damming up the water sources when otherwise they might flood the plain; but when everything is parched and withered, when the peril is of an opposite kind, what can be more untimeous and ill-omened than to persist in keeping the wells sealed up, and in refusing to widen and multiply the conduits?

In that fine and exhaustive piece of reasoning, the Speech on American Taxation, the orator reproaches George Grenville for "thinking better of the wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it deserves. . . . He conceived," Burke continues, "and many conceived along with him, that the flourishing trade of this country was greatly owing to law and institution, and not quite so much to liberty; for but too many are apt to believe regulation to be commerce, and taxes to be revenue." Grenville was for diligently enforcing the Navigation Laws against the American traders, thinking that the size of the trade and the prosperity which it brought alike to the colonies and to the mother country, were the fruit of legal restrictions rather than of the energetic and enterprising spirit which animated the merchants. Was this very dissimilar from Burke's own mistake, which attributed the origin and secret of liberty itself to institutions that were only possible where liberty had been before?

If Grenville mistook regulation for commerce and taxation for revenue, did not Burke go too near confounding the mechanism of liberty with its spirit and ultimate source of momentum ? Does he ever speak of the constitution-and let us remember what it was in his day-without falling into a fallacy identical with that which he himself described and denounced as thinking better of the wisdom and power of human legislation. than in truth it deserves??

"Our constitution," he cried, in an oration against parliamentary reform, "is like an island which uses and restrains its subject sea; in vain the waves roar. In that constitution I know, and exultingly I feel, both that I am free and that I am not free dangerously to myself or to others." It was under this constitution that the Middlesex electors had been robbed for six years of what was as much their own as the freeholds

1

1 Speech on a Motion (1782) for a Committee to inquire into the State of the Representation of the Commons in Parliament, Works, ii. 489, a. In this speech, among other things, Burke fell into the fallacy, so often repeated in later days, of maintaining that unrepresented places had nothing to complain of, after all, because the members for the places that were represented were equally interested in the prosperity of the whole. "Warwick has members; is Warwick or Stafford more happy, opulent, or free than Newcastle or than Birmingham? Is Wiltshire the pampered favourite, whilst Yorkshire, like the child of the bond-woman, is turned out to the desert?"

in virtue of which they went through the empty formality of voting; that Mansfield's pestilent doctrine of libel being a matter for judges and not for juries to decide, had been allowed to stand; that taxes had been recklessly and perversely sanctioned upon the unrepresented colonies: and it was under this constitution that in later days every enormity was perpetrated against public freedom that a Bourbon or a Stuart could have sighed for.1 Burke might know that he was free in 1782.

free twelve years

twelve years later.

People knew that they were not before, and they knew it again

Wilkes did not feel Burke's proud and comfortable sentiment of freedom when he was carried to prison on a general warrant; nor the colonists when they were asked to pay stamp duty; nor did any living Englishman in that reign of terror which began in this country with the outbreak of the crusade against the French Republic. The history of the English constitution over the whole period of Burke's career, and some years after death had silenced his panegyrics, is the history of about the most in

1 Take, for instance, 36 George III. c. 8, and 39 George III. c. 79. Lord Campbell, no violent writer, allows that in 1794 the alternative. seemed to be servitude or civil war. Fox, Sheridan, and Grey openly averred in 1795 that they thought resistance to the laws was justified, if it could be proved likely to succeed.

adequate and mischievous set of political arrangements that any country has ever yet had to endure. Yet it was this which Burke declared that he looked upon with filial reverence. "Never will I cut it in pieces, and put it into the kettle of any magician, in order to boil it with the puddle of their compounds into youth and vigour; on the contrary, I will drive away such pretenders; I will nurse its venerable age, and with lenient arts extend a parent's breath."1

He was filled with the spirit, and he borrowed the arguments, which have always marked the champion of faith and authority against the impious assault of reason or innovation. The constitution was sacred to him as the voice of the Church, and the oracles of her saints are sacred to the believer. Study it, he cried, until you know how to admire it, and if you cannot know and admire, rather believe that you are dull than that the rest of the world has been imposed upon. We ought to understand it according to our measure, and to venerate where we are not able

1 Works, ii. 490, b. Sheridan, writing of a debate on Sawbridge's motion in 1782: "Burke acquitted himself with the most magnanimous indiscretion, attacked William Pitt in a scream of passion, and swore Parliament was, and always had been, precisely what it ought to be, and that all people who thought of reforming it wanted to overturn the Constitution." Quoted in Earl Stanhope's Life of Pitt, i. 76..

presently to comprehend.1 Well has Burke been called the Bossuet of politics.

Although, however, Burke's unflinching reverence for the constitution, and his reluctance to lay a finger upon it, may now seem clearly excessive, as it did to Chatham and his son, who were great men in the right, or to Beckford and Sawbridge, who were very little men in the right, we can only be just to him by comparing his ideas with those which were dominant throughout this evil reign. While he opposed more frequent parliaments, he still upheld the doctrine that "to govern according to the sense and agreeably to the interests of the people is a great and glorious object of government." While he declared himself against the addition of a hundred knights of the shire, he in the very same breath protested that, though the people might be deceived in their choice of an object, he "could scarcely conceive any choice they could make to be so very mischievous as the existence of any human force capable of resisting it."2 To us this may seem very mild and commonplace doctrine, but it was not commonplace in an age when Anglican

1 Works, i. 536, a.

To the Chairman of the Buckinghamshire Meeting, 1780, Works, ii. 430, a.