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his labour and his care. Those who are not ignorant of the less liberal views of Mr. Fox, and of some of his greatest contemporaries on this subject, are bound to record that he always supported her interests at the sacrifice of his own; and that on the subject of her trade more especially, all the principles, by which the intercourse between the two countries has in the sequel been regulated and improved, were traced by his sagacity. His exertions in regard to the Roman Catholics of Ireland, what ever may be the natural differences of opinion on the great ques tion yet pending, cannot surely be perverted into proofs of his indifference to the civil rights of mankind. From them at least no evidence of an aristocratical or abstract love of oppression can be extorted. Long before the first relaxation of the penal laws in 1778, Mr. Burke had examined every branch of the subject, and had explained to the more leading statesmen of Ireland his feelings and his opinions. It is not possible to deny that before that period the whole system was odious and unwise, and incapable of producing any other results than those of hatred and turbulence on the one side, of insolence and of fear on the other. Of the first bill of relief, to which Sir George Savile's name was given, Mr. Burke was known to be the author; and after the greater bill of relief in 1792, he continued, to the moment of his death, to urge the policy of granting to the Roman Catholics the political privileges from which they still continued to be excluded. The man who acted thus, whatever else he might be, was not a bigoted advocate of the existing order of things: this Apostle of Institutions could consent without alarm to the removal of political restraints, when the case in his opinion justified such a con

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But to leave Ireland-if the claims of Mr. Burke to be ranked with the most successful friends of English liberty, had rested on the single foundation of his reforms in the public offices, and the public expenditure of the country, the most sincere alarmist on the influence of the crown must surely hesitate to reject them. For he must be sensible that it cannot be deemed the same enterprize, requiring the same spirit, or opposed by the same difficulties, to have attacked the very citadel of royal influence in the year 1780, which it would be considered in the year 1826. He must feel some respect for the hand, which inflicted the first serious wound on the system of sinecures; which deprived the crown of so many sources of influence and means of corruption; which so largely exaited the character, by increasing the independence, of parliament. We have observed that a very narrow and unfair estimate of the national service accomplished by these reforms, is too frequently admitted. It is supposed to consist in fixing a limit to the pension

list, in reducing the accounts of the civil list to the system of all other parliamentary accounts, and in suppressing the unlimited use of the balances of public money. But difficult and praiseworthy as were these services, they form but a small and an inferior part of the whole. For to the laws for which we are indebted to Mr. Burke, and to the public discussions by which he introduced them, a total change in the feelings and the conduct of all public accountants may be distinctly ascribed. Without any arrogant pretension to an immaculate purity in our own times, one cannot consider the habits and practices of the public departments before those reforms, without many emotions of shame, and some of disgust and of indignation. The exorbitant fortunes amassed by the possessors of offices, and amassed by means that would not bear description; the studied and ingenious profusion of expense in all the details of official business; the unsparing application of the large balances of the revenue to private emolument; these are some of the features of that ancient system, which the single arm of Burke combated and destroyed. Some lovers of antiquity may certainly regret, that the old distinction between a public and a private account is no longer maintained, and that so much of the clearness, the simplicity and the precision of the latter has been introduced into the former. But those who reflect, how much the risks of embezzlement and the temptations to dishonesty were at once retrenched, how many resources of a sinister influence were for ever severed from the crown, may well be startled by the statement that the original parent of all this national good was himself, above all other men, the zealot of corruption and power, the most bigoted and relentless of all the systematic advocates of thrones and dominions.

Nearly at the same period when the intense interest of domestic politics absorbed the attention of every other mind-that of Burke, soaring above the scene of his personal interests, and the contests of his party, calmly examines the whole system of negro slavery, and exposes it to public inquiry and to public reprobation. Not satisfied with declamation on a topic as yet unhackneyed, or rather untouched, he frames a code of regulations so admirably adapted to the case, that after the experience of forty years it has been made the model and the ground-work of the measures recently adopted by the English ministers. The scheme of Burke proposes, by gradually raising the condition and above all promoting the instruction of the slave, to render his ultimate manumission at once conducive to his own welfare, and safe to his master. Sensible of the risk, and indeed of the inevitable failure of any sudden alteration in such a peculiar state of society, Burke calculated his system for the same end,

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and sketched out nearly the same means, that have found favour with the present government. But while popular applause is lavished on vulgar intellects incapable of originating anything, and equally incapable of treading in, without trampling into inutility, any path marked out by such a mind as this, the man who first directed the attention of England to the condition of the negros is utterly forgotten.

We may take this opportunity of pausing for a moment on a popular notion regarding Mr. Burke, which has been partly refuted by the better experience of his countrymen, but which still exists to a very considerable extent: we allude to the habit of discarding and vilifying him as an extravagant theorist, as one, whose barren generalities are unfit for the test of practice and of real life. That this clamour should be echoed and re-echoed by sheer ignorance, or by the malice of those to whom such theorists as Burke are always dangerous, cannot be the subject of any reasonable surprize. But the charge sometimes proceeds from more respectable quarters. It is, in fact, the favourite topic of those mechanical statesmen' who treat with majestic contempt every thing in politics beyond the bustling intrigue, the exclusive attention to details, valued in proportion to their minuteness, on which their own chances of fortune and of reputation are wholly founded. These make their own horizon the boundary of the political universe. The party-battle of the day, the routine of official or of parliamentary duty, presents to their imagination the whole circle of political science. They regard the excursions of such a mind as Burke's with the same feelings which some men apply to the invention of balloons; that is to say, with a faint emotion of wonder, and a much stronger one of contempt. No subject can be named, on which an indulgence in general topics, and in the mere flights of oratory, is more tempting or more pardonable, than the slavery of so large a portion of mankind, with all its attendant evils, and its peculiar sufferings. Yet may we observe that here too, as on the great questions of America, of civil reform, of Indian abuses, and of religious libertythe attention of Burke, this mighty theorist, is devoted to the practical mitigation of evils, of which not his own ignorance or incapacity, but the state of national feeling at the time on the one hand, and his own knowledge of the nature of man and the history of the world on the other, forbad him to attempt the total and immediate abolition. He not only penetrates but methodizes the minutest details of this inquiry, then not less novel than intricate; and is able to chain down even his expansive genius to the strictest *forms of business. Let us not conclude that this was simply a proof of his industry or his intellect; it is the best evidence that

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he was in earnest; that he steadily aimed at the attainment of practical good. And here is in fact the distinction between pretension and utility, between the genuine and the spurious patriot.

The industrious and continued attention of. Mr. Burke to the system of our Indian government, and the impeachment of Warren Hastings, greatly tend to confirm the same general impression as to the character of his views and principles of political action. Valuing himself more highly on these than on any of his political labours, he justly asserts that their intention, at least, cannot be mistaken. These toils, whatever else may be said of them, were not undergone in deference to arbitrary power; they cannot be accused of forming a precedent of impunity to great delinquents, or of encouragement to the future oppressors of our distant colonies and dependencies: they were strictly constitutional in their tendency; and their effect has been to cast the light of parliamentary inquiry on a system, which requires that corrective more than any part of the British government; to impress on the most powerful officers of the state the wholesome conviction of the controul of parliament, and of their absolute responsibility to it. This was not an injury to the crown; but unquestionably the service was of a popular nature and advanced the progress of freedom. Dazzled by the splendour of the impeachment, we do not always reflect that it was but the closing scene of Mr. Burke's labours on East Indian subjects, that it was the result and not the cause of his patient drudgery in that pursuit. We may regret the dilatory course of the trial, in itself a penal infliction that few crimes would justify; but that is now properly ascribed to circumstances above the controul of the accusers. From this reproach, the statements of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Dundas are amply sufficient to relieve the memory of Burke. If however there are still sceptics on the subject, we should refer them to the detailed Report on the delays of the trial, prepared by Burke himself; and unless that succeed in effecting their conviction, we must consider their prejudices irreclaimable. The closeness of the reasoning, the accuracy of legal and of historical research, are as remarkable in this composition, as the perspicuous precision and force of the style. As a record of constitutional law, the tract is in itself a national service.

To follow the stream of incidents in the discussions on the rights of jurors in cases of libel, we may still trace this consistent enemy of freedom, this champion of power and of abuses, insisting on the widest construction of popular rights, and combating at every step the pretensions of the bench. The Bill of Mr. Fox in 1791, was nearly a literal copy of an act framed by Mr. Burke at much earlier period, and to be found in a volume of his post

mous works. This, therefore, was another of the many instances, in which he anticipated the decisions of public opinion. What were the merits of this service to the constitution, what has been its effect on the national freedom, are not now the grounds of any dispute. But how many of the bitterest enemies, of the most malignant revilers of Mr. Burke could be named, who, in their own cases, are living witnesses of the effectual aid which Mr. Burke lent to the cause of free discussion! Here as elsewhere the essential distinction between his public exertions and those of statesmen in general, whatever may be their ability or their diligence, is not to be overlooked. His views were seldom if ever limited to a victory in debate, to the success of a party, still less to the theatric display of his own ingenuity or his own eloquence. The objects of his ambition are more exalted; and he is rarely satisfied with labours of which the description alone is startling to ordinary minds, until they have conducted him to some permanent improvement in the laws, the policy, or the constitution of his country.

Our limits warn us not to expatiate, as we might do, on many other points of Mr. Burke's career illustrative of the same high and consistent liberality. His successful exertions on the question of Wilkes's election; his act to limit the claims of the crown on the property of the subject; his continued efforts to procure not only liberty of worship, but civil privileges for the dissenters;-these are not inadequate proofs, though but a part of the existing proofs, of the proposition which we have undertaken to maintain. They distinctly negative the accusation, repeated by numberless writers usque ad nauseam, of any natural bias to arbitrary principles, of any aristocratic hatred of popular interests and genuine freedom. But we cannot pretend to deny, that Mr. Burke was guilty of one political crime; which, it would seem to be decreed by his enemies, is to mark him an outlaw for ever from all political honour, and to bar his claim to any portion of national gratitude. From the very first dawning of the French revolution, he certainly presumed to doubt the wisdom of its principles, and the honesty of its agents above all, its tendency to promote the cause of freedom. We are perfectly aware, that the proof of his objects and his disposition before the period of that revolution, cannot be presumed to embrace the whole case against his character. It is fair to require the further proof, that his conduct was in that conjuncture a consistent consequence of his own principles; or, rather, as we should be inclined to contend, that it constituted in effect an additional and a splendid service to the very cause, to which the whole of Mr. Burke's previous public life had been devoted.

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