The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12). Edmund Burke

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СКАЧАТЬ is ready to blaspheme his God, to insult his king, and to libel the Constitution of his country, without any provocation from me or any encouragement from his Grace. I assure him that I shall not be guilty of the injustice of charging Mr. Paine's next work against religion and human society upon his Grace's excellent speech in the House of Lords. I farther assure this noble Duke that I neither encouraged nor provoked that worthy citizen to seek for plenty, liberty, safety, justice, or lenity, in the famine, in the prisons, in the decrees of Convention, in the revolutionary tribunal, and in the guillotine of Paris, rather than quietly to take up with what he could find in the glutted markets, the unbarricadoed streets, the drowsy Old Bailey judges, or, at worst, the airy, wholesome pillory of Old England. The choice of country was his own taste. The writings were the effects of his own zeal. In spite of his friend Dr. Priestley, he was a free agent. I admit, indeed, that my praises of the British government, loaded with all its incumbrances, clogged with its peers and its beef, its parsons and its pudding, its commons and its beer, and its dull slavish liberty of going about just as one pleases, had something to provoke a jockey of Norfolk,14 who was inspired with the resolute ambition of becoming a citizen of France, to do something which might render him worthy of naturalization in that grand asylum of persecuted merit, something which should entitle him to a place in the senate of the adoptive country of all the gallant, generous, and humane. This, I say, was possible. But the truth is, (with great deference to his Grace I say it,) Citizen Paine acted without any provocation at all; he acted solely from the native impulses of his own excellent heart.

      His Grace, like an able orator, as he is, begins with giving me a great deal of praise for talents which I do not possess. He does this to entitle himself, on the credit of this gratuitous kindness, to exaggerate my abuse of the parts which his bounty, and not that of Nature, has bestowed upon me. In this, too, he has condescended to copy Mr. Erskine. These priests (I hope they will excuse me, I mean priests of the Rights of Man) begin by crowning me with their flowers and their fillets, and bedewing me with their odors, as a preface to their knocking me on the head with their consecrated axes. I have injured, say they, the Constitution; and I have abandoned the Whig party and the Whig principles that I professed. I do not mean, my dear Sir, to defend myself against his Grace. I have not much interest in what the world shall think or say of me; as little has the world an interest in what I shall think or say of any one in it; and I wish that his Grace had suffered an unhappy man to enjoy, in his retreat, the melancholy privileges of obscurity and sorrow. At any rate, I have spoken and I have written on the subject. If I have written or spoken so poorly as to be quite forgot, a fresh apology will not make a more lasting impression. "I must let the tree lie as it falls." Perhaps I must take some shame to myself. I confess that I have acted on my own principles of government, and not on those of his Grace, which are, I dare say, profound and wise, but which I do not pretend to understand. As to the party to which he alludes, and which has long taken its leave of me, I believe the principles of the book which he condemns are very conformable to the opinions of many of the most considerable and most grave in that description of politicians. A few, indeed, who, I admit, are equally respectable in all points, differ from me, and talk his Grace's language. I am too feeble to contend with them. They have the field to themselves. There are others, very young and very ingenious persons, who form, probably, the largest part of what his Grace, I believe, is pleased to consider as that party. Some of them were not born into the world, and all of them were children, when I entered into that connection. I give due credit to the censorial brow, to the broad phylacteries, and to the imposing gravity of those magisterial rabbins and doctors in the cabala of political science. I admit that "wisdom is as the gray hair to man, and that learning is like honorable old age." But, at a time when liberty is a good deal talked of, perhaps I might be excused, if I caught something of the general indocility. It might not be surprising, if I lengthened my chain a link or two, and, in an age of relaxed discipline, gave a trifling indulgence to my own notions. If that could be allowed, perhaps I might sometimes (by accident, and without an unpardonable crime) trust as much to my own very careful and very laborious, though perhaps somewhat purblind disquisitions, as to their soaring, intuitive, eagle-eyed authority. But the modern liberty is a precious thing. It must not be profaned by too vulgar an use. It belongs only to the chosen few, who are born to the hereditary representation of the whole democracy, and who leave nothing at all, no, not the offal, to us poor outcasts of the plebeian race.

      Amongst those gentlemen who came to authority as soon or sooner than they came of age I do not mean to include his Grace. With all those native titles to empire over our minds which distinguish the others, he has a large share of experience. He certainly ought to understand the British Constitution better than I do. He has studied it in the fundamental part. For one election I have seen, he has been concerned in twenty. Nobody is less of a visionary theorist; nobody has drawn his speculations more from practice. No peer has condescended to superintend with more vigilance the declining franchises of the poor commons. "With thrice great Hermes he has outwatched the Bear." Often have his candles been burned to the snuff, and glimmered and stunk in the sockets, whilst he grew pale at his constitutional studies; long, sleepless nights has he wasted, long, laborious, shiftless journeys has he made, and great sums has he expended, in order to secure the purity, the independence, and the sobriety of elections, and to give a check, if possible, to the ruinous charges that go nearly to the destruction of the right of election itself.

      Amidst these his labors, his Grace will be pleased to forgive me, if my zeal, less enlightened, to be sure, than his by midnight lamps and studies, has presumed to talk too favorably of this Constitution, and even to say something sounding like approbation of that body which has the honor to reckon his Grace at the head of it, Those who dislike this partiality, or, if his Grace pleases, this flattery of mine, have a comfort at hand. I may be refuted and brought to shame by the most convincing of all refutations, a practical refutation. Every individual peer for himself may show that I was ridiculously wrong; the whole body of those noble persons may refute me for the whole corps. If they please, they are more powerful advocates against themselves than a thousand scribblers like me can be in their favor. If I were even possessed of those powers which his Grace, in order to heighten my offence, is pleased to attribute to me, there would be little difference. The eloquence of Mr. Erskine might save Mr. ***** from the gallows, but no eloquence could save Mr. Jackson from the effects of his own potion.

      In that unfortunate book of mine, which is put in the Index Expurgatorius of the modern Whigs, I might have spoken too favorably not only of those who wear coronets, but of those who wear crowns. Kings, however, have not only long arms, but strong ones too. A great Northern potentate, for instance, is able in one moment, and with one bold stroke of his diplomatic pen, to efface all the volumes which I could write in a century, or which the most laborious publicists of Germany ever carried to the fair of Leipsic, as an apology for monarchs and monarchy. Whilst I, or any other poor, puny, private sophist, was defending the Declaration of Pilnitz, his Majesty might refute me by the Treaty of Basle. Such a monarch may destroy one republic because it had a king at its head, and he may balance this extraordinary act by founding another republic that has cut off the head of its king. I defended that great potentate for associating in a grand alliance for the preservation of the old governments of Europe; but he puts me to silence by delivering up all those governments (his own virtually included) to the new system of France. If he is accused before the Parisian tribunal (constituted for the trial of kings) for having polluted the soil of liberty by the tracks of his disciplined slaves, he clears himself by surrendering the finest parts of Germany (with a handsome cut of his own territories) to the offended majesty of the regicides of France. Can I resist this? Am I responsible for it, if, with a torch in his hand, and a rope about his neck, he makes amende honorable to the sans-culotterie of the Republic one and indivisible? In that humiliating attitude, in spite of my protests, he may supplicate pardon for his menacing proclamations, and, as an expiation to those whom he failed to terrify with his threats, he may abandon those whom he had seduced by his promises. He may sacrifice the royalists of France, whom he had called to his standard, as a salutary example to those who shall adhere to their native sovereign, or shall confide in any other who undertakes the cause of oppressed kings and of loyal subjects.

      How can I help it, if this high-minded prince will subscribe to the invectives СКАЧАТЬ