Speech on conciliation with America

Introduction

The easiest way to remember the facts about the life of Burke is to arrange them under four heads corresponding to four periods of his life. Consider the first, of nineteen years, to bring him to his graduation from Dublin University in 1748 ; the second, to his election to ParHament in 1765 ; the third, to the height of his active public service, in 1782 ; tht fourth, to his death, in 1797.

Burke's Early Life.

Burke was brought up in the Protestant faith of his father, who was an attorney of good repute in Dublin, albeit a man of irritable disposition. Burke's mother, a Roman Catholic, was a large-minded, well-connected woman, with a strong hold upon the affection and reverence of her son. We shall see that the son inherited both the impatient temper of his father, and the liberal mind of his mother. Before entering college, his mind and temper were trained with great skill by a Quaker schoolmaster, Abraham Shackleton, towards whom Burke ever felt the sincerest respect and gratitude. In college his course, while desultory and whimsical, formed a valuable brooding period for both intellect and moral purpose. He himself describes it as a series of passionate sallies into various heights of learning, saying vi INTRODUCTION.

that he passed from \\\^ furor mathematicus, through the furor logicus and the furor historicus, to the furor poeticus. Like young Francis Bacon, he took all knowledge to be his province. f How Burke Came to be in Parliament.

When Burke was twenty he went to London, to the Middle Temple, to study law. Biit Ws interest was not continuous, his ambitions were literary and social, his allowance was withdrawn, and a period of several years began which passed in obscure conflict with fortune. But 1756 saw the publication of two notable essays, and, what was of even greater import, his marriage to Miss Jane A Nugent, like Burke's mother, a Catholic and an ideal !u\ wife. The first of the essays was A Vindication of J Natural Society^ a brilliant piece of irony purporting to \ ) be a posthumous work of Lord Bolingbroke, so cleverly ^ imitated as to deceive skilled contemporary critics. The second pamphlet soon followed, in Burke's own name, entitled A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. This was a serious effort towards a psychological explanation of the origin of the standards of art, Lessing and Kant are said to have received valuable suggestions from it.

As a consequence of the reputation made by these and other published works, and by the intimacy with the great literary men of London which Burke now enjoyed, he was invited in 1759 ^^ furnish the brains for a periodical called the Annual Register, which Dodsley, the bookseller of Pall Mall, wished to publish, Burke was to receive ^100 per annum for an account of the great current events of the year. For thirty years he attended

2NTR OD UCTIOM. vii

faithfully to this chronicle-editing, often glad of the moderate income it assured him. For six years from this time, he also received an income of several hundred pounds from a Mr. Hamilton, secretary to Lord Halifax in Ireland, for services of a perfunctory kind. But over against his happy marriage and his good beginning as an author, was the inexorable fact that he was not his own master, and that therefore he must serve whom he must, not whom he would. The inust was to Burke's mind, very unsatisfactory. He wished to do some original literary work, and felt that his nature and ability called on him to do so ; but his patron, with a selfishness which now appears blind as well as obstinate, insisted on his undivided service; so Burke with passionate disgust and sense of injury, threw up his pension, and declared his independence in 1765.

He was thirty-six years old, when by virtue of that fortune which is said always to favor the brave, he was elected to Parliament from Wendover, a borough, in the pocket of Lord Verney who was an adherent of Lord Rockingham. The friendship of Lord Rockingham for the young '' Encyclopedia of political knowledge " does no less credit to the nobleman's generous insight, than it did service to Burke. The close of the year in which Hamilton lost a secretary, saw England gain a statesman.

Burke's First Seventeen Years in Parliament.

The ministerial changes from 1765 to 1782 were numerous and important. Grenville's administration which had begun in the year of the Peace of Paris, 1763, was marked by far-reaching error in colonial affairs, culminating in the passage of the Stamp Act, in 1765. Then viii INTRODUCTION.

came the Rockingham ministry, with Burke as its secret but powerful guiding spirit, which was dissolved as soon as it had shown a disposition systematically to undo the evil previously done, but not before the Stamp Tax had been removed in 1766, and Burke had made a deep impression as orator and publicist.

Chatham followed, with a cabinet which Burke described as a tesselated pavement without cement. Burke was offered a place in this cabinet, and was urged even by Lord Rockingham to accept it, but he preferred to stand by his party, and till the death of its leader in 1782, he never wavered in party or personal allegiance to the Rockingham Whigs. His first public service after his friends were out of office was the publication of Observations on the Present State of the Nation. His role was to bolster up the interest, the information, the oratory of his party leaders, and at every opportunity to speak or write so as to impress their principles upon the public.

Chatham failed to unite the Whigs, was taken ill, and resigned the government to the Duke of Grafton. In the three years of Grafton's administration, the king's obstinate desire to rule America with an arbitrary hand brought about the most unjust and oppressive legislation. But the timidity which accompanies the bullying temper, stirred by the threatening aspect of colonial commerce, repealed most of the obnoxious measures, leaving in 1769, as a monument of the supremacy which dared not be quite supreme, the Tax on Tea.

To Lord North, who was prime minister from 1770 to 1782, was left the legacy of discontent in the colonies, fixed tyranny in the spirit of the king, and as an instrument of legislation, the Tories coupled with a body of

INTRODUCTION. ix

corrupt and menial Whigs. The first five years of North's administration completed preparations for the American Revolution by a series of irritating penal laws. The good-natured minister, easily tuning his voice to the royal ear, demanded the recognition of the supremacy of Parliament and the consequent subservience of America. The whole object was to teach America a lesson, and as parts of that bitter instruction the provinces of Massachusetts and New York were especially subjected to discipline.

The opposition fought in vain. Neither Chatham in the House of Lords nor Burke in the House of Commons could persuade a venal and benumbed political conscience to conciliate America. After three years of fighting, when France and Spain had joined the colonies, and when the popular reaction in England revolted against further bloodshed amongst their American kinsmen. Lord North himself yielded every point in the contest and even the king was silenced. But it was too late ; the counsels of generosity and justice could avail nothing at such a day, and the colonies were alienated forever.

America was not the only object of legislative concern during these troubled years, but it may fairly be said to have been the most pressing, and the most full of consequence to the future of England. For it must be remembered that statesmen like Chatham and Burke were not alone in seeing that the subversion of English liberties in America meant the subversion of English liberties at home. On all accounts, therefore, it is natural that we should pass lightly over the activities of Burke in other directions, while especially emphasizing his work in behalf of constitutional freedom.

X Introduction.

Throughout the struggle of John Wilkes for his ju' ,xy won seat in the House of Commons, Burke fcaght strongly on the side of liberty of election. In 1770, in the midst of threatening anarchy, was published his Thoughts on the Present Discontents, a calm and powerful exposition of the nature of true government, and a conservative proposition for rendering Parliament more truly representative of the national will. In November, 1774, six months after his speech on American Taxation, Burke was honored with an unsought election to Parliament from Bristol, commercially the second city in the realm. His speeches at Bristol are of interest from the light they throw upon his theory of the duties of a popular representative — a trustee of his constituency.

The March of the following year saw Burke delivering his speech on Conciliation to a parliament of ears that heard not. Seventy members of that house sat for rotten boroughs which were the property of the king ; about a hundred and fifty more were controlled by boroughjobbing nobles like the Duke of Newcastle, and were at the disposal of the king ; a great number more were owners of estates whose highest political ambition was to lighten their burden of taxes by exacting a war-revenue from America. Several seats, at a time when it cost a decent man thousands of pounds to secure a seat for honorable service were occupied by the puppet-officers of the royal household. There was no doubt how the turnspit of the king's kitchen would stand on questions of sacrifice of personal advantage for the public good, none about the position of the groom of the stole or his treasurer, the steward of the household or his retinue, the board of green cloth, or the board of works. It is easy

INTkODUCTION. XI

to Sc. how such parliamentarians as these would regard appeals to magnanimity as in politics the truest wisdom, and how much they would listen to, and understand, of the profound, the historical, the logical, the literary, in the speech on Conciliation.

All this mass of political corruption Burke deliberately attacked in 1780, when there was nothing further for him or any one else to do towards redeeming the colonies, in his schemes of Economical Reform. No project of his was ever more successful than that for reducing the number of sinecure offices used as bribes, and the number of political pensions. He succeeded also in checking the outflow from the treasury through bad fiscal arrangements. The paymaster of the forces, for example, had managed with passive honesty to derive a salary of about thirty thousand pounds. Burke reduced it to a definite four thousand.

To sum up the period, this Burke, who cast the choicest of English oratory before seats which were either quite vacant, or occupied by loungers eating nuts and oranges, was in the House and out, the real leader of the Rockingham Whigs \ while Lord North, blind to justice and deaf to mercy, followed with the unprincipled majority, the course dictated by an ignorant populace and a selfish king. When Cornwallis surrendered, North resigned and King George again reluctantly invited the Marquis of Rockingham to form a cabinet (1782).

The Last Fifteen Years of Burke's Life.

Even in this second Rockingham cabinet Burke received no place. Why, we do not fully know ; but we do know as Burke himself said, that a hunt of obloquy xii tNTRODUCTloN.

had ever pursued him with a full cry through life, and that amongst other natural rewards withheld, was this honor of a place in the ministerial circle. However, he was installed in the pay office whose salary he had just reduced, and with a proud humility labored on in behalf of his party and his principles. After three months of office, Rockingham died, and Burke refused to serve under Shelburne, who soon gave place to the coalition between Fox and Lord North, under the nominal leadership of the Duke of Portland. But Burke, who had been reappointed to the pay office, favored Fox's unwise and unsuccessful India Billy and fell with the ministry (1783), while the younger Pitt became prime minister and remained so till his death in 1806.

There are some elements of tragedy in the final decade of Burke's life. In the great impeachment of Warren Hastings, which he conducted, and in which he rendered justice and England valuable service, he failed of his immediate object. After the lapse of a century we can see that failure as a mere disguise, obscuring the purification of British rule in India ; but to Burke, the fourteen years of close application to every phase of the case seemed thrown away when Hastings was acquitted.

But a far more tragic experience was the unmerited success, which he gained through his bigoted and passionate hostiUty to the French Revolution. It is true that no motive could be more unselfish, no devotion to the ideals of a lifetime more faithful. But his view of the situation in France was narrow and mistaken, and therefore his championship was unjust to many of those very interests which he had fostered with his deepest affection for years. Many of those liberal, true, and

INTRODUCTION. xiii

prophet-like principles regarding the sense of a whole people, the adequate motives of nations, the small value of untried force, and so on, were forgotten in his panic lest the prerogative of an ancient nobility should be impaired or the feelings of an intriguing queen bruised and neglected. More than all this, it is strange to find the steady and hard-headed English people, gradually veering to his side, and sharing his anxiety lest the order of things in England should be subverted as in France.

Still more tragic was the change that came over the spirit of Burke in his public utterances, in the closing years of his parliamentary career. From the height of reason we find him descending to the blindest prejudice \ instead of the nobility of an historical philosophy we see him employing personal abuse ; for a never-failing stream of hopeful eloquence coupled with inexorable logic, we find pessimistic threatenings of disaster and a voice breaking into screams of angry protestation.

Such passion and perverseness could not fail to react upon his relations with men ; so it is with sadness, but not surprise that we read of the breach of friendship with his party in 1791, and especially with Fox, with whom he quarreled publicly over a difference regarding France. His disagreement with the party which should have been his, brought out his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, a reaffirmation of the position he had taken in the Reflections on the French Revolution (1790). This position was supported also by a series of Letters on a Regicide Peace, which urged England to force Pitt, the peace-minister, into war with France, and filled all England with dread of impending anarchy.

But apart from these aberrations the real Burke apxiv INTRODUCTION.

peared, in the last years of his active life, in two masterpieces of cool and solid thinking ; one an economic tract marking out prophetic lines of free-trade, entitled Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, the other, the Letter to a Noble Lord, a defence against attacks upon his pension by two pampered noblemen, which Morley calls the most splendid repartee in the English language.

With the close of the trial of Hastings, Burke had retired from Parliament (1794). Shortly afterwards the king made known his intention of bestowing a peerage upon him. But at the critical moment his son Richard died, and the title was of course withheld. To the brokenhearted statesman, however, bowed under heavy debt as well as years and sorrow, was granted through Pitt's efforts a substantial pecuniary relief. Even this tardy and partial recognition of his public service was not long to be enjoyed. He died at the age of sixty-eight, at Beaconsfield, in 1797.

Burke as a Man.

Green gives a graphic description of Burke's personal appearance in the House of Commons. ''The heavy Quaker-like figure, the little wig, the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll of paper which loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a great orator. ' ' But this picture is quite unlike that drawn by several of Burke's friends, who saw him at an earlier period in life or under other circumstances. It is also quite unlike the impression one gets from certain of the portraits we have of Burke — that by Reynolds which ought to be the truest, or that by Romney which certainly harmonizes with what we should expect in Burke's face. Fortunately our basis for

INTRODUCTION. xv

judgment of his character is far more satisfactory than the contradictory evidence regarding his personal appearance. His charm in conversation is attested by the most briUiant women in France, as well as England, and in everything but wit he was the recognized peer of Johnson in the Literary Club. There it was that Burke was best known and loved. Johnson's admiration was not deeper than his friendship, and his feelings towards Burke were shared by Reynolds, Goldsmith, Garrick, Gibbon, Boswell, Windham and the rest. Goldsmith in his i?^/«//- ation, amongst the epitaphs on various members of the club, gives a playful description of Burke. Intelligently construed the lines give a remarkably complete idea of his character.

Here lies ouf 'g(bod Edmund, whose genius was such, We scarcely can praise it or blame it too much ; Who, born for the universe, ^£rovved his mind. And 1^ party gave up what was meant for mankind; ThoO^ii fraught with all learning, yet straining his throat To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote ; Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining, And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining; Though equal to all things, for all things unfit : Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit, For a patriot too cold, for a drudge disobedient, And too fond of the right to pursue the expedient. In short, 'twas his fate, unemployed, or in place, sir, To eat mutton cold, and cut blocks with a razor.

The fact is that Burke's whole life was an effort to apply the gifts of genius to the purposes of practical life. This serves the world, and honors the man; but the process is fraught with unspeakable suffering. The xvi INTRODUCTION.

noblest trait in Burke's character is his superiority to the rejection of his best efforts, by those whom he would have benefited. He went on with apparent complacency, to do the next good deed. Confident of his position in the right, and aiming too high to see petty obstacles in his own path, he was moved by a philanthropy which was as^ modest as it was sincere. Ambition never tempted him unless it appeared clothed in honor and animated by the good of mankind; and notwithstanding the rumors of low connections in business and religion which never ceased to affect his public station, no single irregularity has ever been proved against him, though the record of his life has been searched again and again by the lynxeye of personal and partisan hostility.

The one apparent exception to this statement deserves special comment. When Burke had been but a short time in Parliament, kmi^, as he was to have no considerable income and no fortune at all, he surprised his friends and piqued the jealoiasy Of 'his. enemies, by the purchase of an immense estate, valued at ^j^ 2 2,000. To maintain such a residence would have required. a^*<ed income of ^2^4, 000. Here, twenty-four miles from*"London, he established a stately family-seat, which he called Beaconsfield, after the parish in which it wa^ situated.

Such extravagance is hard to understand ^ven in a man of genius, and an Irishman at that. JBut fixity, deep-rootedness, was a passion with Burke, and his life was devoted so far as his family interests were concerned, to laying plans for a notable posterity in a fitting environment. To cherish such hopes was no small part of his religion, and it was with religious seriousness that he sought to realize them. Beaconsfield \vas a farm of three

INTRODUCTION. xvii

thousand acres. Burke became an enthusiastic student of agriculture. It was here that he took refuge from the turmoil and disappointments of political strife, and it was here that he received, with infinite hospitality, both the great men of the Literary Club, and any unfortunates whose situation he could improve. Here, also, it was, that two exiled Indian devotees, who could find no peace in unfeeling London, were permitted to make a temple of Burke's summer-house. And after his fruitless struggle on behalf of the old order in France, and after the desolating blow of his own son's death, Beaconsfield was thrown open as the home and school of sixty orphans of the French nobility.

If there be a higher morality than that which regulates business affairs, perhaps the light-hearted improvidence which ended in so much^harity, may be justified on ethical grounds. MeatiwHue let us say that as the wellearned pension under the management of Mrs. Burke eventually canceled every debt of money, and as the improvidence was more than compensated for by Burke's dis0ess of mind, the account may fairly be considered closed and the debtor free.

Burke in Public Life.

Burke's chief principles of government may be discovered in the Speech on Conciliation, though they come out more definitely upon research in a broader range of his utterances. A catalogue of his fundamental rules would read thus : Seek to preserve everything possible that time has consecrated ; adapt the operation of forces to suit present conditions ; be satisfied with less than the ideal ; be generous rather than exacting ; remember there xviii INTRODUCTION.

is a higher justice than that framed in the law ; and that all laws derive their efficacy from the spirit of obedience in the people.

The first of these principles is the one to which Burke was most emphatically committed. Birr ell calls him the '' High Priest of Order," and Perry, *'the great pleader for conservatism." He was conservative by nature and education. When innovations threatened, conservatism was the only thing worth living for. Reform, says he, is not change, but " a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of." In his Letter to a Noble Lordf he describes the way he went to work upon the problem of Economical Reform. ^'I heaved the lead every inch of way I made. ... I proceeded upon principles of research to put me in possession of my matter; on principles of method to regulate it; and on principles in the human mind%iSti in civil affairs to secure and perpetuate the operation."

He goes on to express the feeling which Morley has pointed out as an essential element in his philosophy, a mystical reverence for the supernatural power which alone he believed could have raised a "political edifice." ** I have ever abhorred, since the first dawn of my understanding to this its obscure twilight, all the operations of opinion, fancy, inclination and will, in the affairs of government, where only a sovereign reason, paramount to all forms of legislation and administration, should dictate. Government is made for the very purpose of opposing that reason to will and caprice, in the reformers or in the reformed, in the governors or in the governed, in kings, in senates, or in people."

The remaining principles cited in the catalogue, since

INTRODUCTION. xix

the Speech. on Conciliation fully illustrates them, need no special comment here. There is a wide difference however between merely seeing the rule by which Burke did his work, and appreciating the work itself. The art of the statesman is a thing quite beyond the principles of the publicist. In the effort to follow Burke in the practice of his profession, it is well to attempt two lines of thought : first a comprehension of the living realities which furnished his motives and dictated his mode of treatment ; second the power, and method, and beauty of the oratory in which he worked.

Burke's affections were always warm towards any person or people in distress, except the French mob. In their case special considerations blinded him to one-half the truth. But in regard to the common people of England, the struggling peasants of Ireland, the colonists of America, his position was uniformly sympathetic. He knew their condition and he believed in their privileges, therefore, always for the sake of order, he made their cause his own.

So truly did he do this in actual practice, that he deliberately sacrificed the seat in the House to which he had been elected by the great constituency of Bristol. The issue was between justice to the trade of Ireland, and to the religion of the Roman Catholics in England, on the one hand, and the wishes of the great commercial corporation on the other. Burke never hesitated. True to the view of the duty of a representative which he had avowed boldly on the day of his election at Bristol, he chose the course dictated by his reason and conscience, in defiance of their will. His championship of the American cause still further

XX INTRODUCTION.

estranged him from this valuable constituency. It is true he addressed the sheriffs of Bristol in an impassioned and closely reasoned letter in .1777 on behalf of the soundness of his views; and in 1780 he spoke to the electors of Bristol words on the subject of true freedom, that should have won their renewed allegiance. But their hearts were hardened, and Burke cheerfully gave place to a more docile representative.

Burke's experience as an orator was full of contradictions. The most obvious of these was that while the greatness of a speech was conceded, the due effect was scarcely ever gained. Some of his most powerful addresses were ignored. The Speech on Conciliation^ which is considered on the whole his greatest, utterly failed to secure its legislative object. The explanation of this contradiction is to be found largely in the prejudice of his audience.

But even to those who listened with sympathy to Burke's speeches there was no such degree of satisfaction as the reading of them afterwards afforded. This fact seems to indicate that as essays they are greater than as orations. And from the practical point of view there is much justice in this conclusion at first. But another item must be taken into account. Burke's delivery was exceedingly rapid. So much so that none but a great political philosopher like himself could have comprehended the intricacies of his discourse as he delivered it ; and we have no report from any such philosopher. The witnesses are upon the whole, but second-rate observers. They lay far more stress upon the inevitable faults of manner in Burke's delivery than upon the passionate sincerity with which his words w^ere uttered. It

INTRODUCTION. xxi

is his harsh voice, his brogue, his awkward gestures, his overearnest shaking of the head, and his facial contortions which to them stand for Burke's oratory. No doubt also they felt called upon to explain to themselves as they listened, why it was that Burke's oratory was unpopular, and so they hit upon every mannerism their shallow criticism could detect.

Another strange fact about Burke as an orator is that while discoursing with 'a breadth of mind and hberality of policy which few statesmen have equaled, he would exhibit a personal irritation entirely out of character with his sentiments. This peculiarity was largely constitutional, but was fostered by harrassing debt, by failure in projects into which he had thrown his grandest efforts, and by a sense of the inexorable personal and party prejudice against which he had to fight with unfit weapons, until it became at times a painful thing even to his friends to observe his frantic utterance, in the heat of extempore debate. Yet forgetting these petty failings we can see in Burke, a ready and skilful disputant, whose knowledge was infinitely accurate and varied, and who, in a parliament more worthy of his presence, would have towered like a god among heroes.

The real power of Burke's oratory is shown in its effect upon the generations who have followed him. One after another their great statesmen have led the way to victory for one or another of Burke's ideas. For threequarters of a century his works have been the text-book of British statesmen and economists. Our noblest Americans have formed their public characters upon his ideal. Almost every advance in political reform was prophesied in his principles of government, and so xxii INTRODUCTION.

rapidly has his philosophy become a common possession that we find it hard to realize the newness of many positions when he took them in the eighteenth century.

Notwithstanding all this, it is doubtful whether the oratory of Burke, if he could now share in the deliberations of our American Congress, would command its full measure of respect. It is characteristic of the mind of man to accept only a little of what he hears, especially if that which is offered be out of harmony with his own lines of thought and interest. No appeal, however eloquent, however sane, however persistent, will take away the settled prejudices of the mass of mankind, till some other influence has first broken through the shell of indifl"erence. This fact does not argue against the employment of every persuasive art, or detract from the dignity of argumentative oratory. But it does help to explain why Burke, who perhaps surpassed every othtjr man in the list of English orators, apparently worked in vain.

The Speech on Conciliation.