Complete Works of Edmund Burke

by Edmund Burke

  II. That Mr. Lumsdaine, the officer employed to reduce those disordered parts of the province to submission, after several advantages gained over the Rajah and his adherents, and expelling him from the country, did represent the utter impossibility of bringing it to a permanent settlement “merely by forcible methods; as in any of his [the Rajah’s] incursions it would not be necessary to bring even a force with him, as the zemindars [landed proprietors and freeholders] are much attached to the Rajah, whom they consider as their hereditary prince, and never fail to assist him, and that his rebellion against government is not looked on as a crime”: and Mr. Lumsdaine declared it “as his clear opinion, that the allowing the said Rajah a pension suitable to his rank and influence in the country would be the most certain mode of obtaining a permanent peace,” — alleging, among other cogent reasons, “that the expense of the force necessary to be employed to subdue the country might be spared, and employed elsewhere, and that the people would return to their villages with their cattle and effects, and of course government have some security for the revenue, whereas at present they have none.” And the representation containing that prudent and temperate counsel, given by a military man of undoubted information and perfect experience in the local circumstances of the country, was transmitted by the Resident, Bristow, to the said Warren Hastings, who did wilfully and criminally omit to order any relief to the said Rajah in conformity to the general sense and wishes of the inhabitants, a compliance with whose so reasonable an expectation his duty in restoring the tranquillity of the country and in retrieving the honor of the English government did absolutely require; but instead of making such provision, a price was set upon his head, and several bodies of British troops being employed to pursue him, after many skirmishes and much bloodshed and mutual waste of the country, the said Rajah, honored and respected by the natives, was hunted down, and at length killed in a thicket.

  REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE

  This political pamphlet first appeared in November 1790 and is widely considered to be one of the best-known intellectual attacks against the French Revolution. The text is a defining tract of modern conservatism, as well as an important contribution to international theory; celebrated for its thoroughness, rhetorical skill and literary power, the pamphlet has since established its reputation as a classic text of political theory.

  In 1789, soon after the fall of the Bastille, the French aristocrat Charles-Jean-François Depont asked Burke for his impressions of the Revolution. After reading Richard Price’s A Discourse on the Love of our Country in January of 1790, his second draft of these impressions became Reflections on the Revolution in France. Following its publication, the pamphlet was an instant bestseller, with thirteen thousand copies purchased in the first five weeks and by the following September it had gone through eleven editions. One particular aspect of its appeal to contemporary readers lay in the highly wrought accounts of the mob’s violent treatment of the French king and queen.

  Burke argues that the French Revolution would end disastrously because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignore the complexities of human nature and society. He focuses on the practicality of solutions instead of the metaphysics, writing, “What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor”. As a Whig, he expressly repudiates the belief in divinely appointed monarchic authority and the idea that a people have no right to depose an oppressive government. Nevertheless, he advocates central roles for private property, tradition, and adherence to values regardless of their rational basis to give citizens a stake in their nation’s social order. He argues for gradual, constitutional reform, not revolution (in every case except the most qualified case), emphasising that a political doctrine founded upon abstractions such as liberty and the rights of man could be easily abused to justify tyranny.

  He goes on to predict that the Revolution’s concomitant disorder would make the army “mutinous and full of faction”, and then a “popular general”, commanding the soldiery’s allegiance, would become “master of your assembly, the master of your whole republic”. Though he may have been thinking of Lafayette, Napoleon would fulfil this prophecy on the 18th Brumaire, two years following Burke’s death.

  Most of the House of Commons disagreed with Burke and in turn his popularity declined. As the French Revolution broke into factions, the Whig Party broke into two factions, known as the New Whig party and the Old Whig party. As founder of the Old Whigs, Burke always took the opportunity to engage in debate with the New Whigs about French Jacobinism. After trying to loosen the Protestant minority’s control of Irish government, he was voted out of the House of Commons with a large pension. He later adopted French and Irish children, believing himself correct in rescuing them from government oppression. Before dying, he ordered his family to bury him secretly, believing his corpse would be a political target for desecration should the Jacobins prevail in England.

  The first edition’s title page

  ‘Promis’d horrors of the French invasion, or forcible reasons for negotiating a regicide peace’ Vide the authority of Edmund Burke — hand-coloured etching and aquatint, published on 20 October 1796

  REFLECTIONS

  ON THE

  REVOLUTION IN FRANCE,

  AND ON

  THE PROCEEDINGS IN CERTAIN SOCIETIES IN LONDON RELATIVE TO THAT EVENT:

  IN A LETTER

  INTENDED TO HAVE BEEN SENT TO A GENTLEMAN IN PARIS.

  1790.

  It may not be unnecessary to inform the reader that the following Reflections had their origin in a correspondence between the author and a very young gentleman at Paris, who did him the honor of desiring his opinion upon the important transactions which then, and ever since have, so much occupied the attention of all men. An answer was written some time in the month of October, 1789; but it was kept back upon prudential considerations. That letter is alluded to in the beginning of the following sheets. It has been since forwarded to the person to whom it was addressed. The reasons for the delay in sending it were assigned in a short letter to the same gentleman. This produced on his part a new and pressing application for the author’s sentiments.

  The author began a second and more full discussion on the subject. This he had some thoughts of publishing early in the last spring; but the matter gaining upon him, he found that what he had undertaken not only far exceeded the measure of a letter, but that its importance required rather a more detailed consideration than at that time he had any leisure to bestow upon it. However, having thrown down his first thoughts in the form of a letter, and, indeed, when he sat down to write, having intended it for a private letter, he found it difficult to change the form of address, when his sentiments had grown into a greater extent and had received another direction. A different plan, he is sensible, might be more favorable to a commodious division and distribution of his matter.

  REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.

  Dear Sir, — You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness, for my thoughts on the late proceedings in France. I will not give you reason to imagine that I think my sentiments of such value as to wish myself to be solicited about them. They are of too little consequence to be very anxiously either communicated or withheld. It was from attention to you, and to you only, that I hesitated at the time when you first desired to receive them. In the first letter I had the honor to write to you, and which at length I send, I wrote neither for nor from any description of men; nor shall I in this. My errors, if any, are my own. My reputation alone is to answer for them.

  You see, Sir, by the long letter I have transmitted to you, that, though I do most heartily wish that France may be animated by a spirit of rational liberty, and that I think you bound, in all honest policy, to provide a permanent body in which that spirit may reside, and an effe
ctual organ by which it may act, it is my misfortune to entertain great doubts concerning several material points in your late transactions.

  You imagined, when you wrote last, that I might possibly be reckoned among the approvers of certain proceedings in France, from the solemn public seal of sanction they have received from two clubs of gentlemen in London, called the Constitutional Society, and the Revolution Society.

  I certainly have the honor to belong to more clubs than one in which the Constitution of this kingdom and the principles of the glorious Revolution are held in high reverence; and I reckon myself among the most forward in my zeal for maintaining that Constitution and those principles in their utmost purity and vigor. It is because I do so that I think it necessary for me that there should be no mistake. Those who cultivate the memory of our Revolution, and those who are attached to the Constitution of this kingdom, will take good care how they are involved with persons who, under the pretext of zeal towards the Revolution and Constitution, too frequently wander from their true principles, and are ready on every occasion to depart from the firm, but cautious and deliberate, spirit which produced the one and which presides in the other. Before I proceed to answer the more material particulars in your letter, I shall beg leave to give you such information as I have been able to obtain of the two clubs which have thought proper, as bodies, to interfere in the concerns of France, — first assuring you that I am not, and that I have never been, a member of either of those societies.

  The first, calling itself the Constitutional Society, or Society for Constitutional Information, or by some such title, is, I believe, of seven or eight years’ standing. The institution of this society appears to be of a charitable, and so far of a laudable nature: it was intended for the circulation, at the expense of the members, of many books which few others would be at the expense of buying, and which might lie on the hands of the booksellers, to the great loss of an useful body of men. Whether the books so charitably circulated were ever as charitably read is more than I know. Possibly several of them have been exported to France, and, like goods not in request here, may with you have found a market. I have heard much talk of the lights to be drawn from books that are sent from hence. What improvements they have had in their passage (as it is said some liquors are meliorated by crossing the sea) I cannot tell; but I never heard a man of common judgment or the least degree of information speak a word in praise of the greater part of the publications circulated by that society; nor have their proceedings been accounted, except by some of themselves, as of any serious consequence.

  Your National Assembly seems to entertain much the same opinion that I do of this poor charitable club. As a nation, you reserved the whole stock of your eloquent acknowledgments for the Revolution Society, when their fellows in the Constitutional were in equity entitled to some share. Since you have selected the Revolution Society as the great object of your national thanks and praises, you will think me excusable in making its late conduct the subject of my observations. The National Assembly of France has given importance to these gentlemen by adopting them; and they return the favor by acting as a committee in England for extending the principles of the National Assembly. Henceforward we must consider them as a kind of privileged persons, as no inconsiderable members in the diplomatic body. This is one among the revolutions which have given splendor to obscurity and distinction to undiscerned merit. Until very lately I do not recollect to have heard of this club. I am quite sure that it never occupied a moment of my thoughts, — nor, I believe, those of any person out of their own set. I find, upon inquiry, that, on the anniversary of the Revolution in 1688, a club of Dissenters, but of what denomination I know not, have long had the custom of hearing a sermon in one of their churches, and that afterwards they spent the day cheerfully, as other clubs do, at the tavern. But I never heard that any public measure or political system, much less that the merits of the constitution of any foreign nation, had been the subject of a formal proceeding at their festivals, until, to my inexpressible surprise, I found them in a sort of public capacity, by a congratulatory address, giving an authoritative sanction to the proceedings of the National Assembly in France.

  In the ancient principles and conduct of the club, so far at least as they were declared, I see nothing to which I could take exception. I think it very probable, that, for some purpose, new members may have entered among them, — and that some truly Christian politicians, who love to dispense benefits, but are careful to conceal the hand which distributes the dole, may have made them the instruments of their pious designs. Whatever I may have reason to suspect concerning private management, I shall speak of nothing as of a certainty but what is public.

  For one, I should be sorry to be thought directly or indirectly concerned in their proceedings. I certainly take my full share, along with the rest of the world, in my individual and private capacity, in speculating on what has been done, or is doing, on the public stage, in any place, ancient or modern, — in the republic of Rome, or the republic of Paris; but having no general apostolical mission, being a citizen of a particular state, and being bound up, in a considerable degree, by its public will, I should think it at least improper and irregular for me to open a formal public correspondence with the actual government of a foreign nation, without the express authority of the government under which I live.

  I should be still more unwilling to enter into that correspondence under anything like an equivocal description, which to many, unacquainted with our usages, might make the address in which I joined appear as the act of persons in some sort of corporate capacity, acknowledged by the laws of this kingdom, and authorized to speak the sense of some part of it. On account of the ambiguity and uncertainty of unauthorized general descriptions, and of the deceit which may be practised under them, and not from mere formality, the House of Commons would reject the most sneaking petition for the most trifling object, under that mode of signature to which you have thrown open the folding-doors of your presence-chamber, and have ushered into your National Assembly with as much ceremony and parade, and with as great a bustle of applause, as if you had been visited by the whole representative majesty of the whole English nation. If what this society has thought proper to send forth had been a piece of argument, it would have signified little whose argument it was. It would be neither the more nor the less convincing on account of the party it came from. But this is only a vote and resolution. It stands solely on authority; and in this case it is the mere authority of individuals, few of whom appear. Their signatures ought, in my opinion, to have been annexed to their instrument. The world would then have the means of knowing how many they are, who they are, and of what value their opinions may be, from their personal abilities, from their knowledge, their experience, or their lead and authority in this state. To me, who am but a plain man, the proceeding looks a little too refined and too ingenious; it has too much the air of a political stratagem, adopted for the sake of giving, under a high-sounding name, an importance to the public declarations of this club, which, when the matter came to be closely inspected, they did not altogether so well deserve. It is a policy that has very much the complexion of a fraud.

  I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause, in the whole course of my public conduct. I think I envy liberty as little as they do to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years
ago, have felicitated France on her enjoyment of a government, (for she then had a government,) without inquiry what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has broke prison upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance.

  When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with solidity and property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too; and without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate, insulated, private men. But liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power, — and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers.