by Will Durant
His special acquaintance with business and finance enabled him to restore a treasury dangerously burdened by two major wars in one generation. Pitt had read Adam Smith; he listened to merchants and manufacturers; he reduced import dues, negotiated a treaty of lowered tariffs with France (1786), and delighted industrial leaders by declaring that manufacturers should in general be free from taxes. He made up for this by taxing consumption: ribbons, gauzes, gloves, hats, candles, couches, salt, wine, bricks, tiles, paper, windows; many houses boarded up some windows to reduce the tax.127 By 1788 the budget was balanced, and England had escaped the governmental bankruptcy that was leading France to revolution.
Before the election Pitt had introduced his “First India Bill,” which had been defeated. Now he offered a second bill: a Board of Control appointed by the King was to manage the political relations of the East India Company, while commercial relations and patronage were left in company hands, subject to royal veto. The bill was passed (August 9, 1784), and governed British-Indian affairs till 1858.
Fox and Burke considered this arrangement a shameful surrender to a company notorious for corruption and crime. Burke had special reasons for dissatisfaction. His patron Lord Verney, his brother Richard Burke, and his relative William Burke had invested in the East India Company, and had suffered heavy losses in the fluctuations of its stock.128 When William Burke went to India Edmund recommended him to Sir Philip Francis as one whom he loved tenderly; William was made a paymaster, and proved “as corrupt as any.”129 Francis, back in England, gave Burke and Fox his version of Hastings’ administration; he was one source of Burke’s remarkable knowledge of Indian affairs. The attack upon Hastings by the liberal Whigs was presumably motivated in part by desire to discredit and overthrow Pitt’s ministry.130
In January, 1785, Hastings resigned, and returned to England. He hoped that his long years of administration, his restoration of the company to solvency, and his rescue of British power in Madras and Bombay would be rewarded with a pension, if not with a peerage. In the spring of 1786 Burke asked the House of Commons for the official records of Hastings’ rule in India. Some were refused, some were given him by the ministers. In April he laid before the House a bill of charges against the ex-governor of Bengal. Hastings read to the House a detailed reply. In June Burke presented charges relating to the Rohilkhand war, and asked for the impeachment of Hastings; the Commons refused to prosecute. On June 13 Fox told the story of Chait Singh, and asked for impeachment. Pitt surprised his cabinet by voting with Fox and Burke; many of his party followed his lead, which may have been designed to dissociate the ministry from Hastings’ fate. The motion to impeach was carried 119 to 79.
The prorogation of Parliament and the pressure of other issues interrupted the drama, but it was resumed with éclat on February 7, 1787, when Sheridan made what Fox and Burke and Pitt called the best speech ever heard in the House of Commons.131 (Sheridan was offered £ 1,000 for a corrected copy of the address; he never found time to do this, and we know it only from subdued summaries.) With all the art of a man born to the theater, and all the fervor of a romantic spirit, Sheridan recounted the spoliation of the begums of Oudh. After speaking for over five hours, he demanded that Hastings be impeached. Again Pitt voted for the prosecution; the motion was carried, 175 to 68. On February 8 the House appointed a committee of twenty—with Burke, Fox, and Sheridan at their head—to prepare the articles of impeachment. These were presented, and on May 9 the House ordered “Mr. Burke, in the name of the House of Commons, … to go to the bar of the House of Lords and impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, … of high crimes and misdemeanors.” Hastings was arrested and brought before the peers, but was released on bail.
After a long delay the trial began, February 13, 1788, in Westminster Hall. All lovers of literature will recall Macaulay’s gorgeous description132 of that historic assemblage: the lords sitting in ermine and gold as the high court of the realm; before them Hastings, pale and ill, aged fifty-three, height five feet six inches, weight 122 pounds; the judges under their great ear-lapping wigs; the family of the King; the members of the House of Commons; the galleries crowded with ambassadors, princesses, and duchesses; Mrs. Siddons in her stately beauty; Sir Joshua Reynolds amid so many notables whom he had portrayed; and on one side the committee, now called the “managers,” ready to present the case for impeachment. Clerks read the charges and Hastings’ reply. For four days, in the most powerful speech of his career, Burke laid upon the accused an overwhelming mass of accusations. Then, on February 15, he made the historic hall ring with his passionate demand:
I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanors.
I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, … whose Parliamentary trust he has betrayed. . . .
I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate.
I impeach him in the name, and by the virtue, of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated.
I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life.133
With a hundred interruptions the trial proceeded, as Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and others told the story of Hastings’ administration. When it became known that at noon on June 3 Sheridan would present the evidence concerning the begums of Oudh, the streets leading to Westminster Hall were crowded from eight in the morning with persons, many of high rank, anxious to find admittance. Some who had secured cards of admission sold them for fifty guineas ($1,500?) each. Sheridan understood that a dramatic performance was expected of him; he gave it. He spoke at four sittings; on the final day (June 13, 1788), after holding the floor for five hours, he sank exhausted into the arms of Burke, who embraced him. Gibbon, who was in the gallery, described Sheridan as “a good actor,” and remarked how well the orator looked when the historian called upon him the next morning.134
That speech was the climax of the trial. Each of the score of charges required investigation; the lords took their time, and may have dallied to let the effect of eloquence wear off, and let interest in the case be diverted to other events. These came. In October, 1788, King George went mad, quite seriously mad, borne down by the stress of the trial and the misconduct of his son. George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, was fat, good-natured, generous, wasteful, and amorous. He had maintained a succession of mistresses, and had accumulated debts which his father or the nation paid. In 1785 he had privately married Mrs. Maria Anne Fitzherbert, a devout Roman Catholic, already twice widowed, and six years older than the Prince. The Whigs, led by Fox, proposed to set up a regency under the Prince, who sat up through two nights waiting for the King to be declared incompetent. George III confused matters by having lucid intervals, in which he talked of Garrick and Johnson, sang snatches of Handel, and played the flute. In March, 1789, he recovered, shed his strait jacket, and resumed the forms of rule.
The French Revolution provided another diversion from the trial. Burke gave up the chase of Hastings and ran to the aid of Marie Antoinette. The immoderation of his speeches ended the remains of his popularity; he complained that the members of Parliament slipped away when he began to speak. Most of the press was hostile to him; he charged that £ 20,000 had been used in buying journalists to attack him and defend Hastings; and unquestionably a large part of Hastings’ fortune had been so spent.135 It must have been no surprise to Burke when, at last, eight years after the impeachment, the House of Lords acquitted Hastings (1795). The general feeling was that the verdict was just: the accused had in many respects been guilty, but he had saved India for England, and had been punished by a trial that had broken his health and his hopes and had left him tarnished in reputation and ruined in purse.
Hastings survived all his accusers. The East India Company rescued him from insolvency by voting him a gift of
£ 90,000. He bought back his family’s ancestral estate at Daylesford, restored it, and lived in Oriental luxury. In 1813, aged eighty-one, he was asked to testify on Indian affairs before the House of Commons; he was received there with acclamation and reverence, his services remembered, his sins washed away by time. Four years later he passed away, and of his tumultuous generation only one remained—the blind and imbecile King.
VII. ENGLAND AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
After almost exhausting himself in his war against the East India Company, Burke took on the French Revolution as his personal enemy, and in the course of this new campaign he made a major contribution to political philosophy.
He had predicted the Revolution twenty years before its coming. “Under such extreme straitness and distraction labors the whole of French finances, so far does their charge outrun their supply in every particular, that no man, … who has considered their affairs with any degree of attention or information, but must hourly look for some extraordinary convulsion in that whole system; the effect of which on France, and even on all Europe, it is difficult to conjecture.”136 In 1773 he visited France; at Versailles he saw Marie Antoinette, then dauphine; he never forgot that vision of youthful beauty, happiness, and pride. He formed a favorable opinion of the French nobility, and still more of the French clergy. He was shocked by the anti-Catholic, often antireligious, propaganda of the philosophes, and on his return to England he warned his countrymen against atheism as “the most horrid and cruel blow that can be offered to civil society.”137
When the Revolution came he was alarmed by the acclaim it received from his friend Fox, who hailed the fall of the Bastille as “the greatest event that ever happened in the world, and … the best.”138 Radical ideas stemming from the campaigns of Wilkes and the Society of Supporters of the Bill of Rights had slowly spread in England. One obscure writer, in 1761, proposed communism as a cure for all social ills except overpopulation, which, he feared, might cancel all attempts to relieve poverty.139 A Society for Commemorating the Revolution (of 1688) had been formed in 1788; its membership included prominent clergymen and peers. At its meeting on November 4, 1789, it was so stirred by a Unitarian preacher, Richard Price, that it sent an address of congratulations to the National Assembly at Paris, expressing the hope that “the glorious example given in France” might “encourage other nations to assert the inalienable rights of mankind.”140 The message was signed by the third Earl Stanhope, president of the society and brother-in-law of William Pitt.
That sermon and that message aroused Burke to fear and wrath. He was now sixty years old, and had reached the right to be conservative. He was religious, and owned a large estate. The French Revolution seemed to him not only “the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world,”141 but the most outrageous attack upon religion, property, order, and law. On February 9, 1790, he told the House of Commons that if any friend of his should concur in any measures tending to introduce into England such democracy as was taking form in France, he would renounce that friendship, however long established and dearly cherished. Fox soothed the orator with his famous compliment to Burke as his best educator; the break between the two was postponed.
In November, 1790, Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France, in the form of a letter (365 pages long) to “a gentleman in Paris.” Leader of the liberals during the American Revolution, Burke was now the hero of conservative England; George III expressed his delight with his old enemy. The book became the bible of courts and aristocracies; Catherine the Great, once the friend and darling of the philosophes, sent her congratulations to the man who had set out to dethrone them.142
Burke began with a reference to Dr. Price and the Society for Commemorating the Revolution. He deplored the entry of clergymen into political discussions; their business was to guide souls to Christian charity, not to political reform. He had no trust in the universal male suffrage that Price pleaded for; he thought the majority would be a worse tyrant than a king, and that democracy would degenerate into mob rule. Wisdom lies not in numbers but in experience. Nature knows nothing of equality. Political equality is a “monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel, in the obscure walks of laborious life, serves only to aggravate that real inequality, which it never can remove.”143 Aristocracy is inevitable; and the older it is, the better it will fulfill its function of silently establishing that social order without which there can be no stability, no security, and no liberty.144 Hereditary monarchy is good because it gives to government a unity and continuity without which the legal and social relations of the citizens would fall into a hectic and chaotic flux. Religion is good, because it helps to chain those unsocial impulses which run like subterranean fire beneath the surface of civilization, and which can be controlled only by the constant co-operation of state and church, law and creed, fear and reverence. Those French philosophers who undermined religious belief in the educated ranks of their people were foolishly loosing the reins that had kept men from becoming beasts.
Burke was revolted by the triumph of the mob at Versailles over “a mild and lawful monarch,” treating him with “more fury, outrage, and insult than ever any people” raised “against the most illegal usurper and the most sanguinary tyrant.”145 Here came the famous page that thrilled our youth:
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in—glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!* Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.146
Sir Philip Francis laughed at all this as romantic moonshine, and assured Burke that the Queen of France was a Messalina and a jade.147 So thought many patriotic Englishmen; Horace Walpole, however, affirmed that Burke had pictured Marie Antoinette “exactly as she appeared to me the first time I saw her when Dauphiness.”148
As the Revolution proceeded Burke continued his attack with a Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (January, 1791). In this he suggested that the governments of Europe should unite to check the revolt, and to restore the King of France to his traditional power. Fox was alarmed at this proposal, and in the House of Commons, on May 6, the friends who had fought shoulder to shoulder in so many campaigns came to a dramatic parting of the ways. Fox reiterated his praise of the Revolution. Burke rose in protest. “It is indiscreet,” he said, “at any period, but especially at my time of life, to provoke enemies, or give my friends occasion to desert me. Yet if my firm and steady adherence to the British constitution place me in such a dilemma I am ready to risk it.” Fox assured him that no severance of friendship was involved in their differences. “Yes, yes,” answered Burke, “there is a loss of friends. I know the price of my conduct. … Our friendship is at an end.”149 He never spoke to Fox again, except formally in their constrained union in the Hastings trial.
In his writings on the French Revolution Burke gave a classical expression to a conservative philosophy. Its first principle is to distrust the reasoning of an individual, however brilliant, if it conflicts with the traditions of the race. Just as a child cannot understand the reasons for parental cautions and prohibitions, so the individual,
who is a child compared with the race, cannot always understand the reasons for customs, conventions, and laws that embody the experience of many generations. Civilization would be impossible “if the practice of all moral duties, and the foundations of society, rested upon having their reasons made clear and demonstrative to every individual.”150 Even “prejudices” have their use; they prejudge present problems on the basis of past experience.
So the second element of conservatism is “prescription”: a tradition or an institution should be doubly reverenced and rarely changed if it is already written or embodied in the order of the society or the structure of the government. Private property is an example of prescription and of the apparent irrationality of wisdom: it seems unreasonable that one family should own so much, another so little, and even more unreasonable that the owner should be allowed to transmit his property to successors who have not lifted a hand to earn it; yet experience has found that men in general will not bestir themselves to work and study, or to laborious and expensive preparation, unless they may call the results of their efforts their own property, to be transmitted, in large measure, as they desire; and experience has shown that the possession of property is the best guarantee for the prudence of legislation and the continuity of the state.
A state is not merely an association of persons in a given space at a given moment; it is an association of individuals through extensive time. “Society is indeed a contract, … a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”;151 that continuity is our country. In this triune whole a present majority may be a minority in time; and the legislator must consider the rights of the past (through “prescription”) and of the future as well as those of the living present. Politics is, or should be, the art of adjusting the aims of clashing minorities with the good of the continuing group. Moreover, there are no absolute rights; these are metaphysical abstractions unknown to nature; there are only desires, powers, and circumstances; and “circumstances give to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect.”152 Expediency is sometimes more important than rights. “Politics ought to be adjusted not to [abstract] human reasonings but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.”153 “We must make use of existing materials.”154