472 Prior's Life of Burke. the good of mankind, or even the freedom of France. For if the restless and unlimited ambition of Buonaparte had not united all the leading nations of Europe against his power, and so, in the end, caused his ruin, it is still, at the very least, questionable, whether France would have gained any thing of liberty or of more liberal institutions by her revolution. The truth, however, is that the argument, if it deserves to be called one, might be applied with equal justice to private as to public conduct. Because God's providence works good out of all evil, therefore let us stand idly by, and witness a robbery, or a murder! But never let the adversaries of Burke forget, that the fate of France was an inferior point in his consideration,-that this was all along the weakest motive of his fears and his exertions. The successful incursion of the principles of anarchy into England, and the consequent injury or ruin of her free institutions, was to his mind the main cause of apprehension. To pronounce this alarm chimerical, is not to settle the question. It neither confirms nor refutes the imputation of folly or of knavery: for the whole question in dispute was to England one of degree; and, in this view, the possible and remote advantages which in the course of years might or might not spring out of present confusion and present oppression, could have no defensible influence on Mr. Burke's conduct as a statesman or a patriot. It could not be questioned that England actually possessed a considerable share of freedom; nor could the most sanguine republican deny that even that portion, in the desperate and lasting contest which must have followed any violent attempt at innovation, might have been totally lost to England. To the country of Burke, then, the acquisition of any improvement was at best uncertain and contingent, while the risk to be incurred was no less than the absolute loss of all the objects in dispute. The case of France, we fully admit, was very different. Her government was in its nature despotic-there was no popular representation, and scarcely even a partial enjoyment of virtual freedom. In her case separately considered, therefore, it might be fair to infer, that without passing through the ordeal of a severe contest and of great though temporary suffering, France could not hope to escape from a pressing and admitted evil. But the circumstances of the time rendered it impossible to look to France alone. That despotism is the worst of national evils, and freedom the greatest of national blessings, was not less the argument of Burke than of his adversaries: but he preferred the imperfect enjoyment of the latter, admitting it to have been imperfect in England, to all the hazards of a contest, which in too many instances has ended in the permanent success and establishment of the former. We have endeavoured to prove that, by constitutional courses, he could could labour long and well to enlarge and to confirm the liberties of his country. He had limited the power of the crown-he had extended the rights of juries—he had exposed and greatly remedied the abuses of authority. We must contend that it is a most difficult task to trace with precision the chain of cause and of effect in the course of national events; but estimating at their highest value the advantages to France and to the world resulting from the French revolution, we are persuaded that, without gross injustice, these cannot be quoted as affecting the honesty or the wisdom of Burke; and it is manifest that they cannot, in the slightest degree, disprove the justice of his fears regarding the success of the revolutionary doctrines in England. We cannot enter into the latter question, which it is no longer the fashion to treat as an absurd and extravagant theory; but we might safely rest this part of our case on the answer which any honest opponent of Burke in 1792 would at the present time give to the question-whether the experience of the subsequent twenty years had not altered his notions as to the probable consequences upon English freedom, of the adoption in 1792 of the principles which Mr. Burke at that period resisted. But let us not be misled by words in a case, in which, above all others, words may be strictly said to have been things. We are justly entitled to take a higher ground of defence. Burke had never admitted revolution to be synonimous with freedom, nor reform with improvement. He had not sworn allegiance to all reforms and all revolutions, whether foreign or domestic, whether seasonable or untimely. From his first entrance into public life, reformer as he was in many senses of the word, he had constantly opposed, without exception, all the various projects of reform in parliament. This principle, not assumed by him to meet a particular case, or as a specious disguise of a real inconsistency, may be traced in his speeches and his conduct long before there could be a suspicion, even to his extended forecast, of any event resembling the French revolution. As a consistent statesman, he was not only justified but bound by all his previous opinions, and by the previous actions of his life, to resist the violent and unqualified innovations, the metaphysical tenets of French jacobins and French philosophers. Of the various shades of whiggism, Burke had chosen the Rockingham school; which, whether a good or a bad school in point of doctrine, was not without numbers nor without respect in England. Is it then more fair to judge any statesman by a criterion suggested by his enemies, than by the principles professed and acted upon by himself? Was it rational to expect that, with the pliancy of younger statesmen, Burke could admire that which had, through all his lifetime, been the express express object of his abhorrence; a liberty unconnected with order, which could exist without honesty or virtue'? It was the principal boast of the party in which he had served and which he had commanded, to be the accurate and even the responsible representatives of the principles by which, in the English revolution of 1688, certain definite rights and securities were obtained for this country; could he, then, in the pursuit of vague and undefined freedom, consent to risk the loss of those defined and constitutional benefits? could he consider the doctrines and the practices, which he was, by every principle of his political creed, bound and sworn to condemn if they had been of English growth, as rendered pure and harmless by their importation from France? If a statesman can be proved to have been mercenary and treacherous, the remaining parts of his political character may be abandoned to their own merits; and these, therefore, are the favourite and laboured points of attack to the enemies of Burke. The first charge resolves itself, upon a strict examination, into Mr. Burke's acceptance of a pension at the close of his public life; for, by all the preceding actions of that life, it is refuted in a manner as distinct and unanswerable as Mr. Thomas Moore himself could require. Some allowance, indeed, may be demanded for a scandalous story in certain unpublished papers of Lord Orford: but on the point of scandal purer authority may well be expected, and Mr. Moore has not suggested its existence. But let us come to facts. Nearly the first action of Burke in connection with his political life, when the condition of his private fortune gave the highest value to the sacrifice, was the voluntary abandonment of a pension obtained for him by Mr. Gerard Hamilton, who had made some proposal on the subject implying an expectation of political servitude, and therefore offensive to his feelings; and who will deny that the forbearance of Burke in never proclaiming this action, even as a defence of his supposed desertion of a friend and a patron, greatly enhances its merit? Again, in 1765, Lord Charlemont relates the offer made by Burke to resign his office of private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the moment he learned that prejudices were entertained against him by some of his lordship's colleagues in the government. Lord Charlemont is not a mean authority on any question of political integrity; and it should be observed, that, at the period of this offer, this office was to Burke the only opening to parliament and to political distinction. Again, on the formation of Lord Chatham's administration, though urged by Lord Rockingham himself to accept the office of a lord of trade, Burke refused to abandon the fortunes of his earliest patron. Once more, the seat in parliament for Bristol, so honourably conferred on him, and in itself an honour of which neither the value nor the effects should be estimated by the feelings of the present times, was risked and lost for no other reason but his intrepid avowal of principles more liberal than those of his constituents. And lastly, in 1782, when paymaster of the army, he voluntarily retrenched from his own emoluments various profits depending on the management of Chelsea Hospital-and the whole interest of the balances of public money, which had been enjoyed by all his predecessors; and even a few years enjoyment of which (for the amount of the interest on these balances was actually upwards of £20,000 per annum) would have made himself infinitely a richer man than he ever was or hoped to be. If to these unquestionable facts, not arguing corruption or laxity of principle, we add Burke's persevering refusal to accept any office after his junction with Mr. Pitt; if, moreover, we reflect that his pension, the head and front of his offending,' never solicited by himself, was not accepted before 1795, after his retirement from the active pursuits of his political career; that it was neither a retainer for future service in parliament, nor a bribe to indolence or to incapacity, but the hardly-earned recompense of a laborious public life and of many substantial services to the state-If we look to the case in all its bearings as it really stands, we shall impute the charge rather to political malice than to political justice. At the worst, we shall hesitate to admit the propriety of the verdict which, on the ground of a single offence, would obliterate the merits and defame the character of a whole existence; and even find some difficulty in admiring the policy or the candour of those who reject, on this sole plea, the honour and the advantage which the long and disinterested attachment of a splendid genius might shed on their own cause. With regard to the charge of political treachery, we shall be contented with one observation, and that we borrow from Mr. Moore's Life of Sheridan, of which a very unreasonable portion is filled with the most vulgar common-places of rancorous abuse against Burke. It is, in fact, an unconscious refutation of many of this sprightly partizan's own statements. In general,' Mr. Moore remarks, 'political deserters lose their power and their value in the very act; and bring little more than their treason to the cause which they espouse; but Burke was mighty in either camp,' &c. &c. What then was the true cause of this rare exception in the instance of Burke to the common fate of political deserters? Why did not his influence, his power and his character expire with his faith to his party? There is but one intelligible solution of this problem that he deserved and received the credit, commonly denied to similar cases, of an honest conviction, of a conduct neither capricious nor interested; in other words, that even in the opinion of those from whom he separated himself, there was not only a plausible, but a natural and substantial reason in the events of the times for the apparent inconsistency of their former champion. Whatever might be said, it was deeply and bitterly felt by those most concerned, that although he quitted the ranks, he could not justly be said to abandon the creed of a party, who had not only carried their own old dogmas to an extreme hitherto unknown, and in the opinion of a large and respectable division of their own army, dangerous to the country; but actually had adopted entirely new principles-principles in direct contradiction to the leading doctrines, and the previous conduct of Burke himself. In truth, not only did his influence and his character survive the change, as Mr. Moore has confessed, but they were greatly and naturally increased by it. The fortitude, which in deference to a clear public principle enabled him to encounter the storm of personal obloquy, was in itself a just subject of admiration and of gratitude and the sentiments with which he was received by the party he had adopted, were directly the reverse of those, which are, and ought to be, the unfailing portion of political traitors. The national feeling on the subject was well expressed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, when he applied to Burke Milton's description of Abdiel: that the fervent angel' did not abandon his friends, until his friends had proved faithless to his principles. Faithful found Among the faithless, faithful only he To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind, 6 To trace minutely the influence of Burke as an orator or a writer on his own and on the succeeding age, would lead us far beyond our prescribed space; yet in the most superficial view of his character, it would be unpardonable to omit the subject altogether. Admitting the correctness of the celebrated definition of eloquence in the Treatise De Causis corruptæ Eloquentiæ,' we must consider the period of his life to have been as favourable as any part of English history to the cultivation and the exercise of the art; since in the abundance of the matter of parliamentary eloquence, in the frequent and continued excitement of political agitation, it has assuredly been surpassed by none. Not only is this true of the |