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nates the original rights of men and establishes its arbitrary and unjust power over them, they may throw off that society and establish new forms of government to secure their rights.

Burke says that "if civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence, and law itself is only beneficence acting by rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to justice; as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in politic function or in ordinary occupations. They have a right to the fruits of their industry, and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor."

Such are the rights of man in society, granted by Burke in his "Reflections"; and we may add, first and above all, he has a right to life, liberty and property. These embrace security and freedom to man, freedom of action and of thought. Society cannot reduce him to slavery. Society can never have a right to do injustice; for justice is the life and spirit of all government in the world. Of course, this is the principle on which all society must stand or fall, and on these rights of man France, in 1789, had an undoubted right to regenerate herself. Burke says that "government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom." Let us then see the condition of France at this time, and the wants of man in that ancient state. There was great inequality of taxation, exempting two-thirds-the landed property held by the church and the noblesse. The taille was levied on the property and not on the proprietor, and so some properties originally possessed by nobles were purchased by roturiers, who thus inherited the exemptions, and became privileged from taxation. When the noblesse

purchased lands of plebian origin they took them subject to taxation. In France the feudal system remained, the claims of lord and vassal still existed and survived in full force. In France the seigneur, while asserting the most onerous rights over the cultivator of the soil, did nothing in return. His demands assumed the form of unwarranted, hateful exactions; they resembled the worst sort of tithes-those levied by a clergy of a different creed. They assumed a worse form, for they were no longer levied on his own tenants or vassals, but on the owners of land. The French peasant had been long a proprietor of land; he had bought his estate or inherited from his forefathers; and he held it in fee simple; and yet he was daily called upon to satisfy rates and demands made by those no longer his master; who did nothing for him, and whose exemption from taxation made his own taxation the heavier; and thus he regarded him as a privileged extortioner. The corvée still existed, and he was obliged to leave his own land to labor for many days on the farm of the noble without recompense. He payed tolls on the seigneur's roads, and others to keep them in repair. The seigneur likewise levied dues on all fairs and markets. He alone might hunt and shoot, and keep pigeons, which fed on the peasant's corn. The peasant was compelled to send his wheat to be ground at the lord's mill, and his grapes to be pressed at the lord's pressoir. He could not buy nor sell an acre of land without paying a fine to this invisible but omnipresent lord. These things were but a part of the oppressions of one party and the exactions of the other. Had the cultivator been a tenant he scarcely would have felt them; they would have been a part of his rent; and had the lord been his master they would have been a sort of homage cheerfully paid for a certain protection, and thus the lord was in every sense to him an extortioner.

In the words of M. de Tocqueville's "France before the Revolution," "they sell him the right to sell his own produce, and he cannot touch it till he has ground it at the mill and, baked it at the bakehouse of these same men. Whatever he does, these troublesome neighbors are everywhere on his path

to disturb his happiness, to interfere with his labor, to consume his profits; and when these are dismissed, others in the black garb present themselves to carry off the clearest profits of his harvest. Picture to yourself the condition, the wants, the character, the passions of this man, and compute, if you are able, the stores of hatred and of envy which are accumulated in his heart" (p. 54).

This French peasant found relief from these grievances in the utter demolition of feudalism. The French Revolution did accomplish something for him; and it also removed personal grievances equally destructive to liberty and to the happiness of France. Indeed, we have no wish to say more about the rights of the laborer and the remedies to be applied to his relief. Amelioration came at great expense to France, but it was caused by centuries of cruelties and oppressions. Reform had been long in vogue before the Revolution, and Louis XVI. was one of the best of kings. It was his misfortune to suffer and perish for the crimes of his ancestors, of the noblesse, the church, and his own vaccilations. But he was not the only man in France that deserved our sympathy for the wrongs they endured, and who were sufficiently elevated to command the noble indignation of Edmund Burke.

But the errors of Burke in the French Revolution were the errors of the age, when the oppressions of the people were in a degree unknown and unfelt outside of France. The exactions of the rich upon the poor had not been exposed until the Revolution broke out in 1789, and made bare the odious demarcations existing in French society. Burke's "Reflections" produced an immense reaction in England against the Revolution, and finally influenced in a large measure the war of monarchs to restore the Bourbons in France. So much were they misled that they conceived that France had no rights of a nation to self-government, and Edmund Burke was the great writer of retrogression. He certainly spent his last days sincerely, as he thought, for the interest of England and other states, in exposing the delusions of the French nation in the establishment of a free government. If we look at the immediate results of that Revolution, we might conclude that

Burke was quite right in his war against it, but if we judge that event by the lapse of three-fourths of a century, we must pronounce that revolution beneficent to the world. It has taught that if governments would avert civil convulsions in states there must be justice among men; it has taught that a people, though long-suffering, have rights that kings must respect; it has taught that a people will rise after long oppression; it has taught that a blind aristocracy must perish where they will not yield to reform; it has taught that justice long deferred will sooner or later overtake every people; it has taught the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity to all men; and these principles are permeating every civilized state, and teaching in every civil convulsion the indisputable rights of man to govern himself. Failures may come as they have come, but this tendency to renovate and reform is a law of the nineteenth century. We now gather in of that harvest sown a century ago in the revolutions of France and America; and the men of that time drew their principles from former times and other examples, and so events in this age all tend to obliterate the past and found governments on the rights of men. Certainly, then, Burke was the last great writer that gave his genius to retard reform. The age and the century that closed upon his great works have been too strong for even him, and he, thus overborne, but lives to instruct and give us lessons of human prudence.

Burke had given a lifetime to resist the oppressions of the British government in America and India. So far he had proved himself one of the most disinterested statesmen and philanthropists of the world, for he gave half his life to a people he had never seen, and from whom he had nothing to expect but the common gratitude of men. Thus high and pure was the character of Edmund Burke, when the French Revolution left him on disputable ground, where his fame as a patriot has long been questioned.

If the works of a man can attest his faith, his integrity, there can be no question that he was never more in earnest in all his distinguished career, and, however much we may dispute some of the fundamental principles of that masterly work, yet we

regard it as the most extraordinary production of that age, and we read it for its great truths and copious eloquence. We have read it almost as often as we study the poets, and shall always recall it to memory by a fresh reading in connection with the other works of Edmund Burke.

Perhaps Burke, with all his powers of generalization and disquisition, was the greatest practical statesman of his time. He regarded statesmanship as called upon to meet events, and not to spin fine abstractions on government. This was fully displayed in his speeches on the American war, for he refused as a statesman to even debate the right of Great Britain to tax the colonies, and held that it was inexpedient, and, therefore, unjust. He kept in view the rights of the mother country, and never acceded to the proposition that parliament was not supreme over the colonies; but he contended that new powers should not be asserted and exercised. His speeches on American taxation and conciliation are enduring monuments to the greatness of Edmund Burke, and America will forever cherish his fame as dear to her as that which clings around the patriots of her own Revolution. We fully see that the policy of Chatham, Burke and Fox could have saved the British empire in America, and would, for the time, have delayed dismemberment. We cannot agree with Mr. Webster's remark, in the address before the historical society of New York, that England is stronger and richer at this moment than if she had listened to the unheeded words of her great statesmen; and, he adds, that neither nations nor individuals always foresee that which their own interest and happiness require. Suffice it that England and her colonies would have maintained her supremacy so long as she could have kept them in her grasp, for immigration and commerce would have strengthened England at home, and had not France or Eugland lost their American colonies, it might have even averted or at least delayed the revolution in France. France first gave symptoms of discontent in consequence of the revenues of the government falling some few thousands of francs short of her annual expenditures. This deficit was produced by the war debts of the last few years about Prussia and

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