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Part I
Part I
Introductory Note
When Burke retired from Parliament at the close of his labors in the
trial of Warren Hastings, it was proposed to raise him to the peerage as Lord
Beaconsfield; but before the matter came to a point, Burke`s son Richard, in
whom all his hopes and affections were centered, died and left his father
desolate. A hereditary honor was no longer in question, and it was arranged,
since Burke was now, as always, in financial difficulties, that he should get
1,200 pounds a year from the Civil List so long as his wife lived, and that
the King should propose to Parliament a more liberal recognition of his
services. But Pitt, probably in order to avoid unseemly opposition from
Burke`s enemies, arranged a grant of 2,500 pounds a year directly from the
Crown, so that Burke, though glad to get the money, was disappointed in its
not being a more broadly national reward.
Pitt`s caution seems to have been justified, for in the next year, when
party feeling was running high, the Duke of Bedford and Lord Lauderdale seized
upon the granting of the pension as a weapon with which to attack the
administration. Burke at once saw, in the fact that the assault came from the
head of the house of Bedford, an opportunity for the most telling repartee,
and this opportunity he availed himself of with tremendous effect. As
politics, it gives us Burke`s own view of his record as an administrator; as
literature, the piece is probably unsurpassed in the language for lofty and
scornful invective.
On The Attacks Made Upon Him And His Pension, In The House Of Lords, By The
Duke Of Bedford And The Earl Of Lauderdale, Early In The Present Session Of
Parliament
A Letter from The Right Hon. Edmund Burke To A Noble Lord
My Lord,
I could hardly flatter myself with the hope, that so very early in the
season I should have to acknowledge obligations to the Duke of Bedford, and
to the Earl of Lauderdale. These noble persons have lost no time in conferring
upon me that sort of honour, which it is alone within their competence, and
which it is certainly most congenial to their nature, and to their manners, to
bestow.
To be ill spoken of, in whatever language they speak, by the zealots of
the new sect in philosophy and politics, of which these noble persons think so
charitably, and of which others think so justly, to me, is no matter of
uneasiness or surprise. To have incurred the displeasure of the Duke of
Orleans or the Duke of Bedford, to fall under the censure of citizen Brissot
or of his friend the Earl of Lauderdale, I ought to consider as proofs, not
the least satisfactory, that I have produced some part to the effect I
proposed by my endeavours. I have laboured hard to earn, what the noble lords
are generous enough to pay. Personal offence I have given them none. The part
they take against me is from zeal to the cause. It is well! It is perfectly
well! I have to do homage to their justice. I have to thank the Bedfords and
the Lauderdales for having so faithfully and so fully acquitted towards me
whatever arrear of debt was left undischarged by the Priestleys and the
Paines.
Some, perhaps, may think them executors in their own wrong: I at least
have nothing to complain of. They have gone beyond the demands of justice.
They have been (a little perhaps beyond their intention) favourable to me.
They have been the means of bringing out, by their invectives, the handsome
things which Lord Grenville has had the goodness and condescension to say in
my behalf. Retired as I am from the world, and from all its affairs and all
its pleasures, I confess it does kindle, in my nearly extinguished feelings,
a very vivid satisfaction to be so attacked and so commended. It is soothing
to my wounded mind, to be commended by an able, vigorous, and well-informed
statesman, and at the very moment when he stands forth with a manliness and
resolution, worthy of himself and of his cause, for the preservation of the
person and government of our sovereign, and therein for the security of the
laws, the liberties, the morals, and the lives of his people. To be in any
fair way connected with such things, is indeed a distinction. No philosophy
can make me above it; no melancholy can depress me so low, as to make me
wholly insensible to such an honour.
Why will they not let me remain in obscurity and inaction? Are they
apprehensive, that if an atom of me remains, the sect has something to fear?
Must I be annihilated, lest, like old John Zisca`s, my skin might be made into
a drum, to animate Europe to eternal battle, against a tyranny that threatens
to overwhelm all Europe, and all the human race?
My Lord, it is a subject of awful meditation. Before this of France, the
annals of all time have not furnished an instance of a complete revolution.
That Revolution seems to have extended even to the constitution of the mind of
man. It has this of wonderful in it, that it resembles what Lord Verulam says
of the operations of nature. It was perfect, not only in its elements and
principles, but in all its members and its organs from the very beginning. The
moral scheme of France furnishes the only pattern ever known, which they who
admire will instantly resemble. It is indeed an inexhaustible repertory of one
kind of examples. In my wretched condition, though hardly to be classed with
the living, I am not safe from them. They have tigers to fall upon animated
strength. They have hyenas to prey upon carcasses. The national menagerie is
collected by the first physiologists of the time; and it is defective in no
description of savage nature. They pursue even such as me, into the obscurest
retreats, and haul them before their revolutionary tribunals. Neither sex, nor
age, nor the sanctuary of the tomb, is sacred to them. They have so determined
a hatred to all privileged orders, that they deny even to the departed the sad
immunities of the grave. They are not wholly without an object. Their
turpitude purveys to their malice; and they unplumb the dead for bullets to
assassinate the living. If all revolutions were not proof against all caution,
I should recommend it to their consideration, that no persons were ever known
in history, either sacred or profane, to vex the sepulchre, and, by their
sorceries, to call up the prophetic dead, with any other event, than the
prediction of their own disastrous fate. - "Leave me, oh leave me to repose!"
In one thing I can excuse the Duke of Bedford for his attack upon me and
my mortuary pension. He cannot readily comprehend the transaction he condemns.
What I have obtained was the fruit of no bargain; the production of no
intrigue; the result of no compromise; the effect of no solicitation. The
first suggestion of it never came from me, mediately or immediately, to his
Majesty or any of his ministers. It was long known that the instant my
engagements would permit it, and before the heaviest of all calamities had
for ever condemned me to obscurity and sorrow, I had resolved on a total
retreat. I had executed that design. I was entirely out of the way of serving
or of hurting any statesman, or any party, when the ministers so generously
and so nobly carried into effect the spontaneous bounty of the crown. Both
descriptions have acted as became them. When I could no longer serve them, the
ministers have considered my situation. When I could no longer hurt them, the
revolutionists have trampled on my infirmity. My gratitude, I trust, is equal
to the manner in which the benefit was conferred. It came to me indeed, at a
time of life, and in a state of mind and body, in which no circumstance of
fortune could afford me any real pleasure. But this was no fault in the royal
donor, or in his ministers, who were pleased, in acknowledging the merits of
an invalid servant of the public, to assuage the sorrows of a desolate old
man.
It would ill become me to boast of anything. It would as ill become me,
thus called upon, to depreciate the value of a long life, spent with
unexampled toil in the service of my country. Since the total body of my
services, on account of the industry which was shown in them, and the fairness
of my intentions, have obtained the acceptance of my sovereign, it would be
absurd in me to range myself on the side of the Duke of Bedford and the
corresponding society, or, as far as in me lies, to permit a dispute on the
rate at which the authority appointed by our constitution to estimate such
things has been pleased to set them.
Loose libels ought to be passed by in silence and contempt. By me they
have been so always. I knew that as long as I remained in public, I should
live down the calumnies of malice, and the judgments of ignorance. If I
happened to be now and then in the wrong, (as who is not?) like all other men,
I must bear the consequence of my faults and my mistakes. The libels of the
present day are just of the same stuff as the libels of the past. But they
derive an importance from the rank of the persons they come from, and the
gravity of the place where they were uttered. In some way or other I ought to
take some notice of them. To assert myself thus traduced is not vanity or
arrogance. It is a demand of justice; it is a demonstration of gratitude. If I
am unworthy, the ministers are worsen than prodigal. On that hypothesis, I
perfectly agree with the Duke of Bedford.
For whatever I have been (I am now no more) I put myself on my country. I
ought to be allowed a reasonable freedom, because I stand upon my deliverance;
and no culprit ought to plead in irons. Even in the utmost latitude of
defensive liberty, I wish to preserve all possible decorum. Whatever it may be
in the eyes of these noble persons themselves, to me their situation calls for
the most profound respect. If I should happen to trespass a little, which I
trust I shall not, let it always be supposed, that a confusion of characters
may produce mistakes; that, in the masquerades of the grand carnival of our
age, whimsical adventures happen; odd things are said and pass off. If I
should fail a single point in the high respect I owe to those illustrious
persons, I cannot be supposed to mean the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of
Lauderdale of the House of Peers, but the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of
Lauderdale of Palace-Yard! - The Dukes and Earls of Brentford. There they
are on the pavement; there they seem to come nearer to my humble level; and,
virtually at least, to have waived their high privilege.
Making this protestation, I refuse all revolutionary tribunals, where
men have been put to death for no other reason, than that they had obtained
favours from the Crown. I claim, not the letter, but the spirit, of the old
English law, that is, to be tried by my peers. I decline his Grace`s
jurisdiction as a judge. I challenge the Duke of Bedford as a juror to pass
upon the value of my services. Whatever his natural parts may be, I cannot
recognize, in his few and idle years, the competence to judge of my long and
laborious life. If I can help it, he shall not be on the inquest of my
quantum meruit. Poor rich man! He can hardly know anything of public industry
in its exertions, or can estimate its compensations when its work is done. I
have no doubt of his Grace`s readiness in all the calculations of vulgar
arithmetic; but I shrewdly suspect, that he is little studied in the theory
of moral proportions; and has never learned the rule of three in the
arithmetic of policy and state.
His Grace thinks I have obtained too much. I answer, that my exertions,
whatever they have been, were such as no hopes of pecuniary reward could
possibly excite; and no pecuniary compensation can possibly reward them.
Between money and such services, if done by abler men than I am, there is no
common principle of comparison; they are quantities incommensurable. Money is
made for the comfort and convenience of animal life. It cannot be a reward for
what mere animal life must indeed sustain, but never can inspire. With
submission to his Grace, I have not had more than sufficient. As to any noble
use, I trust I know how to employ, as well as he, a much greater fortune than
he possesses. In a more confined application, I certainly stand in need of
every kind of relief and easement much more than he does. When I say I have
not received more than I deserve, is this the language I hold to Majesty? No!
Far, very far, from it! Before that presence, I claim no merit at all.
Everything towards me is favour, and bounty. One style to a gracious
benefactor; another to a proud and insulting foe.
His Grace is pleased to aggravate my guilt, by charging my acceptance of
his Majesty`s grant as a departure from my ideas, and the spirit of my conduct
with regard to economy. If it be, my ideas of economy were false and
ill-founded. But they are the Duke of Bedford`s ideas of economy I have
contradicted, and not my own. If he means to allude to certain bills brought
in by me on a message from the throne in 1782, I tell him that there is
nothing in my conduct that can contradict either the letter or the spirit of
those acts. Does he mean the pay-office act? I take it for granted he does
not. The act to which he alludes, is, I suppose, the establishment act. I
greatly doubt whether his Grace has ever read the one or the other. The first
of these systems cost me, with every assistance which my then situation gave
me, pains incredible. I found an opinion common through all the offices, and
general in the public at large, that it would prove impossible to reform and
methodize the office of paymaster-general. I undertook it, however; and I
succeeded in my undertaking. Whether the military service, or whether the
general economy of our finances, have profited by the act, I leave to those
who are acquainted with the army, and with the treasury, to judge.
An opinion full as general prevailed also at the same time, that nothing
could be done for the regulation of the civil-list establishment. The very
attempt to introduce method into it, and any limitations to its services, was
held absurd. I had not seen the man, who so much as suggested one economical
principle, or an economical expedient, upon that subject. Nothing but coarse
amputation, or coarser taxation, were then talked of, both of them without
design, combination, or the least shadow of principle. Blind and headlong
zeal, or factious fury, were the whole contribution brought by the most noisy
on that occasion, towards the satisfaction of the public, or the relief of the
Crown.
Let me tell my youthful censor, that the necessities of that time
required something very different from what others then suggested, or what his
Grace now conceives. Let me inform him, that it was one of the most critical
periods in our annals.
Astronomers have supposed, that if a certain comet, whose path
intercepted the ecliptic, had met the earth in some (I forget what) sign, it
would have whirled us along with it, in its eccentric course, into God knows
what regions of heat and cold. Had the portentous comet of the rights of man,
(which "from its horrid hair shakes pestilence and war," and "with fear of
change perplexes monarchs,") had that comet crossed upon us in that internal
state of England, nothing human could have prevented our being irresistibly
hurried, out of the highway of heaven, into all the vices, crimes, horrors,
and miseries of the French Revolution.
Happily, France was not then Jacobinised. Her hostility was at a good
distance. We had a limb cut off; but we preserved the body. We lost our
colonies; but we kept our constitution. There was, indeed, much intestine
heat; there was a dreadful fermentation. Wild and savage insurrection quitted
the woods, and prowled about our streets in the name of reform. Such was the
distemper of the public mind, that there was no madman, in his maddest ideas,
and maddest projects, who might not count upon numbers to support his
principles and execute his designs.
Many of the changes, by a great misnomer called parliamentary reforms,
went, not in the intention of all the professors and supporters of them,
undoubtedly, but went in their certain, and, in my opinion, not very remote
effect, home to the utter destruction of the constitution of this kingdom.
Had they taken place, not France, but England, would have had the honour of
leading up the death-dance of democratic revolution. Other projects, exactly
coincident in time with those, struck at the very existence of the kingdom
under any constitution. There are those who remember the blind fury of some,
and the lamentable helplessness of others; here, a torpid confusion, from a
panic fear of the danger; there, the same inaction from a stupid insensibility
to it; here, well-wishers to the mischief; there, indifferent lookers-on. At
the same time, a sort of national convention, dubious in its nature, and
perilous in its example, nosed parliament in the very seat of its authority;
sat with a sort of superintendence over it; and little less than dictated to
it, not only laws, but the very form and essence of legislature itself. In
Ireland things ran in a still more eccentric course. Government was unnerved,
confounded, and in a manner suspended. Its equipoise was totally gone. I do
not mean to speak disrespectfully of Lord North. He was a man of admirable
parts; of general knowledge; of a versatile understanding fitted for every
sort of business; of infinite wit and pleasantry; of a delightful temper; and
with a mind most perfectly disinterested. But it would be only to degrade
myself by a weak adulation, and not to honour the memory of a great man, to
deny that he wanted something of the vigilance and spirit of command, that the
time required. Indeed, a darkness, next to the fog of this awful day, loured
over the whole region. For a little time the helm appeared abandoned -
Ipse diem noctemque negat discernere coelo,
Nec meminissie viae media Palinurus in unda.
At that time I was connected with men of high place in the community.
They loved liberty as much as the Duke of Bedford can do; and they understood
it at least as well. Perhaps their politics, as usual, took a tincture from
their character, and they cultivated what they loved. The liberty they pursued
was a liberty inseparable from order, from virtue, from morals, and from
religion; and was neither hypocritically nor fanatically followed. They did
not wish, that liberty, in itself one of the first of blessings, should in its
perversion become the greatest curse which could fall upon mankind. To
preserve the constitution entire, and practically equal to all the great ends
of its formation, not in one single part, but in all its parts, was to them
the first object. Popularity and power they regarded alike. These were with
them only different means of obtaining that object; and had no preference over
each other in their minds, but as one or the other might afford a surere or a
less certain prospect of arriving at that end. It is some consolation to me in
the cheerless gloom, which darkens the evening of my life, that with them I
commenced my political career, and never for a moment, in reality, nor in
appearance, for any length of time, was separated from their good wishes and
good opinion.
By what accident it matters not, nor upon what desert, but just then, and
in the midst of that hunt of obloquy, which ever has pursued me with a full
cry through life, I had obtained a very considerable degree of public
confidence. I know well enough how equivocal a test this kind of popular
opinion forms of the merit that obtained it. I am no stranger to the
insecurity of its tenure. I do not boast of it. It is mentioned to show, not
how highly I prize the thing, but my right to value the use I made of it. I
endeavoured to turn that short-lived advantage to my self into a permanent
benefit to my country. Far am I from detracting from the merit of some
gentlemen, out of office or in it, on that occasion. No! - It is not my way to
refuse a full and heaped measure of justice to the aids that I receive. I
have, through life, been willing to give everything to others; and to reserve
nothing for myself, but the inward conscience, that I had omitted no pains to
discover, to animate, to discipline, to direct the abilities of the country
for its service, and to place them in the best light to improve their age, or
to adorn it. This conscience I have. I have never suppressed any man; never
checked him for a moment in his course, by any jealousy or by any policy. I
was always ready, to the height of my means, (and they were always infinitely
below my desires,) to forward those abilities which overpowered my own. He is
an ill-furnished undertaker, who has no machinery but his own hands to work
with. Poor in my own faculties, I ever thought myself rich in theirs. In that
period of difficulty and danger, more especially, I consulted, and sincerely
co-operated with, men of all parties, who seemed disposed to the same ends, or
to any main part of them. Nothing to prevent disorder was omitted: when it
appeared, nothing to subdue it was left uncounselled, nor unexecuted, as far
as I could prevail. At the time I speak of, and having a momentary lead, so
aided and so encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand - I do
not say I saved my country; I am sure I did my country important service.
There were few, indeed, that did not at that time acknowledge it, and that
time was thirteen years ago. It was but one voice, that no man in the kingdom
better deserved an honourable provision should be made for him.
So much for my general conduct through the whole of the portentous crisis
from 1780 to 1782, and the general sense then entertained of that conduct by
my country. But my character, as a reformer, in the particular instances which
the Duke of Bedford refers to, is so connected in principle with my opinions
on the hideous changes, which have since barbarized France, and, spreading
thence, threaten the political and moral order of the whole world, that it
seems to demand something of a more detailed discussion.
My economical reforms were not, as his Grace may think, the suppression
of a paltry pension or employment, more or less. Economy in my plans was, as
it ought to be, secondary, subordinate, instrumental. I acted on state
principles. I found a great distemper in the commonwealth; and, according to
the nature of the evil and of the object, I treated it. The malady was deep;
it was complicated, in the causes and in the symptoms. Throughout it was full
of contraindicants. On one hand government, daily growing more invidious from
an apparent increase of the means of strength, was every day growing more
contemptible by real weakness. Nor was this dissolution confined to government
commonly so called. It extended to parliament; which was losing not a little
in its dignity and estimation, by an opinion of its not acting on worthy
motives. On the other hand, the desires of the people (partly natural and
partly infused into them by art) appeared in so wild and inconsiderate a
manner, with regard to the economical object, (for I set aside for a moment
the dreadful tampering with the body of the constitution itself,) that, if
their petitions had literally been complied with, the state would have been
convulsed; and a gate would have been opened, through which all property might
be sacked and ravaged. Nothing could have saved the public from the mischiefs
of the false reform but its absurdity; which would soon have brought itself,
and with it all real reform, into discredit. This would have left a rankling
wound in the hearts of the people, who would know they had failed in the
accomplishment of their wishes, but who, like the rest of mankind in all
ages, would impute the blame to anything rather than to their own proceedings.
But there were then persons in the world, who nourished complaint; and would
have been thoroughly disappointed if the people were ever satisfied. I was not
of that humour. I wished that they should be satisfied. It was my aim to give
to the people the substance of what I knew they desired, and what I thought
was right, whether they desired it or not, before it had been modified for
them into senseless petitions. I knew that there is a manifest, marked
distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any
design, will constantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction between
change and reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects
themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the
accidental evil, annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to
operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not
contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be
certainly known beforehand. Reform is, not a change in the substance, or in
the primary modification, of the object, but, a direct application of a
remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure.
It stops there; and, if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation,
at the very worst, is but where it was.
All this, in effect, I think, but am not sure, I have said elsewhere. It
cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon
precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, to innovate is not to
reform. The French revolutionists complained of everything; they refused to
reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all unchanged. The
consequences are before us, - not in remote history; not in future
prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us. They shake the public
security; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the growth of the young;
they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they stop our way. They infest
us in town; they pursue us to the country. Our business is interrupted; our
repose is troubled; our pleasures are saddened; our very studies are poisoned
and perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous
evils of this dreadful innovation. The revolution harpies of France, sprung
from night and hell, or from that chaotic anarchy, which generates equivocally
"all monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their
eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighbouring state.
These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what divine
attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey, (both
mothers and daughters,) flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our
tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the
slime of their filthy offal.^1
[Footnote 1: Tristius haud illis monstrum, nec saevior ulla
Pestis, et ira Deum Stygiis sese extulit undis
Virginei volucrum vultus; faedissima ventris
Proluvies; uncaeque manus; et pallida semper
Ora fame -
Here the poet breaks the line, because he (and that he is Virgil) had not
verse or language to describe that monster even as he had conceived her. Had
he lived in our time, he would have been more overpowered with the reality
than he was with the imagination. Virgil only knew the horror of the times
before him. Had he lived to see the revolutionists and constitutionalists of
France, he would have had more horrid and disgusting features of his harpies
to describe, and more frequent failures in the attempt to describe them.]
If his Grace can contemplate the result of this complete innovation, or,
as some friends of his will call it, reform, in the whole body of its solidity
and compounded mass, at which, as Hamlet says, the face of heaven glows with
horror and indignation, and which, in truth, makes every reflecting mind, and
every feeling heart, perfectly thought-sick, without a thorough abhorrence of
everything they say, and everything they do, I am amazed at the morbid
strength or the natural infirmity of his mind.
It was then not my love, but my hatred, to innovation, that produced
my plan of reform. Without troubling myself with the exactness of the logical
diagram, I considered them as things substantially opposite. It was to prevent
that evil, I proposed the measures, which his Grace is pleased, anl I am not
sorry he is pleased, to recall to my recollection. I had (what I hope that
noble duke will remember in all its operations) a state to preserve, as well
as a state to reform. I had a people to gratify, but not to inflame, or to
mislead. I do not claim half the credit for what I did, as for what I
prevented from being done. In that situation of the public mind, I did not
undertake, as was then proposed, to new-model the House of Commons or the
House of Lords; or to change the authority under which any officer of the
Crown acted, who was suffered at all to exist. Crown, Lords, Commons, judicial
system, system of administration, existed as they had existed before; and in
the mode and manner in which they had always existed. My measures were, what
I then truly stated them to the House to be, in their intent, healing and
mediatorial. A complaint was made of too much influence in the House of
Commons; I reduced it in both Houses; and I gave my reasons article by article
for every reduction, and showed why I thought it safe for the service of the
state. I heaved the lead every inch of way I made. A disposition to expense
was complained of; to that I opposed, not mere retrenchment, but a system
of economy, which would make a random expense, without plan or foresight, in
future not easily practicable. 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 and in civil affairs to secure and perpetuate
the operation. I conceived nothing arbitrarily; nor proposed anything to be
done by the will and pleasure of others, or my own; but by reason, and by
reason only. 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.
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