INTRODUCTION. I. ACQUAINTANCE WITH BURke. "I MUST be in a wretched state indeed when your company would not be a delight to me." These words, which the dying Dr. Johnson addressed to Edmund Burke, can be sincerely repeated even now by any one who really gets acquainted with him. Without some acquaintance, however, with Burke himself and with his environment, one may fail to realize that, far from being a mere eloquent declaimer about matters settled a hundred years before we were born, he is rather the greatest of statesmen, discussing the very problems which vex us today. To understand him wholly, even in the Speech on Con ciliation with America, one must have a considerable knowledge of the social conditions in his time, of the political situation, of his character, his principles of statecraft and his style. II. SOCIAL CONDITIONS. The social conditions of England in Burke's day are most fully laid before us in the clear-cut pictures of Boswell's Life of Johnson, Horace Walpole's Letters, Madame D'Arblay's Diary 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, edited by G. Birkbeck Hill, Oxford, 1887, IV, 407. and Letters and Jesse's George Selwyn and His Contemporaries. In these works such small details as tie-wigs and swords, journeys from country to town by coach and four, pleasure parties at Vauxhall Gardens, dinners of the Literary Club at the Turk's Head, gossip about the shameless old Marquis of Queensberry and tears over the woes of Clarissa Harlowe often show the real temper of the age more distinctly than do the generalizations of formal history. Halfway between gossip and history come Thackeray's entertaining lectures on George the Second and George the Third in the Four Georges, and on Hogarth, Smollett, Fielding, Sterne and Goldsmith in the English Humorists. Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century treats more particularly the intellectual side of life. Of the regular histories, Lecky's England in the Eighteenth Century goes over the whole ground minutely, and Green's History of the English People focusses the same wide view into small space. All these books exhibit 8 the first stage of the transformation from the slow, insular, unorganized country seen in the writings of Dryden and Pope, Addison, Steele and Swift, to the quickly moving, cosmopolitan, highly organized modern England. One important element in the development was the broader diffusion of intelligence. It is true that the wits still gathered in the London coffee-houses, and, as Dr. Johnson and David Garrick had done, men still came to town to make fortunes in business and attain eminence in all professions; but life outside London was becoming a bit less dull. Owing in part to the popularity which the Tatler and the Spectator had given to periodical literature, newspapers were springing up in all the cities and leading towns, and were carrying into every village the discussion of such topics as the social theories of Rousseau, Dr. Smollett's new novel Humphrey Clinker, and the last letter 1 London, 1843. 2 See chapter xii. 8 New York, 1878–90, VI, 138-300. of Junius in the Public Advertiser. More or less complete reports of the proceedings of Parliament bore the voices of Fox, Pitt and Burke' to an audience consisting of the whole nation. Another element on which both Green and Lecky lay much stress was the so-called Methodist movement. Though the followers of Wesley and Whitfield were ridiculed3 as fanatics or snivelling hypocrites, nevertheless before the middle of the century their zeal had gone beyond the narrow limits of the sect, and was deepening the moral earnestness of all England. This fresh impulse toward cleaner thinking and living was shaming the coarseness and profligacy of the age of Anne, as revealed in the brutal pages of Swift, and was driving out the cynical corruption of Sir Robert Walpole's day, when every man had his price and even a clergyman would buy a bishopric from a king's mistress. Above all, it was steadily strengthening that interest in philanthropy now so widespread. It stirred not only individual leaders like John Howard, but Parliament' and various local governing boards as well, to discuss plans for ameliorating the condition of the poor, the sick, the imprisoned and the enslaved. Indeed it had already gained for the antislavery movement such parliamentary support that Burke's references to the "inhuman traffic" must have quickened his hearers' attention, just as any mention of aid for the unemployed quickens ours. The most noteworthy change of all, however, was the expansion of commerce. Burke tells how foreign trade had shot up; no less remarkable had been the increase in domestic. 1 The Speech on Conciliation was issued in pamphlet soon after delivery. 2 II, 568-699. * See Anstey's New Bath Guide, published in 1766. 4 Thackeray's George the Second, London, 1869, 46. • See Parliamentary History, London, 1806–20, XVII, 639–643, 843-848. • Lecky, VI, 279–281. * See 32 22. 8 Pages 11-13. |