Complete Works of Edmund Burke

by Edmund Burke

  The rules and definitions of prudence can rarely be exact, never universal. I do not deny, that, in small, truckling states, a timely compromise with power has often been the means, and the only means; of drawling out their puny existence; but a great state is too much envied, too much dreaded, to find safety in humiliation. To be secure, it must be respected. Power and eminence and consideration are things not to be begged; they must be commanded: and they who supplicate for mercy from others can never hope for justice through themselves. What justice they are to obtain, as the alms of an enemy, depends upon his character; and that they ought well to know before they implicitly confide.

  Much controversy there has been in Parliament, and not a little amongst us out of doors, about the instrumental means of this nation towards the maintenance of her dignity and the assertion of her rights. On the most elaborate and correct detail of facts, the result seems to be, that at no time has the wealth and power of Great Britain been so considerable as it is at this very perilous moment. We have a, vast interest to preserve, and we possess great means of preserving it: but it is to be remembered that the artificer may be incumbered by his tools, and that resources may be among impediments. If wealth is the obedient and laborious slave of virtue and of public honor, then wealth is in its place and has its use; but if this order is changed, and honor is to be sacrificed to the conservation of riches, riches, which have neither eyes nor hands, nor anything truly vital in them, cannot long survive the being of their vivifying powers, their legitimate masters, and their potent protectors. If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free: if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed. We are bought by the enemy with the treasure from our own coffers. Too great a sense of the value of a subordinate interest may be the very source of its danger, as well as the certain ruin of interests of a superior order. Often has a man lost his all because he would not submit to hazard all in defending it. A display of our wealth before robbers is not the way to restrain their boldness or to lessen their rapacity. This display is made, I know, to persuade the people of England that thereby we shall awe the enemy and improve the terms of our capitulation: it is made, not that we should fight with more animation, but that we should supplicate with better hopes. We are mistaken. We have an enemy to deal with who never regarded our contest as a measuring and weighing of purses. He is the Gaul that puts his sword into the scale. He is more tempted with our wealth as booty than terrified with it as power. But let us be rich or poor, let us be either in what proportion we may, Nature is false or this is true, that, where the essential public force (of which money is but a part) is in any degree upon a par in a conflict between nations, that state which is resolved to hazard its existence rather than to abandon its objects must have an infinite advantage over that which is resolved to yield rather than to carry its resistance beyond a certain point. Humanly speaking, that people which bounds its efforts only with its being must give the law to that nation which will not push its opposition beyond its convenience.

  If we look to nothing but our domestic condition, the state of the nation is full even to plethora; but if we imagine that this country can long maintain its blood and its food as disjoined from the community of mankind, such an opinion does not deserve refutation as absurd, but pity as insane.

  I do not know that such an improvident and stupid selfishness deserves the discussion which perhaps I may bestow upon it hereafter. We cannot arrange with our enemy, in the present conjuncture, without abandoning the interest of mankind. If we look only to our own petty peculium in the war, we have had some advantages, — advantages ambiguous in their nature, and dearly bought. We have not in the slightest degree impaired the strength of the common enemy in any one of those points in which his particular force consists, — at the same time that new enemies to ourselves, new allies to the Regicide Republic, have been made out of the wrecks and fragments of the general confederacy. So far as to the selfish part. As composing a part of the community of Europe, and interested in its fate, it is not easy to conceive a state of things more doubtful and perplexing. When Louis the Fourteenth had made himself master of one of the largest and most important provinces of Spain, — when he had in a manner overrun Lombardy, and was thundering at the gates of Turin, — when he had mastered almost all Germany on this side the Rhine, — when he was on the point of ruining the august fabric of the Empire, — when, with the Elector of Bavaria in his alliance, hardly anything interposed between him and Vienna, — when the Turk hung with a mighty force over the Empire on the other side, — I do not know that in the beginning of 1704 (that is, in the third year of the renovated war with Louis the Fourteenth) the state of Europe was so truly alarming. To England it certainly was not. Holland (and Holland is a matter to England of value inestimable) was then powerful, was then independent, and, though greatly endangered, was then full of energy and spirit. But the great resource of Europe was in England: not in a sort of England detached from the rest of the world, and amusing herself with the puppet-show of a naval power, (it can be no better, whilst all the sources of that power, and of every sort of power, are precarious,) but in that sort of England who considered herself as embodied with Europe, but in that sort of England who, sympathetic with the adversity or the happiness of mankind, felt that nothing in human affairs was foreign to her. We may consider it as a sure axiom, that, as, on the one hand, no confederacy of the least effect or duration can exist against France, of which England is not only a part, but the head, so neither can England pretend to cope with France but as connected with the body of Christendom.

  Our account of the war, as a war of communion, to the very point in which we began to throw out lures, oglings, and glances for peace, was a war of disaster, and of little else. The independent advantages obtained by us at the beginning of the war, and which were made at the expense of that common cause, if they deceive us about our largest and our surest interest, are to be reckoned amongst our heaviest losses.

  The Allies, and Great Britain amongst the rest, (and perhaps amongst the foremost,) have been miserably deluded by this great, fundamental error: that it was in our power to make peace with this monster of a state, whenever we chose to forget the crimes that made it great and the designs that made it formidable. People imagined that their ceasing to resist was the sure way to be secure. This “pale cast of thought” sicklied over all their enterprises, and turned all their politics awry. They could not, or rather they would not, read, in the most unequivocal declarations of the enemy, and in his uniform conduct, that more safety was to be found in the most arduous war than in the friendship of that kind of being. Its hostile amity can be obtained on no terms that do not imply an inability hereafter to resist its designs. This great, prolific error (I mean that peace was always in our power) has been the cause that rendered the Allies indifferent about the direction of the war, and persuaded them that they might always risk a choice and even a change in its objects. They seldom improved any advantage, — hoping that the enemy, affected by it, would make a proffer of peace. Hence it was that all their early victories have been followed almost immediately with the usual effects of a defeat, whilst all the advantages obtained by the Regicides have been followed by the consequences that were natural. The discomfitures which the Republic of Assassins has suffered have uniformly called forth new exertions, which not only repaired old losses, but prepared new conquests. The losses of the Allies, on the contrary, (no provision having been made on the speculation of such an event,) have been followed by desertion, by dismay, by disunion, by a dereliction of their policy, by a flight from their principles, by an admiration of the enemy, by mutual accusations, by a distrust in every member of the Alliance of its fellow, of its cause, its power, and its courage.

  Great difficulties in consequence of our erroneous policy, as I have said, press upon every side of us. Far from desiring to conceal or even to palliate the evil in the representation, I wish to lay it down as my foundation, that never greater existed. In a moment when sud
den panic is apprehended, it may be wise for a while to conceal some great public disaster, or to reveal it by degrees, until the minds of the people have time to be re-collected, that their understanding may have leisure to rally, and that more steady councils may prevent their doing something desperate under the first impressions of rage or terror. But with regard to a general state of things, growing out of events and causes already known in the gross, there is no piety in the fraud that covers its true nature; because nothing but erroneous resolutions can be the result of false representations. Those measures, which in common distress might be available, in greater are no better than playing with the evil. That the effort may bear a proportion to the exigence, it is fit it should be known, — known in its quality, in its extent, and in all the circumstances which attend it. Great reverses of fortune there have been, and great embarrassments in council: a principled regicide enemy possessed of the most important part of Europe, and struggling for the rest; within ourselves a total relaxation of all authority, whilst a cry is raised against it, as if it were the most ferocious of all despotism. A worse phenomenon: our government disowned by the most efficient member of its tribunals, — ill-supported by any of their constituent parts, — and the highest tribunal of all (from causes not for our present purpose to examine) deprived of all that dignity and all that efficiency which might enforce, or regulate, or, if the case required it, might supply the want of every other court. Public prosecutions are become little better than schools for treason, — of no use but to improve the dexterity of criminals in the mystery of evasion, or to show with what complete impunity men may conspire against the commonwealth, with what safety assassins may attempt its awful head. Everything is secure, except what the laws have made sacred; everything is tameness and languor that is not fury and faction. Whilst the distempers of a relaxed fibre prognosticate and prepare all the morbid force of convulsion in the body of the state, the steadiness of the physician is overpowered by the very aspect of the disease. The doctor of the Constitution, pretending to underrate what he is not able to contend with, shrinks from his own operation. He doubts and questions the salutary, but critical, terrors of the cautery and the knife. He takes a poor credit even from his defeat, and covers impotence under the mask of lenity. He praises the moderation of the laws, as in his hands he sees them baffled and despised. Is all this because in our day the statutes of the kingdom are not engrossed in as firm a character and imprinted in as black and legible a type as ever? No! the law is a clear, but it is a dead letter. Dead and putrid, it is insufficient to save the state, but potent to infect and to kill. Living law, full of reason, and of equity and justice, (as it is, or it should not exist,) ought to be severe, and awful too, — or the words of menace, whether written on the parchment roll of England or cut into the brazen tablet of Borne, will excite nothing but contempt. How comes it that in all the state prosecutions of magnitude, from the Revolution to within these two or three years, the crown has scarcely ever retired disgraced and defeated from its courts? Whence this alarming change? By a connection easily felt, and not impossible to be traced to its cause, all the parts of the state have their correspondence and consent. They who bow to the enemy abroad will not be of power to subdue the conspirator at home. It is impossible not to observe, that, in proportion as we approximate to the poisonous jaws of anarchy, the fascination grows irresistible. In proportion as we are attracted towards the focus of illegality, irreligion, and desperate enterprise, all the venomous and blighting insects of the state are awakened into life. The promise of the year is blasted and shrivelled and burned up before them. Our most salutary and most beautiful institutions yield nothing but dust and smut; the harvest of our law is no more than stubble. It is in the nature of these eruptive diseases in the state to sink in by fits and reappear. But the fuel of the malady remains, and in my opinion is not in the smallest degree mitigated in its malignity, though it waits the favorable moment of a freer communication with the source of regicide to exert and to increase its force.

  Is it that the people are changed, that the commonwealth cannot be protected by its laws? I hardly think it. On the contrary, I conceive that these things happen because men are not changed, but remain always what they always were; they remain what the bulk of us ever must be, when abandoned to our vulgar propensities, without guide, leader, or control: that is, made to be full of a blind elevation in prosperity; to despise untried dangers; to be overpowered with unexpected reverses; to find no clew in a labyrinth of difficulties; to get out of a present inconvenience with any risk of future ruin; to follow and to bow to fortune; to admire successful, though wicked enterprise, and to imitate what we admire; to contemn the government which announces danger from sacrilege and regicide whilst they are only in their infancy and their struggle, but which finds nothing that can alarm in their adult state, and in the power and triumph of those destructive principles. In a mass we cannot be left to ourselves. We must have leaders. If none will undertake to lead us right, we shall find guides who will contrive to conduct us to shame and ruin.

  We are in a war of a peculiar nature. It is not with an ordinary community, which is hostile or friendly as passion or as interest may veer about, — not with a state which makes war through wantonness, and abandons it through lassitude. We are at war with a system which by its essence is inimical to all other governments, and which makes peace or war as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion. It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war. It has, by its essence, a faction of opinion and of interest and of enthusiasm in every country. To us it is a Colossus which bestrides our Channel. It has one foot on a foreign shore, the other upon the British soil. Thus advantaged, if it can at all exist, it must finally prevail. Nothing can so completely ruin any of the old governments, ours in particular, as the acknowledgment, directly or by implication, of any kind of superiority in this new power. This acknowledgment we make, if, in a bad or doubtful situation of our affairs, we solicit peace, or if we yield to the modes of new humiliation in which alone she is content to give us an hearing. By that means the terms cannot be of our choosing, — no, not in any part.

  It is laid in the unalterable constitution of things, — None can aspire to act greatly but those who are of force greatly to suffer. They who make their arrangements in the first run of misadventure, and in a temper of mind the common fruit of disappointment and dismay, put a seal on their calamities. To their power they take a security against any favors which they might hope from the usual inconstancy of fortune. I am therefore, my dear friend, invariably of your opinion, (though full of respect for those who think differently,) that neither the time chosen for it, nor the manner of soliciting a negotiation, were properly considered, — even though I had allowed (I hardly shall allow) that with the horde of Regicides we could by any selection of time or use of means obtain anything at all deserving the name of peace.

  In one point we are lucky. The Regicide has received our advances with scorn. We have an enemy to whose virtues we can owe nothing, but on this occasion we are infinitely obliged to one of his vices. We owe more to his insolence than to our own precaution. The haughtiness by which the proud repel us has this of good in it, — that, in making us keep our distance, they must keep their distance too. In the present case, the pride of the Regicide may be our safety. He has given time for our reason to operate, and for British dignity to recover from its surprise. From first to last he has rejected all our advances. Far as we have gone, he has still left a way open to our retreat.

  There is always an augury to be taken of what a peace is likely to be from the preliminary steps that are made to bring it about. We may gather something from the time in which the first overtures are made, from the quarter whence they come, from the manner in which they are received. These discover the temper of the parties. If your enemy offers peace in the moment of success, it indicates that he is satisfied with something. It shows that there are limits to his ambition or his resentment. If he offers nothing un
der misfortune, it is probable that it is more painful to him to abandon the prospect of advantage than to endure calamity. If he rejects solicitation, and will not give even a nod to the suppliants for peace, until a change in the fortune of the war threatens him with ruin, then I think it evident that he wishes nothing more than to disarm his adversary to gain time. Afterwards a question arises, Which of the parties is likely to obtain the greater advantages by continuing disarmed and by the use of time?

  With these few plain indications in our minds, it will not be improper to reconsider the conduct of the enemy together with our own, from the day that a question of peace has been in agitation. In considering this part of the question, I do not proceed on my own hypothesis. I suppose, for a moment, that this body of Regicide, calling itself a Republic, is a politic person, with whom something deserving the name of peace may be made. On that supposition, let us examine our own proceeding. Let us compute the profit it has brought, and the advantage that it is likely to bring hereafter. A peace too eagerly sought is not always the sooner obtained. The discovery of vehement wishes generally frustrates their attainment, and your adversary has gained a great advantage over you when he finds you impatient to conclude a treaty. There is in reserve not only something of dignity, but a great deal of prudence too. A sort of courage belongs to negotiation, as well as to operations of the field. A negotiator must often seem willing to hazard the whole issue of his treaty, if he wishes to secure any one material point.

  The Regicides were the first to declare war. We are the first to sue for peace. In proportion to the humility and perseverance we have shown in our addresses has been the obstinacy of their arrogance in rejecting our suit. The patience of their pride seems to have been worn out with the importunity of our courtship. Disgusted as they are with a conduct so different from all the sentiments by which they are themselves filled, they think to put an end to our vexatious solicitation by redoubling their insults.