induction from limited facts; and that therefore it is the part of a wise man, when he adds to the facts, to revise the induction, and, instead of sacrificing practice to principles, modify the principles that he may change the practice. Or, to put this in another way, he lays it down that political principles are at best but the product of human reason; while political practice has to do with human nature and human passions, of which reason forms but a part; and that, on this account, the proper business of a statesman is to contrive the means by which certain ends may be effected, leaving it to the general voice of the country to determine what those ends shall be, and shaping his own conduct, not according to his own principles, but according to the wishes of the people for whom he legislates, and whom he is bound to obey.

It is these views, and the extraordinary ability with which they were advocated, which make the appearance of Burke a memorable epoch in our political history. We had, no doubt, other statesmen before him who denied the validity of general principles in politics; but their denial was only the happy guess of ignorance, and they rejected theories which they had never taken the pains to study. Burke rejected them because he knew them. It was his rare merit that, notwithstanding every inducement to rely upon his own generalizations, he resisted the temptation; that, though rich in all the varieties of political knowledge, he made his opinions subservient to the march of events; that he recognized as the object of government, not the preservation of particular institutions, nor the propagation of particular tenets, but the happiness of the people at large; and, above all, that he insisted upon an obedience to the popular wishes which no statesman before him had paid, and which too many statesmen since him have forgotten. Our country, indeed, is still full of those vulgar politicians against whom Burke raised his voice; feeble and shallow men, who, having spent their little force in resisting the progress of reform, find themselves at length compelled to yield; and then, so soon as they have exhausted the artifices of their petty schemes, and, by their tardy and ungraceful concessions, have sown the seed of future disaffection, they turn upon the age by which they have been baffled; they mourn over

the degeneracy of mankind; they lament the decay of public spirit; and they weep for the fate of a people who have been so regardless of the wisdom of their ancestors as to tamper with a constitution already hoary with the prescription of centuries.

Those who have studied the reign of George III. will easily understand the immense advantage of having a man like Burke to oppose these miserable delusions; delusions which have been fatal to many countries, and have more than once almost ruined our own. They will also understand that, in the opinion of the king, this great statesman was at best but an eloquent declaimer, to be classed in the same category with Fox and Chatham; all three ingenious men, but unsafe, unsteady, quite unfit for weighty concerns, and by no means calculated for so exalted an honour as admission into the royal councils. In point of fact, during the thirty years Burke was engaged in public life, he never once held an office in the cabinet; and the only occasions on which he occupied even a subordinate post were in those very short intervals when the fluctuations of politics compelled the appointment of a liberal ministry.

Indeed, the part taken by Burke in public affairs must have been very galling to a king who thought everything good that was old, and everything right that was established. For, so far was this remarkable man in advance of his contemporaries, that there are few of the great measures of the present generation which he did not anticipate and zealously defend. Not only did he attack the absurd laws against forestalling and regrating, but, by advocating the freedom of trade, he struck at the root of all similar prohibitions. He supported those just claims of the Catholics, which, during his lifetime, were obstinately refused; but which were conceded, many years after his death, as the only means of preserving the integrity of the empire. He supported the petition of the Dissenters that they might be relieved from the restrictions to which, for the benefit of the Church of England, they were subjected. Into other departments of politics he carried the same spirit. He opposed the cruel laws against insolvents, by which, in the time of George III., our statute book was still

defaced; and he vainly attempted to soften the penal code, the increasing severity of which was one of the worst features of that bad reign. He wished to abolish the old plan of enlisting soldiers for life; a barbarous and impolitic practice, as the English Legislature began to perceive several years later. He attacked the slave-trade; which, being an ancient usage, the king wished to preserve, as part of the British constitution. He refuted, but, owing to the prejudices of the age, was unable to subvert, the dangerous power exercised by the judges, who, in criminal prosecutions for libel, confined the jury to the mere question of publication; thus taking the real issue into their own hands, and making themselves the arbiters of the fate of those who were so unfortunate as to be placed at their bar. And, what many will think not the least of his merits, he was the first in that long line of financial reformers to whom we are deeply indebted. Notwithstanding the difficulties thrown in his way, he carried through Parliament a series of bills by which several useless places were entirely abolished, and in the single office of paymaster-general effected a saving to the country of 25,000l. a year.

These things alone are sufficient to explain the animosity of a prince, whose boast it was that he would bequeath the government to his successor in the same state as that in which he had received it. There was, however, another circumstance by which the royal feelings were still further wounded. The determination of the king to oppress the Americans was so notorious that, when the war actually broke out, it was called the king's war ; " and those who opposed it were regarded as the personal enemies of their sovereign. In this, however, as in all other questions, the conduct of Burke was governed, not by traditions and principles such as George III. cherished, but by large views of general expediency. Burke, in forming his opinions respecting this disgraceful contest, refused to be guided by arguments respecting the right of either party. He would not enter into any discussion as to whether a mother-country has the right to tax her colonies, or whether the colonies have a right to tax themselves. Such points he left to be mooted by those politicians who, pretending to be guided by principles, are in reality subjugated by prejudice.

For his own part, he was content to compare the cost with the gain. It was enough for Burke, that, considering the power of our American colonies, considering their distance from us, and considering the probability of their being aided by France, it was not advisable to exercise the power; and it was, therefore, idle to talk of the right. Hence he opposed the taxation of America, not because it was unprecedented, but because it was inexpedient. As a natural consequence, he likewise opposed the Boston Port Bill, and that shameful bill to forbid all intercourse with America, which was not inaptly called the starvation plan; violent measures, by which the king hoped to curb the colonies, and break the spirit of those noble men whom he hated even more than he feared.

It is certainly no faint characteristic of those times that a man like Burke, who dedicated to politics abilities equal to far nobler things, should, during thirty years, have received from his prince neither favour nor reward. But George III. was a king whose delight it was to raise the humble and exalt the meek. His reign, indeed, was the golden age of successful mediocrity; an age in which little men were favoured, and great men depressed; when Addington was cherished as a statesman, and Beattie pensioned as a philosopher; and when, in all the walks of public life, the first conditions of promotion were, to fawn upon ancient prejudices, and support established abuses.

This neglect of the most eminent of English politicians is highly instructive; but the circumstances which followed, though extremely painful, have a still deeper interest, and are well worth the attention of those whose habits of mind lead them to study the intellectual peculiarities of great men.

John Morley, Burke, Chap. IV.

The six years during which Burke sat in Parliament for Bristol saw this conflict carried on under the most desperate circumstances. They were the years of the civil war between the English at home and the English in the American colonies. George III. and Lord North have been made scapegoats for sins which were not exclusively their own. They were

only the organs and representatives of all the lurking ignorance and arbitrary humours of the entire community. Burke discloses in many places, that for once the King and Parliament did not act without the sympathies of the mass. In his famous speech at Bristol, in 1780, he was rebuking the intolerance of those who bitterly taunted him for the support of the measure for the relaxation of the Penal Code. "It is but too true, " he said in a passage worth remembering, "that the love, and even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely rare. It is but too true that there are many whose whole scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness, and insolence. They feel themselves in a state of thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on their mercy. The desire of having some one below them descends to those who are the very lowest of all; and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose footman's instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain from a gaol. This disposition is the true source of the passion which many men, in very humble life, have taken to the American war. Our subjects in America; our colonies; our dependents. This lust of party power is the liberty they hunger and thirst for; and this Siren song of ambition has charmed ears that we would have thought were never organized to that sort of music."

This was the mental attitude of a majority of the nation, and it was fortunate for them and for us that the yeomen and merchants on the other side of the Atlantic had a more just and energetic appreciation of the crisis. The insurgents, while achieving their own freedom, were indirectly engaged in fighting the battle of the people of the mother country as well. Burke had a vehement correspondent who wrote to him (1777) that if the utter ruin of this country were to be the consequence of her persisting in the claim to tax America, then he would be the first to say, Let her perish! If England prevaiis, said Horace Walpole, English and American liberty is at an end; if one fell, the other would fall with it. Burke, seeing this, certainly never could and never did wish," as he says

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