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SOME ASPECTS OF EDMUND BURKE.

BY AUSTIN TAYLOR, B.A.

OCTOBER 21st of the year just passed (1894) was a memorable day in the annals of our country. On that day it fell to the lot of the present prime minister to unveil a statue to Edmund Burke, for six years member of parliament for the city of Bristol. By that solemn act of oblivion the great western seaport proclaimed that all was once more as it should have been between the illustrious dead and the still living constituency-that his principles, his methods, his political aims were not at variance with her more matured political instinct. Just as, during his six years' connection with the city, Burke had on occasion been in advance of his constituents, only to be caught up later by their more informed political judgment, so now, though long since in the tomb, the general tenor of his aims and aspirations has finally commanded the admiring assent of a later Bristol. I cannot forbear the thought that some recognition of this nature is still wanting from his countrymen at large. Burke is always quoted with respect; his political dicta pass current among us; his is an illustrious shade amongst the brilliant group of statesmen who, towards the close of the last century, witnessed the birththroes of two great republics; but his hold on the minds of present-day Englishmen is not, somehow, in proportion to his merits as a thinker. A carefully culled selection of rhetorical passages for use on speech days and prize competitions is, no doubt, a compliment to his power of

language, but to one who deserves the foremost place amongst political and social philosophers, the compliment is but dubious; it is as though one were to confine one's admiration for Shakespeare to his beautiful descriptions of scenery, or one's appreciation of Bacon to his quaint powers of expressing himself by apothegm. I must own that it is difficult to understand why Burke is not more appreciated by, and more familiar to, the public of our own day. He had, it must be owned, one great defect, that, namely, of bringing to bear general principles upon particular facts. This, to the average Briton, is, I fear, an inexcusable fault; he, the average Briton, much prefers to decide a given fact by immediate arguments, pro or con. If, having mastered particular facts, he is willing to ascend therefrom to a general principle, that is quite another matter, but the particular question must first be decided. By way of illustration, not, certainly, by way of analogy, the boa-constrictor at the Zoo, who recently swallowed sixteen or eighteen feet of a friend, did so because he found the head and fangs of his companion embedded in the chicken which he had himself begun to swallow. Probably, had the eighteen feet of boa-constrictor been presented first in order, he might have thought twice about the experiment; so with the Englishman, he must have his chicken first. If at any time he consents to assimilate a general principle per se, it must only be as Mrs. Cadwallader consented to put up with her husband's sermons. She began by liking the end of them, and, as she could not reach the end of them without going through the beginning and middle, her power of association finally enabled her to support the whole of the infliction.

Perhaps another reason for his want of popularity lies in the fact that Burke's order of mind was, and is,

extremely rare-rare because of its completeness. There is an order of mind-do we not all know it?-which bounds at the idea of a long-standing abuse or evil, and whose one demand is for instant abolition. A root and branch policy is the only weapon which appears feasible, or even worthy of consideration. To make a clean sweep and plant all afresh is what impetuous blood, allied with the necessary want of experience, generally calls for when this order of intellect is brought to bear upon vexed political or social problems. At the other end of the gamut reposes that intellect which is more or lessand generally more-content with things as they are. Quieta non movere. Why disturb an existing order which has worked fairly well, or at any rate has worked in some fashion? From this point of view a mere repetition of certain acts in a particular routine is equivalent to prescriptive right. It would as soon think of displacing an old-fashioned system, on the ground of incompetence, as most of us would think of dispossessing the occupant of an accustomed seat at, say, a public dining-table upon the score of selfishness. I suppose that all human minds range between these two types. Burke's completeness lay in this that while he clung to what existed with, perhaps, somewhat inordinate fondness, he was as daring in his attempts to improve upon it, to foster in it its principle of growth, as the most ardent and uncalculating innovator. Possibly it is on this account that he has failed to please in many quarters. By keen economic reforms, by unswerving attachment to the cause of Catholic relief, by unflinching devotion to the claims of the persecuted and the oppressed, he probably disgusted many lovers of that old order which politely declines to give place to the new. By stoutly resisting all attempts to widen the base of the British constitution, by extreme

tenderness for prescriptive rights, by an entire abhorrence of academic methods when applied to practical politics, he has puzzled and confounded those whose one aim is to find or make a tabula rasa upon which to commence their experiments. But be the causes what they may of that lack of full and entire appreciation which Burke deserves, the time has surely come when the genius of the English race should recognise genius akin to its own. Bent on reform, but not keen to innovate; sworn to confer liberty, but a foe to licence and anarchy; content rather to wait for atrophy than hastily to excise the yet living member when excision may fatally injure the very principle of political growth.

Burke's general theory of government is a complex subject. It is, however, impossible to understand his ideas upon the great questions of his own day without an attempt to grapple with it. The task is not made more easy by that enormous grasp of intellect with which Burke travelled from theory to detail, and from detail to theory, and then with a noble enlargement linked all together in one great systematic whole. But the subject has lost none of its fascination with the lapse of time, for round the premises assumed by Burke still rage, and must rage, some of the greatest controversies of our day. The basis of Burke's political method was at once moral and religious. Government was a divine institution originating, it is true, from the people, but resting upon laws which transcended their power to alter. We find this clearly expressed even in his earliest works, notably in his pamphlet On Present Discontents. "Government," he says, "is certainly an institution of divine authority, yet its forms and the persons who administer it all originate from the people." When life was ebbing, we find him still insisting upon

the moral aspect of government. "Some are always considering the formal distribution of power in the constitution. The moral basis they consider as nothing. Very different is my opinion. I consider the moral basis as everything." Here, then, at the outset, we must recognise those two different schools of thought which are at variance on the great questions of morality and religion, and especially as applied to political life-that school, namely, which divorces morality from religion, and finds a sufficient ethical basis in the utilitarian needs of a community; and that other school which finds in the combination of both the only effectual guarantee of an orderly progress. I raise no question as to the truth or otherwise of these respective systems. The discussion of their claims is a subject far beyond the competence of such a paper as I am now reading. I must, however, emphasise clearly to which of these schools it was that Burke belonged, for in this we find the key to unlock the secret decisions of his mind when in great crises he reverted, as do all other men, to those master-principles which at bottom regulate the soul. As early as 1765, when just about entering on public life, he gives no equivocal testimony. "In all forms of government," he says, "the people is the true legislator; their consent is absolutely essential to the validity of law. But," he adds, "they have no right to make a law prejudicial to the whole community, because it would be made against the principle of a superior law, which it is not in the power of any community or of the whole race of man to alter." In 1791, six years before his death, we find him still at the old moorings. "I allow," he says, "that if no supreme. Ruler exists, wise to form and potent to enforce the moral law, there is no sanction to any contract, virtual or even actual, against the will of prevalent power. On that

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