irrational is public excitement, however, that, while his opinions were losing real value, his influence was strengthening. As the events which he had predicted came to pass one by one, the laughter of his enemies turned to alarm; and finally, when Louis the Sixteenth was executed in 1793, England, though in no serious danger, was filled with consternation and looked to Burke as her most far-sighted statesman. Yet to his credit be it said that, even with the nation applauding his frenzy, he now and then fell back into his early habit of examining a question in all lights. In such a moment of clear vision, when he perceived that the movement in France might be one of actual progress, when he caught a glimpse of himself as posterity views him, he penned the solemn close of his Thoughts on French Affairs: "I have done with this subject, I believe, forever. It has given me many anxious moments for the two last years. If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it, the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope, will forward it; and then they who persist in opposing this mighty

current in human affairs will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself than the mere designs of men.

They will

not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.”1

Burke's mistakes in regard to the French Revolution are by some critics ascribed in part to his imperfect acquaintance with the subject. However that may be, it is certain that during the same period, when he was dealing with a subject on which he was thoroughly informed, Ireland, he showed his old qualities of statesmanship. He had always been a champion of his down-trodden native land, just as he had been a champion of America and India. In his boyhood, as we have seen, he endeavored to master the history of his "poor country"; and later he tried to secure justice for it, though at the 1 Works, IV, 377.

expense of offending his Bristol constituents. Then, when Ireland caught the contagion of the French Revolution, and when the war between England and France rendered the situation still more threatening, Burke urged for Ireland the same policy which he had urged for America seventeen years before, conciliation. In letter and pamphlet he unceasingly advocated relieving the Catholics of their disabilities. "It passes my comprehension," he wrote, "in what manner it is that men can be reconciled to the practical merits of a constitution . by being practically excluded from any of its advantages."1 This is surely a return to the high level of the dictum, "I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people."

The incidents connected with the close of the trial of Warren Hastings, with the excitement over the French Revolution, and with the agitation for toleration in Ireland mark the end of Burke's public career. In 1794, with his fame restored, he retired from Parliament. He was to have received a peerage with the title Lord Beaconsfield; but, since the death of his son left him without a direct heir to whom to transmit the honor, he accepted instead a pension granted in recognition of his services to the country. This pension was the occasion of a fresh attack upon him by his enemies. He replied in the Letter to a Noble Lord, which from a rhetorical point of view is one of his best pieces of work. He survived but three years, during which he wrote the Letters on a Regicide Peace. He died on the ninth of July, 1797.

The personality of Burke, which in his public life seems a little vague and distant, appears with more distinctness in his private life. As described by Madame D'Arblay he was tall, his figure noble, his air commanding, his address graceful, his voice clear, penetrating, sonorous and powerful, his language

1 Second Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe on the Catholic Question, Works, VI, 382.

"1

copious, various and eloquent, his manners attractive, his conversation delightful. "Since we lost Garrick," she wrote, “I have seen nobody so enchanting.' The range of Burke's conversation was an indication of the variety of his interests, -politics, economics, social problems, history, philosophy, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture, science, agriculture, manufactures. Whatever subject he took up, he pursued with the same furor that possessed him in studying at college and in mastering the details of finance and the affairs of America and India. When he turned from the cares of state to his farm at Beaconsfield, he was eager over carrots and pigs, just as he had been eager over the Stamp Act. 2

3

Furthermore, his zeal in behalf of the wretched and the oppressed was not a mere vague sentiment which expended itself in words: it was a ruling motive in his daily conduct. When the poet Crabbe was obscure and penniless, Burke took him into the family at Beaconsfield, found a printer for his verses, and finally obtained for him a living in the church. Burke sent the painter Barry abroad and for five years furnished him with money for study and travel. During the Revolution he kept open house for the French refugees, gave from his own slender purse to acquaintances whose estates had been confiscated, and established near Beaconsfield a school for French orphans and children of émigrés who had suffered losses. Such open-handed liberality could not. but win him troops of staunch friends. Richard Shackleton was devoted to him from boyhood to old age; Sir Joshua Reynolds appointed him an executor and left him a large legacy; Dr. Johnson, the stout Tory who declared that "the first Whig was

1 Diary and Letters, June, 1782.

2 Correspondence, I, 245-251, 257–265.

3 Ibid., 86-92, 116–129.

4 Ibid., IV, 246–251.

5 Ibid., 331-341.

Burke's faults were clearly at times unreasoning zeal

the devil,"1 admired and loved him. those of an ardent temperament, for persons, parties or causes, and an impatience of contradiction and delay which betrayed him into fiery outbursts of passion. His virtues were also those of an ardent temperament, unquenchable energy, exhaustless generosity.

In his family relations he was very happy. In the winter of 1756-1757 he had married Jane Nugent, the daughter of a physician. She was a woman of gentle manners, even temper, and a capacity for management which lifted many burdens from her husband's shoulders. Though Burke's only son, Richard, was not generally liked, he was idolized by his father, who with characteristic eagerness had indulged in the most extravagant hopes of a brilliant future for him. The death of Richard in 1794 was a blow from which Burke never recovered: it filled his last days with gloom, and hastened his end. "I am alone," he wrote. "I have none to meet my enemies in the gate.

2

V.

BURKE AS A STATESMAN.3

Burke's principles of statesmanship, when briefly set down, seem almost too bald and simple to be worth much attention. One should remember, however, that theories of government

1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, III, 326.

2 Letter to a Noble Lord, Works, V, 208.

3 Able discussions of Burke's statesmanship are to be found in section 9 of chapter xii of Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, New York, 1876; and in John Morley's Edmund Burke: a Historical Study, London, 1867. The latter book should not be confounded with Morley's life of Burke in the English Men of Letters, to which reference has already been made. Stephen dwells on a matter for which there is no space in this introduction, the sources from which Burke drew his ideas in statesmanship.

had not in Burke's day been discussed and developed as they have been since, so that what is trite now may have been novel then moreover, statesmanship does not consist in a mere knowledge of maxims, in which a modern schoolboy might equal Burke, —but in understanding when and how to apply them.

2

The basis of Burke's system is explained in a sentence from one of his letters: "The principles of true politics are those of morality enlarged; and I neither now do, nor ever will, admit of any other." But had he never written this sentence, his works are full of proofs that his aim was the triumph of the good among the orators of his time he is notable for his frequent appeals to the love of right rather than to the love of might. It is better, he held, to try to make a government wise and honest than to try to make it strong. His hatred of the French Revolutionists was due partly to his conviction that they were enemies to sound morals: they were overturning the church, a bulwark of morality; they were dishonestly repudiating debts; they were unjustly confiscating property. Of their action he wrote: "As no one of us men can dispense with public or private faith, or with any other tie of moral obligation, so neither can any number of us. The number engaged in crimes, instead of turning them into laudable acts, only augments the quantity and intensity of the guilt." 3

The first of the moral principles on which Burke rested great weight was justice. Where duller men would have been stolidly indifferent, his powerful imagination enabled him to feel keenly the burdens of the oppressed. Thus it was for justice to the clergy and the nobility of France, to the disfranchised Catholics, and to the swarming millions of India, that he made his most fervent pleas. Such pleas were not “splendid

1 Letter to the Bishop of Chester, 1771, Correspondence, I, 332.

2 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, Works, II, 220.

Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Works, IV, 163.