Select Works of Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke

(Between whose endless jar justice resides)

       Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

       Then everything includes itself in power,

       Power into will, will into appetite:

       And appetite, an universal wolf,

       So doubly seconded with will and power,

       Must make perforce an universal prey,

       And, last, eat up himself. Great Agamemnon,

       This chaos, when degree is suffocate,

       Follows the choking.

      Troilus and Cressida, Act i. Sc. 3.

      No passage in literature reflects more faithfully the general spirit of the present work. The grave tone of mingled doctrine and portent, and the two contrasted moral effects, are in each exactly similar.

      Jack Cade and his rout, and the mob in Coriolanus, will doubtless occur to the student as instances of sharp satire against Democracy. Shakspere always conceives political action, especially in England, as proceeding from a lawful monarch, wielding [xxxi] real power under the guidance of wise counsellors: and this does not differ greatly from the Whig theory to which Burke always adhered.

      Quitting the Elizabethan period, it would be easy to continue the historical vindication of Burke’s claim. The popular party of the Commonwealth and the Revolution were the true conservatives of their age. They fought, as Burke had pointed out in a previous work, for a liberty that had been consecrated by long usage and tradition; and outside this memorable strife the greatest of English minds, with a few exceptions, surrendered themselves to the general tide of anti-revolutionary opinion. Dryden, always a favourite authority with Burke, is an obvious instance. One passage from his prose works may be adduced to show that the worst arguments employed by Burke in the present treatise do not lack the authority of great and popular English names:

      Neither does it follow that an unalterable succession supposes England to be the king’s estate, and the people his goods and chattels on it. For the preservation of his right destroys not our propriety, but maintains us in it. He has tied himself by law not to invade our possessions, and we have obliged ourselves as subjects to him and all his lawful successors: by which irrevocable act of ours, both for ourselves and our posterity, we can no more exclude the successor than we can depose the present king. The estate of England is indeed the king’s, and I may safely grant their supposition, as to the government of England: but it follows not that the people are his goods and chattels on it, for then he might sell, alienate, or destroy them as he pleas’d; from all which he has tied himself by the liberties and privileges which he has granted us by laws.—Vindication of the Duke of Guise, p. 53.

      It may be truly objected that the course of English political events destroys the authority of these Tory formulas. But it is well known that the Whig policy of England since the Revolution had not been supported by a majority of the English people. The majority of English people, told by the head, would down to the beginning of the reign of George III have been found to be Tory: and Burke was in a strong position when he averred that such was the disposition of the English nation as a whole. Among Dryden’s poems, the famous “Absalom and Achitophel” will illustrate the Tory feeling which the English people [xxxii] cherished: but it will be found in its most compendious form in the pendant of “Absalom,” the matchless satire called “The Medal.” The lines following the portraiture of Shaftesbury, and bitterly ridiculing the appeal to the people as a test of truth, sum up in a masterly form the historical and philosophical topics commonly urged in this belief:

      He preaches to the crowd that power is lent, But not conveyed, to royal government: That claims successive bear no binding force: That coronation oaths are things of course: Maintains the multitude can never err: And sets the people in the papal chair. The reason’s obvious: Interest never lies, The most have still their interest in their eyes, The power is always theirs, and power is ever wise. Almighty crowd! thou shortenest all dispute, Power is thy essence, wit thy attribute: Nor faith nor reason make thee at a stay: Thou leap’st o’er all eternal truths in thy Pindaric way!

      Phocion and Socrates are satirically instanced as examples of popular justice. Then follows a remarkable forecast of an opinion first elaborated and given to the world by the French philosophers in the next century:

      The common cry is even religion’s test,

       The Turk’s is at Constantinople best,

       Idols in India, Popery at Rome,

       And our own worship only true at home.

       . . . . . . . . . . . . .

       A tempting doctrine, plausible and new:

       What fools our fathers were, if this be true!

       Who, to destroy the seeds of civil war,

       Inherent right in monarchs did declare:

       And, that a lawful power might never cease,

       Secured succession, to secure our peace.

       Thus property and sovereign sway at last

       In equal balances were justly cast:

       But this new Jehu spurs the hot-mouthed horse,

       Instructs the beast to know his native force,

       To take the bit between his teeth, and fly

       To the next headlong steep of anarchy.

      [xxxiii] In the conclusion of the “Medal” the poet foreshadows what is called the “bursting of the floodgates”; the inevitable strife of the “cut-throat sword and clamorous gown,” the abolition of “Peerage and Property,” and the supremacy of a popular military commander. Such vaticinations had in Burke’s time been familiar to the world for a century: and he now imagined that he saw them about to be fulfilled in France.¹

      It would be easy to pursue the same track in Butler and Swift, in the vast field of the Essayists, and in English theological and historical writers, among whom most of the popular names will be found on the same side. The Whigs and Tories of the century, if we except a few clerical politicians, alike avoid professing extremes. The popular poets of Burke’s own generation kept up the idea of a grand historical past closely connected with the existing political establishment. English poetry, from Spenser and Drayton to Scott and Tennyson, has in fact always been largely pervaded by this idea, and a retrospective tendency, tinged with something of pride and admiration, has generally accompanied literary taste in the Englishman. Milton and Spenser revelled in the antique fables which then formed the bulk of what was called the History of England. Shakespeare dramatised the history of the ages preceding his own, with even more felicity than the remote legends of Lear and Cymbeline. Little of this is to be noticed in the taste of any foreign nation, and the literature of France has always been eminently the offspring of the moment. French minds have never dwelt with the interest derived from a sense of identity upon the events or products of the past. Continental critics have, as might be expected, traced the love of the English for the English past to a narrow insularity. They ought also to point out how intense was the contrast, down to the French Revolution, of insular and continental institutions. In Burke’s time, religious and political liberty were to Frenchmen entirely foreign ideas. National greatness was a conception common to both the Englishman and the Frenchman: but England had of late repeatedly humbled that of France, and the Frenchman was just beginning to enquire into the causes which had given the smaller country its superiority. There was a contrast, and a [xxxiv] disposition to enquire into it: the English and French people, during the eighteenth century, observed the social and political tendencies of their neighbours with curious watchfulness. The antagonism was heightened by the commencement of social intercourse between them in the intervals of war. We may learn something of the contrast which was believed to subsist between the normal tendencies of the English and the French mind from the criticism of a thoroughly English man of letters upon De Vertot, whose works during the last century were so eagerly read by the French people.¹ Warburton,² himself an early friend of Burke, marks out among the cheats adopted to catch the popular ear, that “entirely new species of historical writing”