Edmund Burke - The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12)

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow."

Is this our style of talk, when

"all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death"?

Talk not to me of what swarm of republics may come from this carcass! It is no carcass. Now, now, whilst we are talking, it is full of life and action. What say you to the Regicide empire of to-day? Tell me, my friend, do its terrors appall you into an abject submission, or rouse you to a vigorous defence? But do—I no longer prevent it—do go on,—look into futurity. Has this empire nothing to alarm you when all struggle against it is over, when mankind shall be silent before it, when all nations shall be disarmed, disheartened, and truly divided by a treacherous peace? Its malignity towards humankind will subsist with undiminished heat, whilst the means of giving it effect must proceed, and every means of resisting it must inevitably and rapidly decline.

Against alarm on their politic and military empire these are the writer's sedative remedies. But he leaves us sadly in the dark with regard to the moral consequences, which he states have threatened to demolish a system of civilization under which his country enjoys a prosperity unparalleled in the history of man. We had emerged from our first terrors, but here we sink into them again,—however, only to shake them off upon the credit of his being a man of very sanguine hopes.

Against the moral terrors of this successful empire of barbarism, though he has given us no consolation here, in another place he has formed other securities,—securities, indeed, which will make even the enormity of the crimes and atrocities of France a benefit to the world. We are to be cured by her diseases. We are to grow proud of our Constitution upon, the distempers of theirs. Governments throughout all Europe are to become much stronger by this event. This, too, comes in the favorite mode of doubt and perhaps . "To those," he says, "who meditate on the workings of the human mind, a doubt may perhaps arise, whether the effects which I have described," (namely, the change he supposes to be wrought on the public mind with regard to the French doctrines,) "though at present a salutary check to the dangerous spirit of innovation, may not prove favorable to abuses of power, by creating a timidity in the just cause of liberty." Here the current of our apprehensions takes a contrary course. Instead of trembling for the existence of our government from the spirit of licentiousness and anarchy, the author would make us believe we are to tremble for our liberties from the great accession of power which is to accrue to government.

I believe I have read in some author who criticized the productions of the famous Jurieu, that it is not very wise in people who dash away in prophecy, to fix the time of accomplishment at too short a period. Mr. Brothers may meditate upon this at his leisure. He was a melancholy prognosticator, and has had the fate of melancholy men. But they who prophesy pleasant things get great present applause; and in days of calamity people have something else to think of: they lose, in their feeling of their distress, all memory of those who flattered them in their prosperity. But merely for the credit of the prediction, nothing could have happened more unluckily for the noble lord's sanguine expectations of the amendment of the public mind, and the consequent greater security to government, from the examples in France, than what happened in the week after the publication of his hebdomadal system. I am not sure it was not in the very week one of the most violent and dangerous seditions broke out that we have seen in several years. This sedition, menacing to the public security, endangering the sacred person of the king, and violating in the most audacious manner the authority of Parliament, surrounded our sovereign with a murderous yell and war-whoop for that peace which the noble lord considers as a cure for all domestic disturbances and dissatisfactions.

So far as to this general cure for popular disorders. As for government, the two Houses of Parliament, instead of being guided by the speculations of the Fourth Week in October, and throwing up new barriers against the dangerous power of the crown, which the noble lord considered as no unplausible subject of apprehension, the two Houses of Parliament thought fit to pass two acts for the further strengthening of that very government against a most dangerous and wide-spread faction.

Unluckily, too, for this kind of sanguine speculation, on the very first day of the ever-famed "last week of October," a large, daring, and seditious meeting was publicly held, from which meeting this atrocious attempt against the sovereign publicly originated.

No wonder that the author should tell us that the whole consideration might be varied whilst he was writing those pages . In one, and that the most material instance, his speculations not only might be, but were at that very time, entirely overset. Their war-cry for peace with France was the same with that of this gentle author, but in a different note. His is the gemitus columbæ , cooing and wooing fraternity; theirs the funereal screams of birds of night calling for their ill-omened paramours. But they are both songs of courtship. These Regicides considered a Regicide peace as a cure for all their evils; and so far as I can find, they showed nothing at all of the timidity which the noble lord apprehends in what they call the just cause of liberty.

However, it seems, that, notwithstanding these awkward appearances with regard to the strength of government, he has still his fears and doubts about our liberties. To a free people this would be a matter of alarm; but this physician of October has in his shop all sorts of salves for all sorts of sores. It is curious that they all come from the inexhaustible drug-shop of the Regicide dispensary. It costs him nothing to excite terror, because he lays it at his pleasure. He finds a security for this danger to liberty from the wonderful wisdom to be taught to kings, to nobility, and even, to the lowest of the people, by the late transactions.

I confess I was always blind enough to regard the French Revolution, in the act, and much more in the example, as one of the greatest calamities that had ever fallen upon mankind. I now find that in its effects it is to be the greatest of all blessings. If so, we owe amende honorable to the Jacobins. They, it seems, were right; and if they were right a little earlier than we are, it only shows that they exceeded us in sagacity. If they brought out their right ideas somewhat in a disorderly manner, it must be remembered that great zeal produces some irregularity; but when greatly in the right, it must be pardoned by those who are very regularly and temperately in the wrong. The master Jacobins had told me this a thousand times. I never believed the masters; nor do I now find myself disposed to give credit to the disciple. I will not much dispute with our author, which party has the best of this Revolution,—that which is from thence to learn wisdom, or that which from the same event has obtained power. The dispute on the preference of strength to wisdom may perhaps be decided as Horace has decided the controversy between Art and Nature. I do not like to leave all the power to my adversary, and to secure nothing to myself but the untimely wisdom that is taught by the consequences of folly. I do not like my share in the partition: because to his strength my adversary may possibly add a good deal of cunning, whereas my wisdom may totally fail in producing to me the same degree of strength. But to descend from the author's generalities a little nearer to meaning, the security given to liberty is this,—"that governments will have learned not to precipitate themselves into embarrassments by speculative wars. Sovereigns and princes will not forget that steadiness, moderation, and economy are the best supports of the eminence on which they stand." There seems to me a good deal of oblique reflection in this lesson. As to the lesson itself, it is at all times a good one. One would think, however, by this formal introduction of it as a recommendation of the arrangements proposed by the author, it had never been taught before, either by precept or by experience,—and that these maxims are discoveries reserved for a Regicide peace. But is it permitted to ask what security it affords to the liberty of the subject, that the prince is pacific or frugal? The very contrary has happened in our history. Our best securities for freedom have been obtained from princes who were either warlike, or prodigal, or both.