Commons, or whether each minister should be content with the direction of the affairs of his own department, deriving the spirit of his instructions not from the House but from the King, and being to the King only responsible. There were thus three points, as it were, at which the same contest of principles was being carried on,-three aspects of the old and only half-settled conflict between the popular and the arbitrary theories of the Constitution. In short, a revolution was being accomplished. It is now plain that nothing less than revolutionary issues were involved — the supremacy of the House of Commons in the legislature. and over the executive, and the supremacy of the popular wishes in the House of Commons. This must constantly be borne in mind by all who wish to see the bottom of the events of the period. Viewed in the merely personal light these events are unintelligible, and it is not until we thus discern the principles at stake, that the history of the time assumes a meaning. The whole history of this reign, perhaps from its nearness to us, has been so overloaded with a mass of trumpery personal anecdotes, and attention has been so exclusively paid to the constant shufflings and combinations going on among Grenvilles and Bedfords, Rockinghams and Shelburnes, that people have overlooked the true importance of the crisis, and have too often failed to distinguish the vital from the accidental features of the first twenty years after the accession of George III. This crisis was only the preliminary stage of the greater revolution which is going silently forward in our own days. But it was an indispensable stage, and a man was or was not amenable to the best influences of the time, was or was not in accord with its best conditions, according to the side he took in this contest. Burke from the first seized the true significance of the position. He strenuously supported the free side of the Constitution, and aroused and reinvigorated its champions. In every part of the field he was the noblest vindicator of the supremacy of the will of the whole people. "To follow, not to force, the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction to the general sense of the community," he declared to be the true end of legislature.1 "The virtue, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons consists," he said, " in its being the express image of the feelings of the nation." 2 And in 1 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, Works, i. 216, a. the same spirit he insisted that "the House of Commons can never be a control on other parts of government, unless they are controlled themselves by their constituents."1 NOTE, p. 62. In a bad book, Schlosser's History of the Eighteenth Century, Burke is called Rockingham's creature, an Irish adventurer, and so forth, and it is said that "the aristocratic families, in order to be sure of him, provided at their cost, economically, for his housekeeping." The author's accurate familiarity with Burke's life and history may be seen in one or two instances which I have noted down. Whenever he exchanges rhapsodical invective for plain statement he makes a blunder. 1. His work upon the Sublime and Beautiful, which appeared in 1757. It was in 1756. 2. Burke was accordingly returned for one of Lord Rockingham's boroughs in 1765. He was returned for Lord Verney's borough of Wendover, and Lord Rockingham had nothing to do with it. 3. Towards the end of the time fixed for this parliament [i.e. the parliament sitting in 1765], he came out with a speech on the occasion of the Boston Port Bill. Considering that the Boston Por Bill was brought forward in 1774, and that this parliament was dissolved in March, 1768, how does he make this out? 4. As an orator Burke appeared for the first time on an occasion very favourable to his reputation; this was in March and April, 1774. The accurate German is here eight years wrong. Burke's first speech was January 27, 1766. It created a great impression, and Pitt congratulated Burke's party on his accession. 5. In a speech delivered on the 19th April, 1774, in support of Rose Fuller's motion Burke expressed himself against this small tax. Burke already appears very different in his second elaborate and renowned speech on North American affairs, delivered on the 15th November, 1775. Burke made 1 Thoughts on Fresent Discontents, Works, i. 143, b. no speech at all on the 15th of November, and though he did make one on the 16th, nobody in this world ever did or could pretend that it was elaborate or renowned either. The speech Schlosser means is no doubt that of the 22nd of March, on Conciliation with Americaperhaps the noblest, wisest, and weightiest of all Burke's pieces. Some sordid imputations have been in recent times thrown upon Burke's honour and credit, with reference, first to the Clogher Estate, and second to the purchase of Beaconsfield. If anybody cares to see them thoroughly and finally overthrown in a clear and legal manner, with references to conclusive documents, I may refer him to the Right Hon. J. Napier's lecture on Burke, delivered before the Dublin Young Men's Christian Association, in 1862, p. 51 et seq. CHAPTER III. THE CONSTITUTION. IT has been incidentally observed by Mr. Hallam that the Revolution was the means of establishing a semirepublican scheme of constitutional law in the English Parliament.1 Judicious as this remark is, still it does not carry us the whole way towards the important truth about the change in feeling which the Revolution had thus occasioned. The House of Commons, it is true, became animated with a conviction of their own supremacy, that could only be harmonised with. a semi-republican scheme. But as it was to the royal supremacy that the Revolution had made them heirs and legatees, so it was in the old royal spirit that they conceived the nature, and set up the expansive boundary-marks, of their own authority. The King's Prerogative was the only pattern they possessed, after which they could model this new fabric of Privilege 1 Const. Hist. iii. 406. (Tenth Edition.) |