came to be dominated by a patriotism which in fervour has never been surpassed, and in utterance seldom equalled. 'I owe to this country my labour, which is my all; and I owe to it ten times more industry, if ten times more I could exert.' 1 There are avowals stronger still: 'Do me the justice to believe that I never can prefer any fastidious virtue (virtue still) to the unconquered perseverance, to the affectionate patience of those who watch day and night by the bedside of their delirious country, who for their love to that dear and venerable name bear all the disgusts and all the buffets they receive from their frantic mother.' 2

It is, however, only when we have some idea of the object which evoked this unfaltering patriotism that we can understand its influence upon Burke's attitude to party. For that object was a widely different thing from the conventional and abstract entity which 'nation' or 'country' too often suggests to popular thought. It was a singularly concrete, comprehensive, and well-compacted reality which had emerged in the world of men by the labours of many hands and many minds all working, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, under the ultimate direction of a 'Divine tactic.' Therefore it was not to be identified with either crown or aristocracy, or landed interest, or moneyed

1 Speech on the Economical Reform.

2 Letter to a Member of the National Assembly.

interest, or parliament, or electorate, or populace— not with any of these singly, because with all of them in richly integrated organic union. For if a nation be indeed a 'partnership,' in the sense that Burke read into that word,1 then must it stand altogether, if it stand at all, and move altogether if it move at all. One member or element must not usurp upon another, or arrogate to itself more than its appropriate function in the subtly and harmoniously knit system of the body politic; any more than, in the body physiological, this organ or that organ, this function or that function, can ignore its necessary co-operation with other organs and other functions which along with it constitute the living unity of the whole. Nothing, as we shall abundantly see, is more constantly reiterated in Burke's pages than this idea of balance, equipoise, harmony, organic unity. Nor is it only to the political constitution in the narrower sense that he applies these and suchlike categories; it is to the constitution of civil society as a whole.

This was Burke's idea of a nation. This was what he saw actually realised in the England of his day. This was the object that enkindled his patriotic devotion. It may be, as has often enough been said, that in seeing it he was looking, in part at any rate, at his fancy's own creation. But even if this be true, it would only prove that he loved 1 Cf. p. 59.

his country because of what he conceived it ought to be, as well as for what he held it to be in fact.

It was upon this conception of his country that, from first to last, Burke took his stand. In his earlier career he saw authority and royal influence usurping our popular institutions, and so he withstood the influence of the Crown in the name of liberty. These were the days when he sided with Wilkes and the Middlesex electorate against the House of Commons; when he urged repeal of the restrictions that strangled Irish commerce; when he denounced the fatuity of American policy; when he pled with a convincing persuasiveness against the disabilities of the Irish Catholics; and when, all along, he was in the front rank of the Whig battle against old royal prerogative in the new dress of corrupt Georgian influence. The scene changed, and when the French Revolution had come, he saw in Radical ideals and popular movements a menace to the constitution from another side; and so he withstood them too. It was then he broke with Fox, and denounced Paine, and ridiculed Price, and poured contempt on Rousseau, and dropped bitter words about the 'swinish multitude,' and won the plaudits of old enemies by 'diffusing the Terror.' It is open to critics to think that he was wrong in one or other or all of these points. The King's friends' thought him in the wrong in the earlier years; the new Whigs' thought him equally

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in the wrong after the Revolution. But at any rate he was consistent, if fidelity to principles be consistency. Lord Morley has here, with his usual felicity, put the whole question in a nutshell when he says that Burke changed his front, but never changed his ground.1 For it was precisely because he held his ground so tenaciously that, in face of changed circumstances and new problems, he felt constrained to change his front so decisively that he was fated to worship the constitution of his fathers, not in the way men call party, but in the way they call patriotism, even by rupture of party ties. It is not the least of his legacies. In all party ridden countries strong parties run a risk of creating narrow men. It is good to be reminded that even the greatest party is after all a part, and that fidelity to party ties, however necessary, however honourable, is dearly bought if the price be loss of the larger outlook and the patriotic spirit. It is not to be lamented that, by the fortunate irony of history, the greatest of our apologists of the party system should have been also a monument of its limitations.

Political sympathies and ideas, however, are not bounded by the nation. They certainly are not now, when the cosmopolitan idea appears conspicuously enough, not only in religion and ethics, but in practical philanthropy, international law, finance, com1 Burke in English Men of Letters,' p. 169.

merce, and industry. Nor were they then, when revolutionary France was offering her 'fraternity' to all peoples; when 'the ambassador of the Human Race,' mountebank though he was, had been received in all seriousness by the French Assembly; when Paine, in writings that ran to one hundred thousand copies, was foreseeing an European republic with man free of the whole; 1 and when it was the claim and the boast of Whigs as well as Radicals in England that they were no whit worse patriots because their sympathies overleaped the frontiers of the nation and went out freely, not only to America and France, but to all struggles for freedom where there were wrongs to right, or rights to win.

Now it is not to be supposed that Burke was devoid of cosmopolitan ideas and sympathies. We meet in his pages many a word and phrase-mankind,' the species,' the race,'' the great primæval contract of eternal society,' 'the great mysterious incorporation of the human race,' all of which suggest that his thought moved in a large political orbit. Nothing can be more striking than the ease and familiarity with which his mind ranges in the wide sphere of international politics, in his handling alike of the American crisis and the French Revolution.2 Even when, in the Letters on a Regicide Peace, he was preaching war to the death against

1 Rights of Man, p. 70.

2 See e.g. the Thoughts on French Affairs.