better than Burke that such emergencies must be faced and dealt with. He was not blind to the fact that even revolutions must sometimes come. How could he be, when from first to last he was the apologist of 1688? How could he be, when he discussed the whole question of the revolt of the American colonies as it never has been discussed? And when the catastrophe of 1789 burst upon Europe, least of all men did he fail to face it, and discuss it to the uttermost. The thing he feared and hated was, therefore, not that even supreme issues should be discussed, when events had forced them to the front, but that they should be rashly raised and cried upon the house-tops by irresponsible politicians (or those he took to be such), who, without the justification of dire emergency, were ready to raise questions that went to the roots of political allegiance. This was the accusation he fastened on the radicals. They were all alike in his eyes, traffickers in extremes and rash dabblers in a pernicious political casuistry. They were for ever calling in question the fundamental obligations of civil society; for ever preaching up the rights of revolution; for ever arguing in ultimatums; for ever eager to administer the extreme medicine of the state as if it were its daily bread. This was what Burke denounced with an unsparing invective. He had a horror of it that is all but morbid ; for, in his eyes, it could eventuate in only one f result. It would destroy for ever that unsuspecting confidence in the law and the constitution, upon which all political stability reposed. It would leave nothing that was not to be called in question. It would habituate men's minds to the thought of the violation of obligations which ought never to be shaken, except when the worst comes to the worst. It would end, to use his own pregnant words, byl ' turning men's duties into doubts.' At a later day, Mill was to plead for all but unlimited discussion as the great vitaliser of convictions, and as the one adequate security against 'the profound slumber of a decided opinion.' But Burke could see little of this. The profound slumber of a decided opinion' was so far from carrying any terrors for him that it was rather welcomed as a symptom of political health. That ideas should become convictions, and convictions sentiments, nay, even that sentiments should pass into prejudices (if the prejudices were just)—this was the condition of moral and social stability. And, by consequence, to shake this wholesome settledness of mind by the doubts and discussions of political casuistry, was the sure path to the undoing of the State. 'I confess to you, sir, I never liked this continual talk of resistance and revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the constitution its daily bread. It renders the habit of society dangerously valetudinarian; it is taking periodical doses of mercury sublimate, and swallowing down repeated provocatives of cantharides to our love of liberty.' 1 Yet this is not the whole of Burke's case for the limitation of discussion, for the passion of his protests is not to be explained merely by the fact that his conservative instincts and convictions recoiled from calling in question fundamental institutions. It turns on the further point that these institutions, and the loyalties they evoked, were always regarded by him as the work of that stupendous wisdom' by which the Disposer of all things has been marshalling the human race not according to their will, but according to His. For from this it followed that, as soon as criticism and controversy touched the fundamentals of the constitution, they became by implication an attack on that faith in the Divine government of the world, which, as we have seen, was the foundation of Burke's political religion. For it is characteristic of the religious mind to resent and resist assaults upon its settled valuations even more than upon its dogmas. And when, as in Burke's case, these valuations are political, two results are apt to follow-the radical onslaught upon venerated institutions comes to be viewed as if it were an attack upon religion itself; and sceptical assault upon religious faith to be reprobated as undermining the 1 Reflections. basis of the constitution. Both results appear in Burke. He resents and resists radicalism when it would push discussion into constitutional principles which (he thinks) ought never to be called in question, because they stand sponsored not only by experience, but by Divine wisdom; and he measures out short shrift to atheists and infidels, because, by striking at religious faith, they shake the foundations of civil society. The first of these results appears in his case for the limitations of political discussion ; the second will appear when we turn to the well-worn topic of toleration. The limitations upon it are not less firm. Few great thinkers, indeed, have gone so far in using incomparable powers of discussion in proving that toleration, as well as discussion, ought to have its limits. (b) The Limits of Toleration There is no writer in whom, were we free to select some passages and to reject others, toleration finds a nobler voice than in Burke. In proportion as mankind has become enlightened, the idea of religious persecution, under any circumstances, has been almost universally exploded by all good and thinking men.'1 So he wrote in his tolerant Tracts on the Popery Laws. Nor would half-measures content him. Keenly alive to the distinction between the persecution of an ancient faith and the 1 Tracts on the Popery Laws, c. iii. more excusable suppression of new opinions such as might possibly initiate bitter civil dissensions, he is not in the least disposed to palliate what he calls the 'rotten and hollow' policy of a 'preventive persecution' of the latter. The same spirit breathes in other passages: I take toleration to be a part of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice. I would keep them both.' And in the spirit of that utterance, he was ready to see some truth in all forms of religious creed, and to recognise even superstition as 'the religion of feeble minds.' 'Toleration,' he elsewhere declares, in words that might seem conclusive, 'is good for all or it is good for none.' 2 And yet the same hand which wrote these catholic avowals penned also two other sentences which have a different ring. Against these' (i.e. infidels) 'I would have the laws rise in all their terrors. . . . I would cut up the very root of atheism.' This is one: the other is not less emphatic: The infidels are outlaws of the constitution; not of this country, but of the human race. They are never, never to be supported, never to be tolerated.' 3 Those are ferocious sentences. But they are not to be read on that account as if they were an outburst of personal intolerance of atheistic or infidel opinions as matter of private conviction. 1 Speech on relief of Protestant Dissenters, 1773. |