have had Garrick flashing in with a story from his theatre.' 1

Such things, of course, needed no theories to prompt them. They were instincts of the heart. But they are none the less illustrative of certain settled convictions, again and again avowed, which Burke held as to the right relation between the private and the public affections. For when Burke called Rousseau 'a lover of his kind; a hater of his kindred,' the taunt was no mere bitter epigram. It conveyed, and was meant to convey, the suggestion that the man who hates his kindred is not likely to love his kind. For, in the natural history of the wider human ties, as Burke understood it, growth does not begin all at once at the circumference. From kin to kind is the true order of development. Men must learn experimentally what ties are, and what duties are in the home and the friendly circle, if they are to develop sympathies worth the giving to the neighbourhood or the nation. No cold relation is a zealous citizen 'so runs his formula. To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to,' is the first step, and the reality of the wider sympathies is suspect if it be not built on fidelity to the lesser relationships that lie at our feet.

It is not the whole truth. It cannot be, if there be any truth at all in the ascetic creed that 'the 1 The Four Georges.

forlorn hope in the cause of mankind must have no, narrower ties to divide the allegiance.' But this is no part of the gospel of Burke. Nor is it the general law of the genesis of public interests. Normally the charities of life begin at home, not, of course, because the claims of family and friendship are more imperative than the service of city or nation, but for the better reason that the civic virtues, unless one is to suppose that they fall like manna from heaven, spring naturally from the kindly soil of ordinary human intercourse.

We find the same principle, though on a larger stage, when we turn to Burke's attitude to political party.

It need not be said that Burke was a party politician. From his entrance into the House in 1765, it is well known that he threw in his lot with the Rockingham Whigs, and that, for the next five-andtwenty years 'night by night in the forlorn hope of constant minorities,' laboured, as few politicians have ever laboured, to build up the party in face of the dogged hostility and corrupt influence of George III. and the various ministries which, after 1766, the Whigs strove in vain for many a year to oust from power. 'In the way they call party I worship the constitution of your fathers '-this was his boast. And, in the spirit of the words, this

1 Robertson of Brighton, Sermon on ‘Marriage and Celibacy.'

John Wesley of politics' not only gave to political party as an institution a vitality which since his day it has never lost, but wrote in the Thoughts on the Present Discontents the best plea for party in our own or in any language.

It was, of course, not his theory of party that made him thus a party man. Men do not join parties to illustrate theories. He became a Whig because he held certain political principles-he had formed them, he declares, before he had so much as set foot in St. Stephen's, and because the Whig party, or the section of it that followed Rockingham, seemed to him the best instrument for making these principles effective. All his life he was, as he often said, a practical politician, a combatant not a spectator, whose prime business it was to promote good measures and resist bad ones. Nor had he any love, as we have seen, for politicians who acted on theories. They filled him with distrust, derision, and denunciation. Yet none the less he had his justification of party. For it was an article of his creed that if a politician means to serve his country, the path to all effective service lies through loyalty to party. All the world knows how Goldsmith once, in Retaliation, satirised his friend for giving up to party what was meant for mankind. But the taunt was in reality a tribute. For mankind was not defrauded, nor ever could be, by Burke's becoming a Whig; because, in his creed at any rate, it was in and

through party that political work for mankind could best be done. No one ever felt this more convincedly than Burke. No one ever looked with a deeper distrust upon the politician without party. No one ever more vehemently denounced the loose allegiance that, with the shibboleth 'not men but measures,' rides off, usually to impotence ('unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle' are his words) upon personal ideals, policies, fanaticisms, or crotchets, and with a light heart casts to the winds the practised friendships and experimented fidelity' which bind comrade to comrade in great public causes. No one was ever more convinced that strong party was one of the prime securities of liberty.

And yet, as every reader of history knows, though Burke lived for his party, he did not die in it. The French Revolution came, and, in face of the issues, not to be evaded, which it raised, latent divergencies sprang to light and the Whig party fell into ruins. Needless to tell again that familiar tale of inevitable rupture, embittered division, and renounced friendship; the point that alone concerns us is its explanation. Many have said that Burke was inconsistent, or worse. Bentham and Buckle have imperilled their own reputation for sanity by pronouncing him mad. 'It is at any rate' (to use words of his own), 'the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools." But the truth is that the one

imputation is as false, though not so absurd, as the other. The more temperate, and to the student of Burke's writings the convincing explanation is simply that, much as Burke loved his party, he loved his country more. Instead of being stigmatised for infidelity to party, he stands to be lauded for the courage of convictions that relegated party ties to their proper and subordinate place.

For when any man throws in his lot with a political party as an invaluable instrument of action, he need not, and, indeed, if he be open-minded he cannot, pledge himself to take his political convictions from it. The world will not blame him, perhaps, if he attach something more than their weight to the oracles of the party in which he finds himself, but his convictions, if they be more than echoes, will be fed from wider sources. Not all the springs of political wisdom rise in the land of Whig, or of Tory, or of Radical party, or even in all of them put together. Burke is a case in point. He did not take his convictions on trust either from new Whigs' or 'Old Whigs,' even if he attached what some may regard as more than their due to the dicta of the latter.1 He had a wider outlook. He had read widely and thought much. He had observed with the eye of the man of affairs; and, partly by nature, partly by experience, he had gained the insight of

genius. The result followed. His life and thought

1 As e.g. in the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.