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XIX. EDMUND BURKE.

EDMUND BURKE was born in Dublin in 1730, and, after an education at Trinity College, came to London and entered himself as a student of law in the Temple. His inclinations however led him to a literary life, and in 1757 he published his "Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful," which was well received, and brought its author into intimacy with some of the most distinguished men of the day. For some time he continued to subsist on the labour of his pen, but at length he found in Lord Rockingham a munificent patron, who introduced him to politics and parliamentary life. Here Burke's abilities found full scope; his high principle, his extensive knowledge, his rich imagination, and his copious eloquence, at once secured for him the highest place as a parliamentary orator. His speeches on the American war, and on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, are not surpassed in eloquence by those of any orator ancient or modern. He employed his pen with equal vigour in defence of his political party; but it was not till the breaking out of the French Revolution that his full power was put forth. Horrified at the atrocities which accompanied the first outbreak, and apprehensive, not altogether. without reason, of attempts to imitate them in this country, he published his famous "Reflections on the French Revolution," in which he denounced in a torrent of indignant eloquence the proceedings of the National Assembly. This work, and succeeding ones in a similar strain, led to a rupture between him and his old friend Fox, but Burke was at all times ready to sacrifice friendship to principle. He died at Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire in 1797. No one now disputes Burke's title to be regarded the first of British orators; his works, daily rising in popularity, are likely long to remain the textbooks from which succeeding generations of statesmen will learn the science of political wisdom.

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1. ENGLISH REVERENCE FOR ANTIQUITY.— REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.")

From Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance delivered to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.

This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection, or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is gene

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rally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity who never look back to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain for ever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down to us and from us in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole at one time is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence, almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree, and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns-armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. We

procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men, on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended. All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.

2. CHARACTER OF ROUSSEAU." LETTER TO A MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY.")

We have had Rousseau, the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity, in England. As I had good opportunity of knowing his proceedings almost from day to day, he left no doubt on my mind that he entertained no principle either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding but vanity. With this vice he was possessed to a degree little short of madness. It is from the same deranged eccentric vanity that this, the insane Socrates of the National Assembly, was impelled to publish a mad confession of his mad faults, and to attempt a new sort of glory, from bringing to light the obscure and vulgar vices which we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents. He has not observed on the nature of vanity who does not know that it is omnivorous; that it has no choice of its food; that it is fond to talk even of its own faults and vices, as what will excite surprise and draw attention, and what will pass at worst for openness and candour.

It was this abuse and perversion, which vanity makes even of hypocrisy, which has driven Rousseau to record a life, not so much as chequered, or spotted here and there with virtues, or even distinguished by a single good action. It is such a life he chooses to offer to the attention of mankind. It is such a life that, with a wild defiance, he flings in the face of his Creator, whom he acknowledges only to brave. The French Assembly, knowing how much more powerful example is found than precept, has chosen this man (by his own account without a single virtue) for a model. To him they erect their first statue. From him they commence their series of honours and distinctions.

It is that new invented virtue which your masters canonize that led their moral hero constantly to exhaust the stores of his powerful rhetoric in the expression of universal benevolence, whilst his heart was incapable of harbouring one spark of common parental affection. Benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every individual with whom the professors come in contact, form the character of the new philosophy. Setting up for an unsocial independence, this, their hero of vanity, refuses the just price of common labour, as well as the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and which, when paid, honours the giver and the receiver; and then he pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He

IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS.

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melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation; and then, without one natural pang, sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers. Vanity, however, finds its account in reversing the train of our natural feelings. Thousands admire the sentimental writer; the affectionate father is hardly known in his parish.

3. IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS.

My lords, you have now heard the principles on which Mr Hastings governs the part of Asia subjected to the British empire. You have heard his opinion of the mean and depraved state of those who are subject to it. You have heard his lecture upon arbitrary power, which he states to be the constitution of Asia. You hear the application he makes of it; and you hear the practices which he employs to justify it, and who the persons were on whose authority he relies, and whose example he professes to follow. In the first place, your lordships will be astonished at the audacity with which he speaks of his own administration, as if he was reading a speculative lecture on the evils attendant upon some vicious system of foreign government, in which he had no sort of concern whatsoever. And then, when in this speculative way he has established, or thinks he has, the vices of the government, he conceives he has found a sufficient apology for his own crimes. And if he violates the most solemn engagements, if he oppresses, extorts, and robs, if he imprisons, confiscates, banishes, at his sole will and pleasure, when we accuse him for his ill treatment of the people committed to him as a sacred trust, his defence is,-" to be robbed, violated, oppressed, is their privilege-let the constitution of their country answer for it. I did not make it for them. Slaves I found them, and as slaves I have treated them. I was a despotic prince, despotic governments are jealous, and the subjects prone to rebellion. This very proneness of the subject to shake off his allegiance exposes him to continual danger from his sovereign's jealousy, and this is consequent on the political state of Hindostanic governments." He lays it down as a rule, that despotism is the genuine constitution of India; that a disposition to rebellion in the subject, or dependent prince, is the necessary effect of this despotism, and that jealousy and its consequences naturally arise on the part of the sovereign; that the government is everything, and the subject nothing; that the great landed men are in a mean and depraved state, and subject to many evils.

But nothing is more false than that despotism is the constitution of any country in Asia, that we are acquainted with. It is certainly not true of any Mahomedan constitution. But if it were, do your lordships really think, that the nation would bear, that any human creature would bear, to hear an English governor defend himself on such principles? or, if he can defend himself on such principles, is

it possible to deny the conclusion, that no man in India has a security for anything but by being totally independent of the British government? Here he has declared his opinion, that he is a despotic prince, that he is to use arbitrary power, and of course all his acts are covered with that shield. "I know," says he, "the constitution of Asia only from its practice." Will your lordships submit to hear the corrupt practices of mankind made the principles of government? No; it will be your pride and glory to teach men intrusted with power, that, in their use of it, they are to conform to principles, and not to draw their principles from the corrupt practice of any man whatever. Was there ever heard, or could it be conceived, that a governor would dare to heap up all the evil practices, all the cruelties, oppressions, extortions, corruptions, briberies, of all the ferocious usurpers, desperate robbers, thieves, cheats, and jugglers, that ever had office from one end of Asia to another, and consolidating all this mass of the crimes and absurdities of barbarous domination into one code, establish it as the "whole duty" of an English governor? I believe that till this time so audacious a thing was never attempted by man.

He have arbitrary power! My lords, the East Indian Company have not arbitrary power to give him; the king has no arbitrary power to give him; your lordships have not; nor the Commons; nor the whole legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give; because arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give. No man can lawfully govern himself according to his own will, much less can one person be governed by the will of another. We are all born in subjection, all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, pre-existent law, prior to all our devices, and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to all our ideas and all our sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir.

4. ON CONCILIATION WITH THE AMERICAN COLONIES.

My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are the ties which, though light as air, are strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government, they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another; that these two things may exist without any mutual relation, the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the

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