of society; and any society, any State, which should attempt to do so, would, by the mere fact of attempting it, pronounce its own instant dissolution.

In this theory, Burke replies, there is an inherent contradiction. It strives to combine two things which are mutually exclusive; the unlimited freedom of nature' with the restrictions and compulsions which are inseparable from the State. Into the very heart of the State-which, as the Revolutionists themselves admit, is the creature of convention, and therefore of compromise-it seeks to import principles which defy convention and are at bitter enmity with compromise. More than that; in any difference between the individual and the State-and, on the revolutionary system, such differences must be of daily, hourly occurrence-it is the former, and not the latter, which is certain to prevail. For the former has absolute, indefeasible right upon his side; the latter has nothing better than expediency and convention. The former is master; the latter, no more than a reluctant, or obsequious, slave. The State, on this system, is the subject; the effective, if not the nominal, sovereignty is vested in the individual. The result is that no State, built on the principle of Rights, can endure for a moment. No sooner is it founded than it is driven to choose between a flagrant breach of Rights which it has pronounced to be sacred and inviolable and a resolution into the fleeting atoms of which it was fortuitously swept together.

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'The French despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men: and as for the rest they have wrought underground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters and acts of parliament. They have the rights of men." Against these there can be no prescription; against these no argument is binding; these admit no temperament and no compromise; anything withheld from their full demand is so much of fraud and injustice. Against these their rights of men let no government look for security in the length of its continuance, or in the justice and lenity of its administration. The objections of these speculatists, if its forces do not quadrate with their theories, are as valid against such an old and beneficent government as against the most violent tyranny or the greenest usurpation. They are always at issue with governments not on a question of abuse, but a question of competency and a question of title.'1 But if the pretensions of these speculatists' are fatal to those Governments which do not quadrate with their theories' they are no less fatal to those which do. If they are at war with existing Governments, with those which are based on long usage and historical accident, they are no less hostile to those which 1 Reflections, i. p. 403.

6

profess to found themselves on pure reason and eternal Right. They are incompatible not only with this, or that, form of government, but with government as such. The rights in question, it must be remembered, are not only the private rights of the individual; the rights of property, the right of equality before the Law, the rights of the family, the rights of conscience and the like. If they were, there would be something to be said for their sanctity and inviolability.1 They are, however, much more than this. They are also, and above all political rights; in particular, the right of each individual to an equal voice in the government of the community with all the rest. Now, how is it possible that rights which, as the very term 'political' shows, imply the existence of Society and Government, can have existed in the 'state of nature,' in the state of things which is assumed to have prevailed before Society and Government were founded? And if they did not, what becomes of the argument that such rights are inherent in the individual, that they were brought by him from the state of nature into civil society, that Society, the State, was expressly founded for their preservation? The one thing absolutely, and by its very nature, excludes the other. To argue from the one to the other betrays either the wildest confusion, or the grossest sophistry, that was ever heard of.

As to the share of power, authority and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the State, that I must deny to be amongst the direct, original rights of men in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil, social man, and no other. It is a thing to be settled by convention. If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executory power are its creatures. They can have no being in any other state of things. And how can any man claim, under the convention of civil society, rights which do not so much as suppose its existence? Rights which are absolutely repugnant to it?

One of the first motives to civil society, and which becomes one of its fundamental rules, is that no man should be judge in his own cause. By this each man has at once divested himself of the first fundamental right of uncovenanted man; that is, to judge for himself and to assert his own cause. He abdicates all right to be his own governor. He inclusively, in a great measure, abandons the right of self-defence, the first law of nature. Man cannot

1 Some significant remarks on what Burke calls the real rights of man' are to be found in the Reflections, i. p. 403-the paragraph beginning 'Far am I from denying in theory.' [Cp. p. 55 below.]

enjoy the rights of an uncivil, and of a civil, state together. That he may obtain justice, he gives up the right of determining what it is, in points the most essential to him. That he may secure some liberty, he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it.'1

And again: The pretended rights of man, which have made this havoc, cannot be the rights of the people. For to be a people, and to have those rights, are things incompatible. The one supposes the presence, and the other the absence, of a state of civil society. The very foundation of the French Government is false and self-destructive; nor can its principles be adopted in any country without the certainty of bringing it to the very same condition in which France is found.' 2 To be a people, and to have those rights, are things incompatible. The one supposes the presence, and the other the absence, of a state of civil society. Man cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil, and of a civil, state together -in these three sentences is contained the pith of Burke's argument against the theory of individual Rights.

Reserving for the moment any criticisms that may suggest themselves on this, the more destructive side of Burke's doctrine, we pass at once to the constructive argument which he builds upon it. Here, once more, he invokes the principle of expediency; but, once more, he employs it in such a way as to give it an entirely new character. The whole object of Society, he pleads, is to secure the welfare of its members; the whole function of Government, as the directing organ of Society, to provide for the advantage of the governed. Now nothing can be more certain than that this welfare is not secured by a form of society, or by principles of government, which lead-as it has been shown that the French system leads and must always lead-direct to anarchy. For not only is the whole end of Society and Government thereby manifestly defeated. But there is a further consequence which, if possible, is more disastrous yet. The most essential element in man's welfare is not his material comfort, but his moral good; not the assertion of his supposed rights, but the enforcement of his plain duties. Now it is beyond doubt that this end can never be attained without a strong measure of compulsion; a compulsion which needs to be laid not only in the form of criminal justice, upon the individual, but also, in the form of political pressure, upon whole classes of the community. The multitude, the mass of men, as well as the lawless individuals, stand in need of control. That control they will never impose upon themselves. If they are to be controlled at all, it can only be by some power from without. And the control which they, in their turn, are to exercise upon that superior power must be rigidly limited; or their subjection will 1 Reflections, i. 403. 2 Appeal, i. p. 529.

be nothing better than an empty name. How large a share of such general control may safely be entrusted to the multitude, is a matter to be determined solely by the circumstances of each community; by the degree of wisdom and self-restraint to which, at any given tíme, the multitude may have attained.1 To suppose that, at all times and under all circumstances, the multitude has a right to the fullest possible extent of control-much more, to suppose that it has a right to the direct exercise of sovereign government-is a fatal error; an error which carries with it the overthrow of all the purposes for which Society and Government exist. The first, and most essential, right of the multitude, in fact, is not to govern, but to be governed; not to control, but to be controlled. For political rights, so far from being absolute and indefeasible, are in truth measured purely by expediency. And that the multitude should be left free to follow its unruly passions is expedient neither for itself nor for the community at large.

'Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it; and exist in much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection. But their abstract perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to everything, they want everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense, the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be

1 A slightly more lenient view of the multitude 'seems to be presented elsewhere. The statesman thinks of the place in which political power is to be lodged, with no other attention than as it may render the more or the less practicable its salutary restraint and its prudent direction. For this reason no legislator, at any period of the world, has willingly placed the seat of power in the hands of the multitude, because there it admits of no control, no regulation, no steady direction whatsoever. The people are the natural control on authority. But to exercise and to control together is contradictory and impossible' (Appeal, i. p. 522; contrast this with the passage below quoted from Reflections).

settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.

The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and, in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle; adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations.' 1

any

Once again, there are sides of this argument which are questionable, and more than questionable. But, once again, the main principle is sound. Burke was wrong in holding that one class, the swinish multitude,' stands in more need of control than other. He was right in maintaining that control of some kind ís a necessity. He did well, therefore, to insist that Rights are not absolute and indefeasible, but limited; and limited by expediency; that they are not a possession which each man brings with him ready made into civil society, but a goal towards which he has to strive, a prize which he has to win by merit, a privilege for which he has to qualify himself by creating at least a presumption that he is worthy of its exercise. That is the main point here at issue between him and the Revolutionists; and on this point it is hard to see how his argument can be met.

This, however, is by no means the end of his pleading. There is yet another, a still deeper and more fruitful, principle at stake. Society, he has argued, exists above all for moral ends. That is the justification of compulsion. It is the justification also of the reverence with which all men have hedged round their existing government and constitution. But if all this is to be justified, it must mean that the connection between morality and the State is something much more than an accident; that the one stands to the other, if not as cause to effect, at least as the condition without which it could not come into being; that, for man as we know him, both the sense of duty and the detailed code of duties have their foundation laid in civil society and the State. It is these that have taught man his duties to his fellow men and to God. It is these that have made him a moral being. This does not, of course, imply that such duties did not exist ideally before the foundation of the institutions here in question. On the contrary, they are laid in the unalterable constitution of things.' They are there, whether the individual, whether men in general, realise them or

1 Reflections, i. pp. 403-4.