EDMUND BURKE: A HISTORICAL STUDY.

CHAPTER I.

CHARACTERISTICS.

T is almost exactly one hundred years since Burke

first took his seat in the House of Commons, and it is something like three-quarters of a century since his voice ceased to be heard there on great public questions. Since his death, as during his life, opinion as to the place to which he is entitled among the eminent men of his country has touched every extreme. Tories have extolled him as the saviour of Europe. Whigs have detested him as the destroyer of his party. One undiscriminating panegyrist calls him "the most profound and comprehensive of political philosophers that has yet existed in the world.". Another and more distinguished writer insists that he is "a resplendent and far-seeing rhetorician rather

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than a deep and subtle thinker." A third tells us that his works "cannot be too much your study if you mean either to understand or to maintain against its various enemies, open and concealed, designing and mistaken, the singular constitution of this fortunate island." A fourth, on the contrary, declares that it would be hard to find a single leading principle or prevailing sentiment in one half of these works to which something extremely adverse cannot be found in the other half. A fifth calls him "one of the greatest men, and, Bacon alone excepted, the greatest thinker who ever devoted himself to the practice of English politics;" and yet, oddly enough, the author of this fifth verdict will have it that this great man and great thinker was actually out of his mind when he composed those pieces for which he has been most generally admired and revered.

These diversities of opinion are not difficult to be accounted for, and they are very well worth considering, both because they are useful in illustrating the general position of English politics in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and because they bear with much force upon the probable course of English political opinion in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

A hundred years ago the government of England had come to a dead lock. For seventy years the Whigs had ruled the country. The Revolution of 1688 was the consummation of that struggle between the sovereign and the nobles which had gone on in England since its conquest by the Normans. The same struggle was universal in Western Europe. It was an inevitable consequence of the decay of the feudal system, after the aim which gave life to it, the defence of the West against the barbarian from the North and the Ottoman from the East, had been satisfactorily accomplished. But the case of England was peculiar. At the moment when William I. established the authority of the Crown, the nucleus of a strong coalition against it already existed in the partially dispossessed and exasperated Saxon nobles. For one of its effects, this accelerated the contest, and the English nobles assailed the authority of the Crown before the corresponding but inverse movement began in France, where the Crown had to attack the authority of the great nobles. Another effect was, that in England the people, sympathising with the Saxon originators of the coalition, and identifying the Crown with all that they had to detest in Norman oppression, uniformly sided with the nobles against the

Crown. This attitude became traditional, and receiving a fresh impulse from the assumption of an unpopular religious supremacy by the monarch, survived the defection of the nobles to their former rival in the Great Rebellion. This kind of defection has been a common characteristic of the history of Western Europe during the break-up of the medieval system. In France, for example, the monarch having first crushed the nobles by the help of the people, afterwards patronised them, and struck an alliance with them. against the people. In England, the nobles in the same spirit felt instinctively that the Crown, which they had reduced to a position of safe inferiority to themselves, was to be supported against the people, their own ally in earlier times. This did not, however, prevent them from again courting the popular support, when they supposed that James II. was about once more to assert the authority of the monarchy. Their alarm, which was perhaps justified by the strength of the reaction they had done their best to promote thirty years before, probably made them sincere in their proclamation of free and popular ideas. A few nobles adhered to the principles which had been learnt in the Civil Wars, and stuck to the Crown. But the majority understood the interests of