effect.' His objection to 'moral rights'—as to most other forms of Right—is that, in reality, they are, or are capable of becoming, abstract. And it is only if, and when, they do become so, that they are liable to objection. In other words, the enforcement of moral, no less than of constitutional and legal, rights may be contrary to expediency.

It remains only to consider abstract rights' in the sense in which the term is most commonly applied by Burke; that is, public rights, whether political or civil, which are supposed to belong to men, as they are men; to be the natural and universal property of mankind. Examples of such rights, on the civil side, would be the right of all men to equality before the criminal and civil law; and on the political side, the right of all men, either directly or through their elected representatives, to an equal voice in the framing of the law and an equal control over the acts of the executive-in plain English, the right of all men to the franchise. On the former point there can hardly be two opinions. And, despite his jealousy of abstract principles, Burke at all events has no doubt about the matter. He pours scorn on those who 'took post' on the dispute with the Colonies to question whether man has any rights by nature, and whether all the property he enjoys be not the alms of his Government, and his life itself their favour and indulgence.'1 And, in supporting the East India Bill, he prides himself that we are going to supersede a charter abused to the full extent of all the powers which it could abuse, and exercised in the plenitude of despotism, tyranny and corruption; and that, in one and the same plan, we provide a real chartered security for the rights of men, cruelly violated under that charter.' 2 Both passages admit-it would be more true to say that both loudly assert the existence of natural rights.' Both Both passages the former in so many words, the latter by unquestionable implication are proof that Burke regards a claim to the protection of life and property as among those rights. From both it may be inferred that rights of this class are independent of time, place and circumstance; that they can be limited only by laws equally applicable, and equally applied to all members of the community; and that, with that restriction, it is the first and main duty of all Governments to secure them. Not even in his later years did he ever draw back from this position, or cease to plead for what he regarded as the 'real rights of man,' as against those 'pretended rights' which he covered with contempt.3 It may be questioned whether, on his principles, it was legitimate to recognise 'natural rights' of any sort or kind. It may also be questioned whether, 1 Letter to Sheriffs, i. p. 217. 2 India Bill, i. p. 276.

3 Reflections, i. pp. 403-4.

having once admitted them in the case of civil matters, he was entitled to bar them out-as he does absolutely bar them outin political concerns. These, however, are questions which it is well to reserve till we come to his later writings, together with his whole treatment of the rights of men in the political sense. For the present it is enough to note that in the case of the elementary civil rights, of equality before the Law, he makes an exception to his general condemnation of all abstract principles. In this one instance, but in this one instance only, he is content to admit that circumstances count for nothing.'

What, then, is the result of our enquiry so far? What, in the first stage of his career, were the precise contributions of Burke to political theory? The answer is that, though in the first instance concerned with purely practical questions, he left his mark both on political principle and on political method. On the one hand, he stood side by side with Hume and Bentham in their assault upon abstract ideas of Right, in their constant reference of everything to expediency. On the other hand, he took up the method employed with brilliant results by Montesquieu, in matters of historical research, and applied it, with at least equal success, to the still more difficult problems of current politics. In his eyes, the one thing was the inevitable consequence of the other; the appeal to experience, the careful scrutiny of circumstance and condition, was the sole method of discovering what, in the given case, is demanded by expediency. The connection had often been admitted in words. But Burke was the first to work it out patiently in practice. Here, probably, if we confine ourselves to his earlier years, is to be found the lasting significance of his work and its true originality.

II

The French Revolution called out in Burke powers which must have astonished those who knew him the most closely, and whose very existence can hardly have been suspected even by himself. Hitherto his task had lain solely with the practical problems of the statesman. He had prided himself, almost to ostentation, on eschewing theory. Except on compulsion he had never touched it; and then only in so far as was necessary to expose the fallacies of his opponents. Now, however, all this was to be altered. The revolutionists appealed straight from practice to theory; from the bitter experience of the past to a golden dream which they hoped to realise, if not in the present, at least in the immediate future. And Burke, hating the changes

thus suddenly proposed and as suddenly carried out, hating still more passionately the theories by which they were supported, had no choice but to turn theorist himself; to meet the theories of innovation with a theory which might justify to himself and others the instinctive hatred aroused in his own breast by the triumphant rashness of the aeronauts of France.' His later writings may have little or no value as a judgement of facts and events. As a contribution to political theory they are of the last importance. Never had his feelings been so deeply stirred. But the passion, which blurs the vision of common men, gave fresh force and keenness to his.

The Revolution brought a wholly new group of questions into the field of theory as well as practice. And the first thing Burke had to consider was-How far are the old methods capable of meeting them with effect? Hitherto he had combated the principle of Right by the principle of expediency. He had met the abstract arguments of his opponents by an appeal to the concrete lessons of the past. And to men such as Grenville or the proprietors of the East India Company-to men who were always ready to desert the plea of Right for the homeliest use and wont-the answer was complete. To such men Right was merely a cloke for avarice or love of domination. For the thing itself they had no care. They were rooted, as firmly as Burke himself, in the existing order, the order which had come down from the past; and Right itself was to them merely the practice of the past. The only difference was that, while they clung blindly to the past, he interpreted it in the light of humanity and discretion. The revolutionists stood on utterly different ground. They looked on the past not only with indifference but with hatred. And for Right, the Right which is the same at all times and under all circumstances, they had a consuming passion. With them, therefore, the appeal to expediency, to what has been proved practicable in the past, could have no weight whatsoever. A course commended on these grounds was, in their eyes, a course to be eschewed, which, for that very reason, stood irretrievably condemned. How was Burke to deal with this sudden change of front? What new arguments could he find to fling into the scale?

Broadly it may be said that he met the revolutionists with two different, but convergent, lines of attack. On the one hand, he deepened and strengthened the old argument from expediency. On the other hand, he sharpened his weapons against the ideas which lay at the very root of the argument from Right. On the one hand, he set himself to prove that the life of every State is inevitably conditioned by its past; and that from that past it is impossible for the present to escape. The attempt to do so, he urges, is wholly

against nature; and that is the real reason why, even if possible, success would be utterly inexpedient. On the other hand, he denies that the individual, as conceived by the revolutionists, has any existence whatsoever. And from this denial it follows that the rights of the individual, as assumed by them, are a pure dream of the imagination. Different as the two assaults are, it is clear that they have the closest possible connection. They start from the same ground: the faith that man, as we know him, is the creature of his past. They lead to the same conclusion: that the being thus moulded by society and by circumstance can have nothing in common with the unsocial, abstract, individual, imagined by the revolutionists. And it is manifest that both are applications -applications far deeper and more original than anything yet attempted of the historical method; that both assume the impossibility of arriving at speculative truth in these matters by any method which is not founded upon a searching study of man's history in the past.

With this connection between the two arguments before our mind, it is well to take each of them by itself. A glance is enough to convince us that an entirely new edge has been given to the argument from expediency. Hitherto it had been little more than a counsel of calculation and timidity. Now it becomes an appeal at once to inevitable necessity and to memories from which, however we may stifle them, it is seldom possible entirely to escape. That, even in its new shape, the argument should bring conviction to the revolutionists was not to be expected. Burke himself had no illusions on this score. The Jacobins'-and even in this country he reckoned them as about eighty thousand; that is, by his own admission, about 'one-fifth' of the intelligent part of the population, of what he calls the natural representatives of the people'-were, in his eyes, 'utterly incapable of amendment'; beyond all reach of reason, argument or authority.' 1 Yet, even to these men, the argument in its new form was far more difficult to meet. And to the public which Burke had immediately before his eye-to those of his own countrymen who had hailed the dawn of the Revolution with eager approval and had not yet opened their eyes to the vast issues which lay behind-it came with irresistible force; and, so far as can now be judged, it was this part of the appeal which did more than anything else to sweep England on to the side of reaction and repression.

6

It must not, of course, be concluded that Burke abandoned the old plea for caution, the old argument that the past is likely to be wiser than the present. On the contrary, some of the most gorgeous passages of his later writings are an embroidered statement 1 Reg. Peace, i.; Works, vol. ii. p. 289.

of this faith. And, questionable as they are in themselves, it is probable that they weighed heavily with those who were already frightened out of their wits at the deeds and doctrines of the Revolution. When he condemns the Revolution of France because it did not follow the sober precedent set by that of England; 1 when he outrages all truth and reason in an attempt to prove that the 'glorious' Revolution of 1688 was in fact no revolution at all, that it was 'not a revolution made but a revolution prevented'; 2 when he crushes Fox and Sheridan with laboured demonstrations that they have wantonly deserted the safe road trodden by Mr. Lechmere and Sir Joseph Jekyl;3 when he falls foul of the French for rejecting their old system of representation by Estates; for abolishing the old division of their land into Provinces; 5 for dissolving their Monasteries, and reforming the gross abuses of their Church— he stoops to the arguments of the narrowest obstructive and reactionary; and the plea which he urges against these particular changes would be as valid against all changes whatsoever. He had done the same by his own country when he denounced the Reform of Parliament as an act of sacrilege, when he resisted wiser men than himself in their efforts to cut off the 'rotten' or, as he himself in a moment of unguarded candour had called them, the 'shameful parts of our constitution.' 8 But here, at any rate, he had acted in full knowledge of the abuses which he took upon him to defend. In the affairs of France he has not even that poor excuse. He deliberately closes his eyes to the facts of the case, and stops his ears to the proofs of them which lay easily in his reach. He drives all adverse evidence in a passion from his tribunal, and his charge to the jury is avowedly a pæan in praise of 'prejudice

9

The conservative instinct had always been strong in Burke. But never before, save on the question of parliamentary reform, had it absolutely defied reason. Now the unreason spreads itself over the whole field of practical politics. It would be hard to think of a single abuse which he is not prepared to tolerate, or even to defend, for fear of worse.' Whatever concessions he may still make to the reforming spirit come merely from the lips.10 Directly they are brought to the test of action, they are hastily withdrawn. In the happy days before the Revolution the French 'had the elements of a Constitution very nearly as good as could be

1 Reflections: Works, i. 394.

3 Appeal: Works, i. pp. 509-16. 5 Ib. 446, 455.

7 Ib. 420-7.

9 Reflections, i. 414.

2 [Army Estimates, i. 380.]

4 Reflections, i. 394.

6 Ib. 440-2.

8 Taxation, i. 174.

10A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman' (Reflections, i. p. 440).