Edmund
Burke (1730-1797) was an Anglo-Irish parliamentarian and political
theorist whose ideas have had a profound influence on the formation of
modern conservatism. His most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France
began as a letter written to an associate in Paris during the early
stages of the French Revolution which eventually developed into a far
more substantial work. In it, Burke developed a contrast between
the British political system, which he held up as a
model political system based upon pragmatism and a reverence for
tradition, and the new order in France which he criticized as too
innovative and overly attached to abstract Enlightenment ideals.
Ultimately, Burke was no mere reactionary, as evidenced by his support
of the American Revolution and his criticisms of British imperial
policies in India, but rather a thoughtful intellectual who believed
that political change should occur only gradually and with the utmost
caution.
Edmund Burke, excerpts from Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
....The question of dethroning or, if these gentlemen like
the phrase better, "cashiering kings" will always be, as it has
always been, an extraordinary question of state, and wholly out of the law
— a question (like all other questions of state) of dispositions and of
means and of probable consequences rather than of positive rights. As it was
not made for common abuses, so it is not to be agitated by common minds. The
speculative line of demarcation where obedience ought to end and resistance
must begin is faint, obscure, and not easily definable. It is not a single act,
or a single event, which determines it. Governments must be abused and
deranged, indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future
must be as bad as the experience of the past. When things are in that
lamentable condition, the nature of the disease is to indicate the remedy to
those whom nature has qualified to administer in extremities this critical,
ambiguous, bitter potion to a distempered state. Times and occasions and
provocations will teach their own lessons. The wise will determine from the
gravity of the case; the irritable, from sensibility to oppression; the
high-minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands;
the brave and bold, from the love of honorable danger in a generous cause; but,
with or without right, a revolution will be the very last resource of the
thinking and the good.
Pages 30-31
You will observe that 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 derived 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 a 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 generally the result of a selfish temper
and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look
backward 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 forever. 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, molding 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.
You might, if you pleased have profited of our example and have given to your recovered freedom a
correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to
memory. Your constitution, it is true, whilst you were out of possession,
suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls and
in all the foundations of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired
those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your constitution
was suspended before it was perfected, but you had the elements of a
constitution very nearly as good as could be wished. In your old states you
possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of
which your community was happily composed; you had all that combination and all
that opposition of interests; you had that action and counteraction which, in
the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of
discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe. These opposed and
conflicting interests which you considered as so great a blemish in your old
and in our present constitution interpose a salutary check to all precipitate
resolutions. They render deliberation a matter, not of choice, but of
necessity; they make all change a subject of compromise, which naturally begets
moderation; they produce temperaments preventing the sore evil of harsh, crude,
unqualified reformations, and rendering all the headlong exertions of arbitrary
power, in the few or in the many, for ever impracticable. Through that
diversity of members and interests, general liberty had as many securities as
there were separate views in the several orders, whilst, by pressing down the
whole by the weight of a real monarchy, the separate parts would have been
prevented from warping and starting from their allotted places.
You had all these advantages in your ancient states, but you chose to act as
if you had never been molded into civil society and had everything to begin
anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to
you. You set up your trade without a capital. If the last generations of your
country appeared without much luster in your eyes, you might have passed them
by and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious
predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them
a standard of virtue and wisdom beyond the vulgar practice of the hour; and you
would have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired. Respecting
your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would
not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of
lowborn servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789...
Pages 33-36
....By following those false lights, France has bought undisguised
calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal
blessings! France has bought poverty by crime! France has not sacrificed her
virtue to her interest, but she has abandoned her interest, that she might
prostitute her virtue. All other nations have begun the fabric of a new
government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing originally or by
enforcing with greater exactness some rites or other of religion. All other
people have laid the foundations of civil freedom in severer manners and a
system of a more austere and masculine morality. France, when she let loose the
reins of regal authority, doubled the license of a ferocious dissoluteness in
manners and of an insolent irreligion in opinions and practice, and has
extended through all ranks of life, as if she were communicating some privilege
or laying open some secluded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions that usually
were the disease of wealth and power. This is one of the new principles of
equality in France.
Pages 37-38
They have seen the French rebel against a mild and lawful
monarch with more fury, outrage, and insult than ever any people has been known
to rise against the most illegal usurper or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their
resistance was made to concession, their revolt was from protection, their blow
was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favors, and immunities.
This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their punishment
in their success: laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigor;
commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church
pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the
constitution of the kingdom; everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol
of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence; and, to crown all,
the paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power, the discredited paper
securities of impoverished fraud and beggared rapine, held out as a currency
for the support of an empire in lieu of the two great recognized species that
represent the lasting, conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared and
hid themselves in the earth from whence they came, when the principle of
property, whose creatures and representatives they are, was systematically
subverted.
Were all these dreadful things necessary? Were they the inevitable results
of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through
blood and tumult to the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty? No!
nothing like it. The fresh ruins of France, which shock our feelings wherever
we can turn our eyes, are not the devastation of civil war; they are the sad
but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound
peace.
Page 39
[The National
Assembly], since the destruction of the orders, has no
fundamental law, no strict convention, no respected usage to restrain it.
Instead of finding themselves obliged to conform to a fixed constitution, they
have a power to make a constitution which shall conform to their designs.
Nothing in heaven or upon earth can serve as a control on them. What ought to
be the heads, the hearts, the dispositions that are qualified or that dare, not
only to make laws under a fixed constitution, but at one heat to strike out a
totally new constitution for a great kingdom, and in every part of it, from the
monarch on the throne to the vestry of a parish? But — "fools rush in
where angels fear to tread". In such a state of unbounded power for
undefined and undefinable purposes, the evil of a moral and almost physical
inaptitude of the man to the function must be the greatest we can conceive to
happen in the management of human affairs.
Page 45
Government
is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in
total independence of it, and exist in much greater clearness and in a
much greater degree of abstract perfection; but their abstract
perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to everything
they want everything. 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. Among these wants is to be reckoned the
want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their
passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals
should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in
the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted,
their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This
can only be done by a power out of themselves, and not, in the exercise
of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is
its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men,
as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But
as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances
and admit to infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any
abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that
principle.
The
moment you abate anything from the full rights of men, each to govern
himself, and suffer any artificial, positive limitation upon those
rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a
consideration of convenience. This it is which makes the constitution
of a state and the due distribution of its powers a matter of the most
delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human
nature and human necessities, and of the things which facilitate or
obstruct the various ends which are to be pursued by the mechanism of
civil institutions. The state is to have recruits to its strength, and
remedies to its distempers. What is the use of discussing a man's
abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of
procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always
advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than
the professor of metaphysics.
The
science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming
it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a
priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that
practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not
always immediate; but that which in the first instance is prejudicial
may be excellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may arise
even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse
also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing
commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions. In
states there are often some obscure and almost latent causes, things
which appear at first view of little moment, on which a very great part
of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend. The science
of government being therefore so practical in itself and intended for
such practical purposes — a matter which requires experience, and even
more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however
sagacious and observing he may be — it is with infinite caution that
any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has
answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of
society, or on building it up again without having models and patterns
of approved utility before his eyes.
Pages 60-61
....Never,
never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that
proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the
heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an
exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of
nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!
It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which
felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated
ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice
itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient
chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the
varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long
succession of generations even to the time we live in. If it should
ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this
which has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which has
distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished
it to its advantage, from the states of Asia and possibly from those
states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique
world. It was this which, without confounding ranks, had produced a
noble equality and handed it down through all the gradations of social
life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions and
raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force or
opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power, it obliged
sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled
stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination,
vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.
But
now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power
gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of
life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics
the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be
dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the
decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added
ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the
heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the
defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in
our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and
antiquated fashion.
On
this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a
woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. All
homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views,
is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and
sacrilege are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by
destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a
bishop, or a father are only common homicide; and if the people are by
any chance or in any way gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the
most pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too severe a
scrutiny.
On
the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold
hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom
as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported
only by their own terrors and by the concern which each individual may
find in them from his own private speculations or can spare to them
from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the
end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left
which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth. On the
principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be
embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons, so as to create in
us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason
which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place.
These public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes
as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law. The
precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic, for the
construction of poems is equally true as to states: — Non satis est
pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto. There ought to be a system of
manners in every nation which a well-informed mind would be disposed to
relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
But
power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners
and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its
support. The usurpation which, in order to subvert ancient
institutions, has destroyed ancient principles will hold power by arts
similar to those by which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and
chivalrous spirit of fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed
both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be
extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be
anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that
long roll of grim and bloody maxims which form the political code of
all power not standing on its own honor and the honor of those who are
to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.
When
ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot
possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern
us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer. Europe,
undoubtedly, taken in a mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on
which your revolution was completed. How much of that prosperous state
was owing to the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to
say; but as such causes cannot be indifferent in their operation, we
must presume that on the whole their operation was beneficial.
We
are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them,
without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been
produced and possibly may be upheld. Nothing is more certain than that
our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are
connected with manners and with civilization have, in this European
world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles and were, indeed,
the result of both combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the
spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession,
the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in the midst
of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their
causes than formed. Learning paid back what it received to nobility and
to priesthood, and paid it with usury, by enlarging their ideas and by
furnishing their minds. Happy if they had all continued to know their
indissoluble union and their proper place! Happy if learning, not
debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor,
and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and
guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under
the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
Pages 76-78
....We
are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire;
Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our
preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no
discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made in
morality, nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the
ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born,
altogether as well as they will be after the grace has heaped its mold
upon our presumption and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on
our pert loquacity. In England we have not yet been completely
embowelled of our natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we
cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful
guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all
liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order
that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and
rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of men. We
preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire,
unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of
flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe
to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with
reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility.[19] Why? Because
when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so
affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious and tend to
corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit
for rational liberty, and, by teaching us a servile, licentious, and
abandoned insolence, to be our low sport for a few holidays, to make us
perfectly fit for, and justly deserving of, slavery through the whole
course of our lives.
You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that
we are generally men of untaught feelings, that, instead of casting
away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable
degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because
they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more
generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid
to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason,
because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the
individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and
capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead
of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the
latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and
they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice,
with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and
to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its
reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection
which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the
emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom
and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of
decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's
virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just
prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.
Your
literary men and your politicians, and so do the whole clan of the
enlightened among us, essentially differ in these points. They have no
respect for the wisdom of others, but they pay it off by a very full
measure of confidence in their own. With them it is a sufficient motive
to destroy an old scheme of things because it is an old one. As to the
new, they are in no sort of fear with regard to the duration of a
building run up in haste, because duration is no object to those who
think little or nothing has been done before their time, and who place
all their hopes in discovery. They conceive, very systematically, that
all things which give perpetuity are mischievous, and therefore they
are at inexpiable war with all establishments. They think that
government may vary like modes of dress, and with as little ill effect;
that there needs no principle of attachment, except a sense of present
convenience, to any constitution of the state. They always speak as if
they were of opinion that there is a singular species of compact
between them and their magistrates which binds the magistrate, but
which has nothing reciprocal in it, but that the majesty of the people
has a right to dissolve it without any reason but its will. Their
attachment to their country itself is only so far as it agrees with
some of their fleeting projects; it begins and ends with that scheme of
polity which falls in with their momentary opinion.
Pages 86-88
Source: http://www.constitution.org/eb/rev_fran.htm
Pagination corresponds to Oxford University Press' 1993 edition.