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

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СКАЧАТЬ have made against all kings, and particularly against himself? How can I help it, if this royal propagandist will preach the doctrine of the Rights of Men? Is it my fault, if his professors of literature read lectures on that code in all his academies, and if all the pensioned managers of the newspapers in his dominions diffuse it throughout Europe in an hundred journals? Can it be attributed to me, if he will initiate all his grenadiers and all his hussars in these high mysteries? Am I responsible, if he will make Le Droit de l'Homme, or La Souverainté du Peuple the favorite parole of his military orders? Now that his troops are to act with the brave legions of freedom, no doubt he will fit them for their fraternity. He will teach the Prussians to think, to feel, and to act like them, and to emulate the glories of the régiment de l'échafaud. He will employ the illustrious Citizen Santerre, the general of his new allies, to instruct the dull Germans how they shall conduct themselves towards persons who, like Louis the Sixteenth, (whose cause and person he once took into his protection,) shall dare, without the sanction of the people, or with it, to consider themselves as hereditary kings. Can I arrest this great potentate in his career of glory? Am I blamable in recommending virtue and religion as the true foundation of all monarchies, because the protector of the three religions of the Westphalian arrangement, to ingratiate himself with the Republic of Philosophy, shall abolish all the three? It is not in my power to prevent the grand patron of the Reformed Church, if he chooses it, from annulling the Calvinistic sabbath, and establishing the décadi of atheism in all his states. He may even renounce and abjure his favorite mysticism in the Temple of Reason. In these things, at least, he is truly despotic. He has now shaken hands with everything which at first had inspired him with horror. It would be curious indeed to see (what I shall not, however, travel so far to see) the ingenious devices and the elegant transparencies which, on the restoration of peace and the commencement of Prussian liberty, are to decorate Potsdam and Charlottenburg festeggianti. What shades of his armed ancestors of the House of Brandenburg will the committee of Illuminés raise up in the opera-house of Berlin, to dance a grand ballet in the rejoicings for this auspicious event? Is it a grand master of the Teutonic order, or is it the great Elector? Is it the first king of Prussia, or the last? or is the whole long line (long, I mean, a parte ante) to appear like Banquo's royal procession in the tragedy of Macbeth?

      How can I prevent all these arts of royal policy, and all these displays of royal magnificence? How can I prevent the successor of Frederick the Great from aspiring to a new, and, in this age, unexampled kind of glory? Is it in my power to say that he shall not make his confessions in the style of St. Austin or of Rousseau? that he shall not assume the character of the penitent and flagellant, and, grafting monkery on philosophy, strip himself of his regal purple, clothe his gigantic limbs in the sackcloth and the hair-shirt, and exercise on his broad shoulders the disciplinary scourge of the holy order of the Sans-Culottes? It is not in me to hinder kings from making new orders of religious and martial knighthood. I am not Hercules enough to uphold those orbs which the Atlases of the world are so desirous of shifting from their weary shoulders. What can be done against the magnanimous resolution of the great to accomplish the degradation and the ruin of their own character and situation?

      What I say of the German princes, that I say of all the other dignities and all the other institutions of the Holy Roman Empire. If they have a mind to destroy themselves, they may put their advocates to silence and their advisers to shame. I have often praised the Aulic Council. It is very true, I did so. I thought it a tribunal as well formed as human wisdom could form a tribunal for coercing the great, the rich, and the powerful,—for obliging them to submit their necks to the imperial laws, and to those of Nature and of nations: a tribunal well conceived for extirpating peculation, corruption, and oppression from all the parts of that vast, heterogeneous mass, called the Germanic body. I should not be inclined to retract these praises upon any of the ordinary lapses into which human infirmity will fall; they might still stand, though some of their conclusums should taste of the prejudices of country or of faction, whether political or religious. Some degree even of corruption should not make me think them guilty of suicide; but if we could suppose that the Aulic Council, not regarding duty or even common decorum, listening neither to the secret admonitions of conscience nor to the public voice of fame, some of the members basely abandoning their post, and others continuing in it only the more infamously to betray it, should give a judgment so shameless and so prostitute, of such monstrous and even portentous corruption, that no example in the history of human depravity, or even in the fictions of poetic imagination, could possibly match it,—if it should be a judgment which, with cold, unfeeling cruelty, after long deliberations, should condemn millions of innocent people to extortion, to rapine, and to blood, and should devote some of the finest countries upon earth to ravage and desolation,—does any one think that any servile apologies of mine, or any strutting and bullying insolence of their own, can save them from the ruin that must fell on all institutions of dignity or of authority that are perverted from their purport to the oppression of human nature in others and to its disgrace in themselves? As the wisdom of men mates such institutions, the folly of men destroys them. Whatever we may pretend, there is always more in the soundness of the materials than in the fashion of the work. The order of a good building is something. But if it be wholly declined from its perpendicular, if the cement is loose and incoherent, if the stones are scaling with every change of the weather, and the whole toppling on our heads, what matter is it whether we are crushed by a Corinthian or a Doric ruin? The fine form of a vessel is a matter of use and of delight. It is pleasant to see her decorated with cost and art. But what signifies even the mathematical truth of her form,—what signify all the art and cost with which she can be carved, and painted, and gilded, and covered with decorations from stem to stern,—what signify all her rigging and sails, her flags, her pendants, and her streamers,—what signify even her cannon, her stores, and her provisions, if all her planks and timbers be unsound and rotten?

      Quamvis Pontica pinus,

      Silvæ filia nobilis,

      Jactes et genus et nomen inutile.

      I have been stimulated, I know not how, to give you this trouble by what very few except myself would think worth any trouble at all. In a speech in the House of Lords, I have been attacked for the defence of a scheme of government in which that body inheres, and in which alone it can exist. Peers of Great Britain may become as penitent as the sovereign of Prussia. They may repent of what they have done in assertion of the honor of their king, and in favor of their own safety. But never the gloom that lowers over the fortune of the cause, nor anything which the great may do towards hastening their own fall, can make me repent of what I have done by pen or voice (the only arms I possess) in favor of the order of things into which I was born and in which I fondly hoped to die.

      In the long series of ages which have furnished the matter of history, never was so beautiful and so august a spectacle presented to the moral eye as Europe afforded the day before the Revolution in France. I knew, indeed, that this prosperity contained in itself the seeds of its own danger. In one part of the society it caused laxity and debility; in the other it produced bold spirits and dark designs. A false philosophy passed from academies into courts; and the great themselves were infected with the theories which conducted to their ruin. Knowledge, which in the two last centuries either did not exist at all, or existed solidly on right principles and in chosen hands, was now diffused, weakened, and perverted. General wealth loosened morals, relaxed vigilance, and increased presumption. Men of talent began to compare, in the partition of the common stock of public prosperity, the proportions of the dividends with the merits of the claimants. As usual, they found their portion not equal to their estimate (or perhaps to the public estimate) of their own worth. When it was once discovered by the Revolution in France that a struggle between establishment and rapacity could be maintained, though but for one year and in one place, I was sure that a practicable breach was made in the whole order of things, and in every country. Religion, that held the materials of the fabric together, was first systematically loosened. All other opinions, under the name of prejudices, must fall along with it; and property, left undefended by principles, became a repository of spoils to tempt cupidity, and not a magazine to furnish arms for defence. I knew, that, attacked on all sides by the infernal energies of talents set in action by vice and disorder, authority could not stand upon authority alone. СКАЧАТЬ