6 118. In January 1791 he already regards the leaders as mere quacks and impostors,' and the people as madmen, who, 'like other madmen,' must be subdued in order to be cured.2 The Revolution, a few months later, is declared to be a foul, monstrous thing, wholly out of the course of moral nature;' it was 'generated in treachery, frauds, and falsehood, hypocrisy, and unprovoked murder.' As he goes on he strains his whole power of invective to gratify the vehemence of his hatred. Jacobinism is incarnate evil; it is atheism by establishment; it makes a 'profane apotheosis of monsters whose vices and crimes have no parallel amongst men.' Jacobins are animated by determined hostility to the human race.' 5 They have deliberately established a system of manners 'the most licentious, prostitute, and abandoned that ever has been known, and at the same time the most coarse, rude, savage, and ferocious.' And, after a passage in which he labours to prove that every moral principle is intentionally violated by these monsters, the virtue of the nation designedly corrupted, family affections perverted, and marriage made more degrading than any connection which would be tolerated at a London brothel,' he finds the only fitting climax to his furious invective by charging them with cannibalism. He recurs more than once to this epithet. The society thus formed resembles that of a 'den of outlaws upon a doubtful frontier; of a lewd tavern for the revels and debauches of banditti, assassins, bravoes, smugglers, and their more desperate paramours, mixed with bombastic players, the refuse and rejected offal of strolling theatres, puffing out ill-sorted verses about virtue, mixed with the licentious and blasphemous songs proper to the brutal and hardened course of life belonging to that sort of wretches.' The fall of Robespierre only added one brutal and treacherous murder the more. He would rather think less hardly of the dead ruffian than associate with the living. 'I could rather bear the stench of the gibbeted murderer than the society of the bloody felons who yet annoy the world.' 9 One seems to see the face of the 1 Burke, vi. 10, 'To a Member of the National Assembly.' 2 Ib. vi. 19, ib. • Ib. vi. 85, ‘Appeal.' Ib. viii. 171, 'Regicide Peace.' • Ib. viii. 172, ib. 6 Ib. 7 Ib. viii. 175, ib. Ib. viii. 180, ib. orator convulsed; he pants, struggles, and gasps for utterance; and in the whirlwind of his passion, tears all propriety and common sense to rags. If words could blast, the French revolutionists would have been scorched and shrivelled by his fury. 119. Why did the wisest politician of the day thus throw the reins on the neck of his eloquence? Something must be set down to the excitement of the struggle; something to the pain inflicted by the sharp severance of all ties; much, in the later writings, to the consequences of the cruel domestic loss which shadowed his declining years with so deep a gloom. The actual atrocities of the Revolution increased his horror, but from the very first he saw the glare of hell in the light which others took to herald the dawn of the millennium. Nor, indeed, can it be doubted that Burke's antipathy to the Revolution was based upon a profound and reasoned conviction of the utter falsity of all leading principles. Good steady-going Whigs might fancy that the French were merely a set of interesting converts to the doctrines of the Petition of Right and the Revolution of 1688. Men like Priestley and Price fancied that reason was revealing itself to mankind, and dispersing the antiquated prejudices of centuries. Burke's insight was deeper and truer. He saw with the revolutionists that the phenomenon did not signify a mere adjustment of an old political balance, and the adoption of a few constitutional nostrums. A new doctrine was spreading from the schools into the mass of the people, and threatening the very foundations of the old social order. Moreover, he saw through the flimsy nature of the logic which it was supposed to embody; and recognised the emptiness of the predictions of an instant advent of peace, justice, and goodwill. He had weighed Rousseau's metaphysics and found them grievously wanting; and what to others appeared to be a startling revelation of new truths were to him a fitful rehabilitation of outworn fallacies. There was, indeed, something which he did not see; but to appreciate his error we must first do justice to the width of his view. 120. The influence of a revolution which aims at the upsetting a government may be confined to the place of its birth. A revolution which aims at propagating a new order of ideas has an interest for the whole world. In the 'Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,' Burke expresses his dread of a fashion proceeding upon speculative grounds.' 'A theory concerning government,' as was now plain, might become a cause of fanaticism as much as a dogma in religion.' And in such cases, calm cannot be regained by the removal of grievances; for monarchy, not a monarch, is assailed. Rather, indeed, the principles were assailed upon which the whole social order rested. Burke would say, when war had begun, 'it is a religious war'2-not a war between different religious sects, but a war between all the religious sects and the enemies of all sects. He deliberately accepted the consequences and preached a crusade. We were at war with an armed doctrine;'3 and such a war, as he rightly inferred, must be a long one. Indeed it is going on still, for Burke erred in supposing that it could be finally decided by the bayonet and the cannon. Assuming, however, that ideas could be put down by the strong hand of force, Burke's zeal was but the natural consequence of his creed. The new doctrines, as he understood them, were nothing less than the direct antithesis of all which he regarded as fundamental and sacred axioms. A passage which he quotes in the 'Reflections' from Rabaud de St. Etienne gives the essence of the revolutionary creed: 'Tous les établissements en France couronnent le malheur du peuple; pour les rendre heureux, il faut les renouveler, changer les idées; changer les loix; changer les mœurs; changer les hommes; changer les choses; changer les mots. . . . tout détruire; oui, tout détruire, puisque tout est à recréer.' To Burke, with whom prescription was the last word of politics; whose ideal statesman was the man who best combined the old with the new; who would guide every step by precedent, even in the destruction of abuses; who would not reform at all unless he could reform with equity; such a proposal seemed as monstrous as a plan for reforming the Church by abolishing a belief in God. Feebler elements, indeed, blend with his general argument. He verges, 5 1 Burke, vi. 239, and see vii. 13 ('French Affairs'), where the Revolution is compared to the Reformation. Ib. viii. 98, 'Regicide Peace.' Ib. viii. 150, ib. * Ib. vii. 174, 'Policy of the Allies.' See, for example, the proposals in the speech on Conciliation with America. 2 1 at times, upon mere sentimentalism. The celebrated 'purple patch' about Marie Antoinette, and the often-quoted phrase 'the age of chivalry is gone,' excited the spleen of his cynical friend Francis. In my opinion,' says the author of Junius, with characteristic bluntness, all that you say of the queen is pure foppery.' To which Burke replied, that the loss of the chivalrous spirit was a serious matter of lamentation; and that he did, in fact, weep whilst composing the passage impugned.3 Yet the argument savours too much of the mere rhetorician; and his more serious reasonings, founded on the reforms of the preceding years, and on his personal observations in a brief tour in France, are scarcely a sufficient basis for the assertion, doubtless sound enough in itself, that the Revolution was not provoked by intolerable suffering alone. 121. But, whatever the value of these appeals to fact or to sentiment, the soundness of his main position is undeniable. The question was not as to the personal merits of a certain set of rulers, nor as to the actual amount of wrongs endured and avenged, but as to the merits of a new order of ideas. The equality of mankind was the fundamental dogma of the revolutionary creed. That dogma was equivalent to justifying the absolute disorganisation of the old society. It condemned all subordination, whether to rightful superiors or to arbitrary despots. It involved the levelling of all the old institutions, however important the part which they played in the social machinery. It explicitly swept aside as irrelevant and immoral all arguments from experience and expediency. It regarded prescription, not as the sacred foundation of all social rights, but as a mischievous superstition. It attacked the historical continuity of the case, and proposed first to make a tabula rasa of all existing organisations, and then to construct society anew on purely a priori grounds. Pure arithmetic was to take the place of observation, and the constitution to be framed without the least reference to the complex internal structure of the nation. The most valuable part of Burke's writings are the passages, full both of wisdom and eloquence, in which he exposes the fallacy of this fanatical creed. The very simplicity of the new schemes condemned 3 Ib. iii. 139. Burke, v. 149, 'Reflections.' 2 Burke's 'Correspondence,' iii. 130. Works, v. 251, 'Reflections.' them sufficiently, for it proved them to have been constructed without reference to the primary data of the problem. The nature of man,' he says, 'is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and, therefore, no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs.' To neglect to take into account the forces by which men are bound together in the constituent elements of society is a fatal error. To be attached to the subdivisions, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.' As the revolutionists would merge these 'platoons' into an inorganic mass, they would cut off the ties by which generations are bound together, by assuming that each human being was born without specific privileges and duties. They were pushing to extremes the doctrine of individuality; and he prophesies that 'the Commonwealth itself would in a few generations crumble away, be disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality, and at length be dispersed to all the winds of heaven.' In fact, the revolutionary creed asserted by necessary implication the rupture of all the bonds which unite men to each other in families, or in political or ecclesiastical bodies, or which connect one generation to others. The power framed by crushing the whole internal organisation must be tyrannical and shameless. The people collectively being omnipotent, and the people, as units, amenable to the small share of responsibility which falls to the lot of each, 'their approbation of their own acts has to them the appearance of a public judgment in their favour; a perfect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world.' Its tyranny would be the most cruel, the most searching, and alleviated by the fewest consolations." In fact, the revolutionary ideas embodied the formal contradictory to that truth, the full appreciation of which was Burke's greatest title to speculative eminence, and which guided his wisest reflections. To him a nation was a living organism, of infinitely complex structure, of intimate dependence upon the parts, and to be treated by 3 |