pardon, them. He would have admitted that their deeds, however desperate, were, or, at the least, may have been, the last stake reserved for the ultimate ransom of the State.' 1 As it is, they have acted in perfect security, and their only motive is their own wanton perversity. They have been guilty of an unforced choice, a fond election of evil.' And the result is that the nature, on which they trample, has taken her inevitable vengeance. Difficulties, entirely of their own making, multiply and thicken on them; and their misfortunes earn for them not the pity, but the contempt and derision of mankind. It is the first and supreme necessity only, a necessity that is not chosen but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no exception to the rule; because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things, to which man must be obedient by consent or force. But if that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth and exiled from this world of reason and order and peace and virtue and fruitful penitence into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion and unavailing sorrow.' 3 So stated, it is manifest that the argument, from expediency, the appeal to caution and circumspection, is a thing entirely different from what it was in its earlier form, the form it took in the American Speeches and in The Present Discontents. There expediency, interpreted doubtless in a generous sense, is an end in itself. Α careful reckoning of consequences and probabilities, an unquestioning allegiance to the genius of our own institutions and the traditions of our own past, is prescribed for its own sake; and beyond these narrow limits Burke is scrupulous, and on principle scrupulous, of passing. Expediency-and by expediency he commonly means what our ancestors have thought expedient-is the best policy and that is all. Here, on the other hand, expediency is exalted to the rank and clothed with the sanctity of duty. It is still identified— or identified in nearly every case-with obedience to the past. Not, however, with obedience to the past, as such; but to the past as the only record which can reveal to us the laws by which man is actually governed, as our sole guide to nature'; to the unalterable constitution of things,' 4 to the settled 'order of the world.' 5 To follow that order is man's duty, as, in Burke's sense of the term, it is his necessity also. And from that necessity he can escape only by a wilful assertion of his own lawlessness; by an 'unforced 1 Reflections, i. 396. 3 Ib. p. 417. 2 Ib. 4 Reg. Peace, i.; vol. ii. p. 280. 5 Reflections, i. 394. choice' which it is as impious, as it is fatal, to allow himself. So understood, expediency is placed under the sanction, not only of the moral law, but also of religion. To defy it, to depart from the *proved patterns of utility,' is to violate our duty not only to man, but to God. So far, the amended version of the theory, no less than the original, has, and is intended to have, a strongly conservative bias. But it is the greatness of Burke that he refuses to be satisfied with a theory which is conservative and nothing more; that he insists on widening its border until it yields room for at least the possibility of change, and even of violent revolution. It is with this end that, so far from limiting necessity to the demands of the existing order, he makes it include the sudden call of circumstances which introduce an entirely new principle into the world of human action, and which, just because they do so, are, even to the wisest, wholly unforeseen. Such circumstances, when they arise, are no less a matter of necessity, no less a part of nature and the irresistible 'order of the world,' than those which are written large in the history of the past, and familiar to all who are capable of reading it. That they are new and without precedent is no reason for ignoring them. To do so is as foolish and impious as to shut our eyes to the common experience of generations. For this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things to which man must be obedient by consent or force.' 1 And they who persist in opposing a mighty current in human affairs,' however novel, will appear rather to resist the designs of Providence itself than the mere designs of men. They are not resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.' 2 The last words have an importance which it is difficult to overrate. They are written with avowed reference to the French Revolution. And in this passage-though in this passage only out of the whole body of his writings-Burke admits that the Revolution, which he elsewhere describes as the consummation of all folly and wickedness, may after all be justified by necessity, that it too may be one of those 'varieties of untried being' through which man is ordained to pass on his way to the goal appointed by a power wiser and greater than himself, a 'part of that moral and physical disposition of things to which man must be obedient by consent or force.' So far as the application of his theory to practice goes, this admission stands alone. And in the writings which follow, he continues to hurl anathemas against the revolutionists as bitterly as if it had never been drawn from him. But the theory itself, it 1 Reflections, i. p. 417. 2 Thoughts on French Affairs, i. p. 580. must be remembered, had always left a loophole for such applications; or rather, it was framed from the first so as to make room for them and to sanction them. Whether he would ever have been ready to admit that the exceptional case, thus provided for, had actually arisen, whether at all the turning-points of history he would not have been as eager to denounce the innovators as he was in the case of France, is another matter. But that does not entitle us to deny either that such cases are explicitly covered by his theory, or that in practice, if only for one short moment, he relents in favour of even the hated' aeronauts of France.' Even with these qualifications, it remains true that the dominant tone of Burke's theory is essentially conservative; that the disposition to preserve' is stamped upon it far more strongly than the readiness to improve.' The temper of the man made this inevitable. So also did the fundamental principles from which he started. Once admit that the political life of man finds an exact analogy in the organism of the animal or the plant, and it cannot but follow that change is as slow a process in the one as in the others. Once admit that the State is a purely natural product, that it stands in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world '; 1 and the consequence is that not decades but centuries must be allowed for each stage of its development. Even this analogy, however, does not give the fixity demanded by Burke. Though manifestly present to his mind, on his lips it is always replaced by that of the unvarying laws of chemistry and mechanics; nor is it without significance that the chemistry from which he draws his comparisons should invariably be not organic but inorganic. The more abstract the science, the more completely it serves his purpose for analogy; the more thoroughly it excludes the idea of growth or development, the better is he pleased. To a man charged with such analogies, change in itself was bound to be an object of suspicion. And, when the change was defended on the score not of expediency but of abstract justice, not of necessity but of ideal perfection, the suspicion inevitably deepened into hatred. All sound principles of political action seemed to him to be deliberately thrust aside, and a radically vicious principle to be set up in their place. On the new system, the statesman was no longer to work upon the material which lay ready to his hand; the material transmitted to him from the past, or forged for him by the circumstances of the present. His one task was to refashion all actual institutions on a model created solely by the imagination, to recast the existing order at the bidding of an arbitrary idea. If this system were adopted, there would henceforth be no sure footing for the statesman; no guarantee of permanence for the institutions, 1 Reflections, i. 394. The however 'perfect,' which it may please him to set up. fashion of to-day is likely, nay certain, to be discredited by that of to-morrow; the ideal of one moment to be dethroned by the ideal of the next. Until the new creed was proclaimed, political action was universally held to be guided by fixed principles, by loyal obedience to circumstance and tradition. Based on the nature of things, on the conditions of the given case, these principles might themselves be said to belong to the order of nature. They were imposed on the statesman from without, not coined by his own fancy at random from within. Now, however, all fixed laws are to be swept away. The guidance of nature, of any principle external to man, is to be discarded. Nothing is left for the statesman to follow but his own arbitrary caprice. It is alleged, indeed, that the new Gospel is a thing fixed and immutable; and that this is the chief reason why it excels the old principles which it endeavours to supplant. These teachers profess to scorn all mediocrity; to engage for perfection; to proceed by the simplest and shortest course. They build their politics not on convenience, but on truth; and they profess to conduct men to certain happiness by the assertion of their undoubted rights.'1 But the rights of one age are not, even in theory, the rights of another. Still less are they uniform when brought, even with the most ruthless obstinacy, to practical application. In the mind of Locke they take a very different shape-for instance, in all matters concerning Property-from that which they bear to Rousseau. As applied by the revolutionists, they appear in a form which neither the one nor the other thinker would have recognised. 'Men with them are strictly equal, and are entitled to equal rights in their own government. Each head, on this system, would have its vote. . "But soft, by regular degrees, not yet." This metaphysic principle, to which law, custom, usage, policy, reason were to yield, is to yield itself to their pleasure. . . The voters in the primary assemblies are to have a qualification. What! A qualification on the indefeasible rights of man! Yes; but it shall be a very small qualification. Our injustice shall be very little. oppressive; only the local valuation of three days' labour paid to the public. Why, this is not much, I readily admit, for anything but the utter subversion of your equalising principle. As a qualification it might as well be let alone; for it answers no one purpose for which qualifications are established. And, on your ideas, it excludes from a vote the man of all others whose natural equality stands the most in need of protection and defence; I mean the man who has nothing but his natural equality to guard him. You order him to buy the right, which you before told him that nature 1 Appeal, i. p. 534. had given him gratuitously at his birth, and of which no authority on earth could lawfully deprive him. With regard to the person who cannot come up to your market, a tyrannous aristocracy is against him, is established at the very outset, by you who pretend to be its sworn foe.'1 There is a further and yet more sinister consequence. The moment any difference arises between your National Assembly and any part of the nation, you must have recourse to force. Nothing else is left to you; or rather, you have left nothing else to yourselves. . . . The king is to call out troops to act against his people, when the world has been told, and the assertion is still ringing in our ears, that troops ought not to fire on citizens. The colonies assert to themselves an independent constitution and a free trade. They must be constrained by troops. . . . As the colonists rise on you, the negroes rise on them. Troops again-massacre, torture, hanging! These are your rights of man! These are the fruits of metaphysic declarations wantonly made and shamefully retracted!... You lay down metaphysic propositions which infer universal consequences and then you attempt to limit logic by despotism.' 2 Thus, while in name you appeal to the eternal and indefeasible laws of Right, in fact your system is based solely upon caprice; and the sole sanction by which caprice can be upheld is here, as always, force. This is what you gain by deserting nature,' by leaving the natural road of expediency and tradition. You are driven, by an inevitable necessity, to fall back upon the exploded principles of good pleasure'; and behind' good pleasure' lies nothing but the sword. The significance of this will become clearer if we consider the application which Burke makes of it for praise and for blame; to the constitution of England and to that of revolutionary France. It The ideal State-need it be said that this is England?-has been slowly built up out of the most diverse materials. It gives scope to every variety of purpose and of interest. It offers, it gladly welcomes, all that combination and all that opposition of interests, all that action and counteraction, which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.' 3 lays itself out not for an excellence in simplicity '—' the simple governments are,' in fact, 'fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them'-' but one far superior, an excellence in composition.' 4 As occasion rises, it is always willing to admit new elements into its system, new materials into the fabric, the living temple, which it has inherited from the past. But it has always 1 Reflections, i. pp. 446-7. 3 Ib. i. p. 394. 2 Ib. i. pp. 464-5. |