not make
your government. Dead instruments, passive tools
as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion

268 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is
the spirit of the English constitution, which, infused
through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites,
invigorates, vivifies, every part of the Empire,
even down to the minutest member.' * Nothing
can be truer. But it hardly bespeaks much faith
in this spirit of the constitution to deny, as in
effect Burke passionately denies, that it might
clothe itself in a better and less contracted form
than the Old Whig constitution of the eighteenth
century.

(e) The Limitations of Burke's Political Ideal

Nor is it easy to believe that, even for purposes of
defence, this inflexible conservatism was the best
resource against those radical and, as he thought,
revolutionary ideals which it was the peculiar mission
of his later years to deride and demolish. When a
statesman finds himself face to face with ideals he
detests, it is never enough to meet them by criticism
and invective. Even when ideals may be false and
fanatical, they will seldom, if they have once found
lodgment in the popular mind, be driven from the
field till they are met by some rival ideal strong and
attractive enough to oust them from their tenancy.
The forward-struggling spirit of man, especially of
masses of men chafing under obstructions, is not to be
won by negations. So long as reason and imagina-

1 Speech on Conciliation with America.

\

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 269

tion keep their hold on life, mankind will cleave to
whatever plan or project seems to satisfy that
craving for betterment which lies deep in, at any
rate, all Western peoples. Hence the familiar re-
mark— it is what Maine said of the ' broken-down'
theories ' of Bentham and Rousseau — that ideals
may survive long after their brains are out. They
do survive, and they will continue to survive, if
there be no counter-ideal to supersede them.

It is here that Burke is lacking. One may not
say that he has no ideal to offer ; and indeed it has
been said a hundred times that the constitution he
worshipped was not the constitution as it was, but
a glorified picture of it as it shaped itself in his
soaring imagination. Nor is the reader to be envied
who can rise from his pages without having found
an ideal. But it is an ideal that has the defects of
its qualities. For, when all is said, the political
imagination of Burke spent its marvellous force
almost wholly in two directions. In the one direc-
tion it conjured up with the vividness of actual
vision the disasters which radical reforms, so easy to
initiate, and so hard to control, might carry in their
train : in the other it lavished its powers in glori-
fying the present as a legacy of priceless practical
value inherited from the ever-memorable past. The
result is splendid, and it is an incomparably richer
thing than the ideals of Rousseau or Paine or Price
or Godwin. But it has limitations which these

270 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

escaped. (_As a gospel for his age, or for any age, it
has the fatal defect that, in its rooted distrust of
theories and theorists, it finds hardly any place for
political ideals as serious attempts to forefigure the
destinies of a people as not less Divinely willed than
its eventful past history or present achievement.
And, by consequence, it fails to touch the future
with the reformer's hope and conviction of better
days to come.

1 The echoes of the past within his brain,
The sunrise of the future on his face,'

— they are both the attributes of all great states-
manship. But if the sunrise of the future ever
irradiates the pages of Burke, it is all too quickly
to be quenched, at best in the clouds that veil the
incalculable future, and at worst in the incendiary
smoke of revolutionary fires. It is this that leaves
our gratitude not unmixed with regrets. For Burke
is no ordinary statesman, from whom it is enough to
expect, that, if he look beyond the present at all, he
should see no further than the next practical step
in advance. Nor is he to be judged as such. It
would do him wrong being so majestical. He is a
political genius of the first order ; and just because
he is so great it is impossible to withhold from him
the tribute of wishing for more than he has actually
given. No one had it in him as he had to give his

f;ountry a comprehensive and satisfying political
deal. He had the knowledge, the imagination,

WHIG TRUSTEESHIP AND DEMOCRACY 271

the experience ; and, not least, he had the religious
faith which, when it strikes alliance with the idealis-
ing spirit, makes all the difference between ideals
that are but subjective dreams and ideals which are
beliefs that nerve to action. Nor is the reader who
has felt the power and fascination of his pages to be
blamed if he falls to wondering how much of the
strife and embitterment of the nineteenth century v
might have been averted, if this master in politics
had given the reins to his imagination as freely and
sympathetically in looking forward to posterity as
in looking backward to ancestors. But it was not
in that path he was to walk. Somehow, though not,
as we have seen, without reasons, his faith failed him.
It was strong enough to make the course of history
divine, to consecrate the legacy of the past, to
intensify the significance and the responsibilities
of the present. But it could not inspire an idealj \/
of constitutional and social progress? ' Perhaps/
he once remarked, with even more than his wonted
distrust of thought divorced from actuality, ' the
only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is
the care of our own time.* *

The result is that we find in Burke's writings the
presence of two things, and the absence of a third.
We find an unfaltering faith in the presence of a <S
' Divine tactic ' in the lives of men and nations.
We find also an apologia such as has never been

1 Appeal*

272 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BURKE

equalled, for the existing social and political system
as it has come to be by the long toil of successive
generations. What we do not find, and are fain to
wish for, and most of all from a thinker to whom the
happiness of the people was always paramount,
is some encouragement for the hope that the ' stu-
pendous Wisdom ' which has done so much in the
past, and even till now, will not fail to operate in
the varieties of untried being through which the
State, even the democratic State, must pass in the
vicissitudes and adventures of the future.

Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press

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