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crisis. And we find that in the writings subsequent to the Reflections, he evinces a much truer appreciation of events by more frequent reference to our revolution of the seventeenth century. More than this, by the end of 1791, when he composed the Thoughts on French Affairs, he had penetrated still further into the essential character of the Revolution. Any notion

of a reform to be effected after the decorous pattern of 1688, so conspicuous in the first great manifesto, had wholly disappeared. The changes in France, he had then discovered, bore little resemblance or analogy to any of those which had been previously brought about in Europe. It is a revolution, he said, of doctrine and theoretic dogma. The Reformation was the last revolution of this sort which had happened in Europe; and he immediately goes on to remark a point of striking resemblance between them. The effect of the Reformation was "to introduce other interests into all countries than those which arose from their locality and natural circumstances." like manner, "they who will examine into the true character and genius of some late events, must be satisfied that other sources of faction, combining parties among the inhabitants of different countries into one connexion, are opened, and that from these

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sources are likely to arise effects full as important as those which had formerly arisen from the jarring interests of the religious sects." It is a species of faction which "breaks the locality of public affections." 1 At all events, he deserves credit for the promptitude and the completeness with which he awoke from the marvellous dream of a Whig France. That he should have ever fallen into it is not a little strange. He declined with his usual wisdom to suggest any positive plan for the National Assembly, for reasons which, if we remember the vehement confidence with which he had taken upon himself to hold them and their proceedings up to the scorn of Europe, appear extremely remarkable. “Permit me to say,”— this, in the letter to a member of the National Assembly -"that if I were as confident as I ought to be diffident in my own loose general ideas, I never should venture to broach them, if but at twenty leagues' distance from

1 Works, i. 564-5. De Tocqueville has unconsciously imitated Burke's very phrases. "Toutes les révolutions civiles et politiques ont eu une patrie, et s'y sont enfermées. La Révolution française . . . on l'a vue rapprocher ou diviser les hommes en dépit des lois, des traditions, des caractères, de la langue, rendant parfois ennemis des compatriotes, et frères des étrangers; ou plutôt elle a formé au-dessus de toutes les nationalités particulières, une patrie intellectuelle commune dont les hommes de toutes les nations ont pu devenir citoyens."—Ancien Régime, p. 15.

the centre of your affairs. I must see with my own eyes; I must in a manner touch with my own hands, not only the fixed, but momentary circumstances, before I could venture to suggest any political project whatsoever. I must know the power and disposition to accept, to execute, to persevere. I must see all the aids and all the obstacles. I must see the means of correcting the plan where correctives would be wanted. I must see the things: I must see the men. Without a concurrence and adaptation of these to the design, the very best speculative projects might become not only useless but mischievous. Plans must be made for men. People at a distance must judge ill of men. They do not always answer to their reputation when you approach them. Nay, the perspective varies, and shows them quite other than you thought them. At a distance, if we judge uncertainly of men, we must judge worse of opportunities, which continually vary their shapes and colours, and pass away like clouds." admiration which rises to our lips at these words is stifled as soon as born, when we recall the confident, unsparing, immoderate criticism which both preceded and followed this most rational exposition of the danger of advising, where we know neither the men nor the 1 Works, i. 487, b.

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opportunities. Surely unfaltering denunciation under these circumstances was not much more befitting than, as he admits, crude prescriptions would have been.

In suggesting, however distantly, the English scheme of government on a monarchic basis as the remedy for the disorders and misfortunes of France, Burke forgot his own favourite doctrine of the relativity of all political systems, quite as fully as his adversaries did, and perhaps a little less justifiably, when they returned to the retrograde types of ancient organization. Talk about Lord Somers was as much out of place on the one side, as talk about Brutus and Gracchus or Lycurgus and Solon on the other. It is to be said that his ideas had the experience of England to a certain extent in their favour, while the absolute rights of man which formed so much of the stock of the revolutionists were presented in the crudest shape, and assuredly received little colour of experience from the way in which they had been held or acted upon by the Greeks and Romans. With all that he said against the intellectual method of the Revolution, none will sympathise more heartily than those who admire most both its general aims and many characteristics of its moral spirit. The rights of man would have furnished a scanty and inadequate basis for the constitution of that state

which first brought them into practical politics, if there had not been men endowed with the knowledge which Hamilton and Madison had experimentally of the principles of government. The Americans had all the benefits of the rights of man, but then they had publicists who could construe and embody them in a practical system. The wise and prudent temper which found expression in the pages of the Federalist, unfortunately had no chance in the revolutionary hurricane. The nearest approach which the French had to the Federalist was in Sieyes, and we know how remote that was. A man who could build constitutions out of his own head by the dozen, naturally came to the front at a time when a nation inspired with a violent hatred of its own history was resolved to be indebted to the teaching of experience for nothing, and to deduce all its maxims of public action from a small set of à priori principles, or a small collection of political and moral ideals.

It has been already suggested in what way this may have been useful to mankind, by bringing these ideals into a bright and impressive prominence. But nobody can help seeing how much deadly injury was inflicted on the French people by this resolute adherence to deductive geometric methods. By adopting

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