demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no exception to that rule; because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things, to which man must be convenient 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.' 1

The latter part of this passage, perhaps the most eloquent that ever came from the lips of Burke, reverts to the old argument, the moral iniquity of revolutions, which was the theme of the preceding extract. And for the moment we may leave it on one side. The earlier part, however, is of wider scope, and of significance yet deeper. It strikes nearer to the heart of the main problem of political philosophy than any other passage to be found in Burke's writings, with the possible exception of that in the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, which has been quoted above. Adopting the language of contract, he puts into it a meaning, which would have spread dismay among its authors. In the opening words, the Contract is represented-it would, at least, seem to be represented as a literal fact. But as the writer warms to his work, it insensibly passes into a mere metaphor, a form, which is of little or no value apart from the spirit which is, with some violence, breathed into it. The mere act of consent, which to Locke was all in all, has ceased to be of any importance. It has, in fact, come to stand for something very different; an obligation which is binding upon all men, whether they choose to recognise it or no. It is no longer the consent itself, but the thing to which consent has been given-no longer the contract, but the particular obligation contracted-that counts. these circumstances, the consent, the contract, is manifestly no true consent, no contract at all. The consent, so far from being actually given, is tacitly assumed. The contract, so far from being matter of choice, is imposed by the necessities of man's nature. And, in the eyes of Burke, it is, for that very reason, far more reasonable than if it had been due to a choice which may be nothing better than accident or caprice.

Under

But if Burke separates himself from the individualists as to the circumstances and formal conditions of the contract,' he does so still more decisively as to its scope and matter. To them the State is a partnership for merely material, and therefore limited, ends; a partnership, as Burke scornfully puts it, 'in things

1 Reflections, i. p. 417.

subservient only to the gross, animal existence' of its members. To him, on the contrary, it is a partnership for intellectual and moral ends; and these are ends which, from the nature of the case, cannot possibly be limited. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.' It would be impossible to define the ends of the State more nobly or more completely. It would be equally impossible to define them in a sense more absolutely opposed to the external and limited aims assumed by the individualists.

That Burke regards the State as existing for essentially moral and spiritual ends, that to him the functions of the State extend to the whole circle of man's activities, is thus beyond all possibility of doubt. Whether he takes the further step and asserts, as Rousseau had asserted before him, that the moral life of man-in all but its barest rudiments-is the creation of the State, that without the State there could be no guarantee for its continuancethis is by no means so clear; and it is probable that he himself would have found some difficulty in saying.

On the one hand, as we have seen, he was never able entirely to shake free from a rather crude form of the theory of Rights. He was far from denying in theory the real rights-and this, in the context, manifestly means the private rights of the individual. And there are moments in which he appears to speak of these as existing-and 'existing in much greater clearness and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection'—before civil society was formed. Now such rights presuppose a whole network of moral relations. If they existed in the state of nature,' so also did the moral relations out of which they spring, and without which it is not possible even to conceive of them. And it would follow-if we are to hold Burke to the strict consequence of his words-that he assumes the moral sense and what is more, some kind of moral code to have existed, doubtless in a more or less rudimentary shape, before the State and in total independence of it.' 2

On the other hand it will be acknowledged that such passages come as a shock to those who have carefully followed the general tenor of Burke's utterances; that they have the effect of pulling the reader up short, of making him ask how in the world they ever got there. And, faced as we are by many passages which bear a contrary sense-in particular, by the two passages above quoted-we are probably justified in saying that the appeal to abstract Right,' with all the consequences which it logically involves, is rather a controversial device than an expression of the author's deliberate and reasoned judgement. Even this admission, 1 Reflections, p. 403. 2 Ib.

however, does not carry with it the answer of which we are immediately in search. It gives, in fact, no more than a negative result. It suffices to raise a strong probability against the conclusion that Burke conceived the moral life of man as existing, or having ever existed, ' in total independence' of civil society and the State. It does not suffice to show that he accepted the contrary conclusion, that he explicitly, or even consciously, recognised the former to be historically-still less speculatively and of necessity— dependent upon the latter.

III 1

6

Yet that Burke was guilty of inconsistency can hardly be denied. It would not, doubtless, be fair to reckon too gravely against the consistency of Burke certain phrases about the rights of men' so 'cruelly violated in India by the English.' Such phrases are but lightly thrown out, and no serious argument is based upon their use. But when they appear in Burke's plea against the French Revolution, the case is widely different. There they are deliberately employed; and a grave charge of iniquity on the part of the National Assembly is founded on them. Certain personal claims are there asserted to be the real right' of every man; a right which no government may justly touch; a right which has as little to do with expediency as the 'supposed' political rights, which, just because they disregard expediency, Burke is never weary of denouncing.

It may perhaps be objected that, in thus speaking of certain personal rights as independent of expediency, Burke, however guilty of inconsistency in logic, was at least free from all charge of countenancing abuse, under the name of rights, in practice. It may be said that Burke is here at issue with his opponents on a merely speculative point; and that, in fact, such rights of the individual as he has in view, can never, under any circumstances, work ill to the community. But this is surely not the case.

6

The exact words of Burke are as follows: 2 Men have a right to the fruits of their industry, and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and consolation in death.' If these words do not assert the right of every man 'in civil society' to 1 [The two remaining extracts, the first on natural rights, the second the conclusion, are taken from an earlier (and the only completed) version of the chapter on Burke. See Preface. ED.]

2 Works, i. p. 403.

absolute control of his own property, inherited and acquired, to absolute freedom of worship, to absolute control over the education of his children, it becomes impossible to attach any meaning to them at all. It is as impossible to point to any State, ancient or modern, which has recognised these claims as absolute, which has not insisted on testing them by expediency; in other words, which has not denied them to be, in any legitimate sense of the term, a right. And the reason of this is obvious; such rights' of the individual may prove the extremest wrong to the community.

And, first, with respect to property. In how many ways does not the State trench upon the supposed right of a man to the fruits of his industry and to the means of making that industry fruitful? All interference with liberty of contract, all prohibition of slavelabour, all restrictions on the employment of women or children in work thought to be injurious for them, all confiscation of a traitor's possessions, all expropriation, whether compensated or no, even all taxation itself, are so many invasions of the rights of property.' Yet would Burke have dared to pronounce that any, or all, of these acts on the part of the State constituted a violation of the 'Rights of man'? On the principles which he asserts, in this and other passages of the Reflections, he was bound to do so. Indeed, not content with condemning such acts by implication, Burke, with all the zeal of a new convert, needlessly embarrasses himself by assuming for he can hardly be said to make an attempt at proving -that the Rights of Property' belong no less to a corporation than to an individual. Too much or too little,' he emphatically says in attacking the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 'too much or too little are treason against property.' And the rest of his argument is directed to show that, when once a corporation had been despoiled, no individual could reckon his property secure.

Without basing either species of property upon what can strictly be called a right, it is easy to see and the English nation has never, at a pinch, been slow to see-how far more drastic a measure it is to interfere with the possessions of an individual than with those of a corporation. The corporation exists solely for public ends, and at the creation of the State. If those ends are flagrantly disregarded, if the creature of the State becomes a danger to the power which created it, the State is surely not only at liberty, but under an obligation, to interfere and, if necessary, to undo the work which it had done. The property of the individual, on the other hand, exists primarily for individual ends; though resting, in the last resort, upon the sanction of the State, it does so in a far less obvious sense than the property of a corporation; and, as its operation is far more wide-reaching, so any interference with it 1 Works, i. p. 420.

must lead to far more serious consequences in the way of unsettlement and alarm, as well as in the sense of grievance which it excites, than interference with a thing so comparatively rare as the property of a corporate body.

But to these considerations Burke was, for the moment, completely blind. If we are to believe him,1 the English nation was as indignant at the disendowment of the monasteries in France as he and his Whig friends, a score of years earlier, had been at the disendowment of the Duke of Portland for the benefit of Sir James Lowther in England. And this assumed indignation of his countrymen against the 'spoliation ' practised by the National Assembly of their neighbours he proceeds blandly to illustrate from the censure implied by the reversal, under the Restoration, of the Act which confiscated the property of Chapters during the Rebellion. He finds it convenient to forget that, only a century before the measure of 1643, England, by an Act never reversed, and on the whole still generally approved, had set the closest possible example to France of 1789. The Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539 was far more obviously analogous to the parallel act of Burke's own day in France than was the confiscation of the Chapter-lands during the short-lived reaction against the tyranny of Laud. That Burke, therefore, avoided so carefully all mention of the former, while dwelling at such length upon the iniquities of the latter, must be admitted to show a strange want of candour. The real reason why the English nation, while on the whole approving the action of Henry VIII., undoubtedly condemned that of the Long Parliament, was not because any distinction was to be drawn between the two measures on the ground of Right-for, on this ground, what distinction is it possible to draw?-but because the one measure has been generally thought to thwart, while the other has no less generally been thought to further, the true interests of the community. But Burke's object being, at that moment, to excite passion, such an admission, however obvious and however much to be expected from his general principles, it was not, at that moment, for his convenience to make. For to have fallen back upon the modest argument from expediency would have been to rob these pages of the Reflections of all logic and-what, it is to be feared, was still more distasteful to rob them of all pungency. It was little to prove that the eager legislators of France were unwise; Burke held a brief to demonstrate that they were fraudulent and wicked.

On the right to freedom in education and religion there is less need to speak at length. That Burke's sweeping principle 1 Works, i. p. 438.