batant in the stormy strifes of politics, the distinctive mark of his genius is its sanity. Even in those pieces where the whirlwind of his passion and invective is at its height, his wisdom and rationality are never far off. This is apparent even in the Regicide Peace, for, though these fiery pages ransack the English language to find vituperative missiles— robbers, assassins, cannibals—it is in them we find towards the end of the Third Letter-a tribute to the old Greek virtue of moderation. 'Our physical well-being, our moral worth, our social happiness, our political tranquillity, all depend on that control of all our appetites and passions, which the ancients designed by the cardinal virtue of temperance.' 1 And it is in keeping with the words that the Letter ends on the note of 'responsibility.' Nor was it without good reason, though the immoderation of his words often obscures the fact, that the virtues to which perhaps above all others he laid claim, were consistency and sobriety of judgment. In reality,' he wrote to his intimate friend Laurence, when the hand of death was already on him (the topic was the prosecution of Hastings), 'you know that I am no enthusiast, but according to the powers that God has given me, a sober and reflecting man.' 2 'Please God,' he said on another occasion, when describing his own procedure, ‘I will walk with caution, whenever I am not able Regicide Peace, Letter III. 2 Feb. 10, 1797.

clearly to see my way before me.'1 'It may be allowed,' so runs still another dictum, 'to the temperament of the statesman to catch his ultimate object with an intuitive glance; but his movements towards it ought to be deliberate.' 2 It was this. deliberateness, this sobriety, this rationality which constrained him, throughout his career, and even in utmost stress and bitterness of party passions, to turn to principles as the necessary rules and standard of the 'prudence' of his panegyric, and not least to keep unwaveringly before him the happiness of the whole' as the end of all political work. And this utilitarian phrase finds reinforcement in the variant (one of many) that those on whose account all just authority exists' are the people to be governed.' 3

It would, however, be a misnomer to call Burke utilitarian-at any rate till we construe happiness of the whole' or 'happiness of the people' in the light of his conception of what a people is. For it will quickly appear that this is vastly different from anything that is to be found in the Radical gospel of Bentham and the Benthamites.

1 Letter on the Duration of Parliaments. 3 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol.

2 Reflections.

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CHAPTER IV

WHAT IS A PEOPLE?

FROM the beginning of his political career Burke seems to have already formed a definite conception of what a people is, which, if it changed at all, changed only, as the years went on, in the direction of maturity and clearness. The best expression of it is to be found in some pages of the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, which are amongst the most luminous in the whole of his writings. The passage is much too lengthy for quotation; but this is the less necessary because the keynote of the whole may be said to be struck in the three words, discipline of nature.' 'When great multitudes act together, under that discipline of nature, I recognise the PEOPLE.' 1

6

What then is this discipline of nature' which thus avails to gather men together and give them the unity of a people, or, to use the phrase that meets us oftenest in Burke's pages, of a civil society?

The answer is that it is that long and gradual process of historical development, divinely guided, as Burke believed, through which the many hands 1 Appeal.

and many minds of successive generations slowly bring a society out of the rude and undisciplined state, when as yet a 'people' cannot be said to exist, into that state of organisation in which the varied elements of a corporate life, throne, aristocracy, church, judiciary, parliament, electorate, non-electorate, professions, trades, science, art, morality, manners-all find their appropriate place and function. In a sense this corporate life implies a compact or agreement. Burke says it does. He speaks of the original compact or agreement which gives its corporate form and capacity to a State.' 1 He even says that the idea of a people is 'wholly artificial and made, like all other legal fictions, by common agreement.' 2 But these and other terms and phrases which he freely borrows from the philosophy of the eighteenth century must never be taken to mean that he thought, as Hobbes or Rousseau thought (or at any rate say), that a 'people' was called into being once for all by an explicit act of contract in some far-off imaginary past. If compact there be, it is a compact of a kind that is tacitly rather than explicitly, gradually rather than by any single transaction, made, as the growth of corporate life advances from generation to generation. Much as he makes of 'the original contract' in arguing about 1688 against the New Whigs, it is the contract implied and expressed in 1 Appeal.

2 Ibid.

the constitution of this country,' not the contract as a single transaction.1 No idea, indeed, is more repugnant to Burke than the notion that any mere multitude of men, whether savage or civilised, should at a given time, and by their own explicit choice, fabricate a state by contract. It filled him, he says, and it is evident without his saying it, 'with disgust and horror.' 'Alas!' he exclaims, 'they little know how many a weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which has a truly politic personality.' 2 For it is by 'the discipline of nature,' as it operates through the centuries, and not by the abrupt initiatives of parties to an explicit contract, that peoples and states are fashioned and perpetuated.

This was the conception of a 'people' that was central in Burke's thought from the beginning, and it carries in it further conclusions of far-reaching significance.

One of these is that a 'people' is a highly complex unity. For when Burke speaks of the 'discipline of nature,' the word 'nature' suggests to him nothing whatever of the associations of artless, primitive simplicity, social or political, that gathered round the fancied state of nature in the minds of the disciples of Rousseau. That vision of a simplified social life, a life that had escaped the inconveniences and limitations of savagery, and yet had 1 Appeal.

2 Ibid.