manufacture is not a great deal enhanced (except to the domestic consumer) by any taxes paid in this country. This I might very easily prove." This range of mental vision is, perhaps, the greatest of all Burke's characteristics. In one sense, his political life might be called a failure, for during a service of thirty years, only a few months were spent in office. He was so much above the greatest statesmen of his generation, that while always admitting his industry and eloquence, it was long indeed before they had any idea of his great political wisdom. He did not inspire great masses with confidence. He did not keep together for any length of time any great combination. His life was to many people an enigma; his thoughts were not their thoughts, nor his ideas their ideas. He sat in his place at Westminster among men, but not of them; it was, as he said himself, a custom among the leading politicians to have his word go for nothing. Why was it that Fox and Pitt were so much more followed, and so much more trusted? Not, surely, because their abilities were superior to his, not because they were more eloquent, more learned, more cautious, or even more practical. They surpassed him in influence, simply because they were inferior to him, because their ideas were more the ideas of ordinary men. For there is one great secret in politics. It is possible for a politician to be very wise, and yet, at the same time, not wise in his generation. The plainest country gentleman, the most prosaic merchant, could understand all that William Pitt or Charles Fox said on any question: these two celebrated men only put into their own language the ideas of common people. But it was not so with Burke. He could not but be at all times a great philosopher, thinking deeply on the nature of man, and the condition of society. These were his constant themes, his thoughts by day, and his dreams by night. He looked at them from all points of view, and while examining one point, never forgot its relation to the other. Hence it is that he never would go all lengths with any party, and was called, even during the early part of his career, a man of aristocratic principles; for these seemed to be a just middle ground between the doctrines professed by the gentlemen who called themselves king's friends, and those of the city tradesmen who cheered Jack Wilkes. Hence it is that we find him so often accused of inconsistency men did not know what to make of him; for though, during the Ameri can war, he strenuously opposed the Stamp Act, the Massachusetts Bill, and all the other violent proceedings of the ministry, he contended with equal vehemence for the supremacy of British legislation over all the British dominions, and, contrary to the opinion of Chatham, supported the Declaratory Act. Hence it is, that with such powerful argument and impassioned eloquence, for the first twenty years of his career, he threw himself so manfully against the influence of the court; and that after this influence had been curbed, when wild democratic notions began to threaten all courts and thrones with destruction, and when revolution, like the giant on the mountains, stood up and shook her bloody locks in the face of the whole world, with argument not less powerful, and with eloquence still more impassioned, he endeavored to rouse all Europe to eternal battle against an enemy that he believed opposed to the interests and the civilization of mankind. His contemporaries, the liberal politicians of the following age, and even a distinguished statesman and orator of a later time, did not give him credit for this comprehensive faculty. They looked only at one side of the question, and therefore accused him of inconsistency; but the fact is, that while inconsistent in name, he was always consistent in spirit. There is one circumstance in his political life that has been overlooked by his accusers. Before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Burke confined himself entirely to the politics of this empire, and professed himself a Whig. Now there is nothing paradoxical in saying that the principles of the old Whigs and Tories were national principles, that they sprang out of the party disputes of this island, and could only be well understood and applied to the politics of Great Britain. They are as natural to England as our roast beef and plum-pudding: nowhere else could they exist in such perfection. So Burke appears always to have considered, and his political writings, until the year 1790, were all on national affairs. But the French Revolution was not a mere national movement; its distinguished advocates declared and boasted that its principles were universal. Burke, therefore, addressing his Reflections and his Letters on a Regicide Peace to all Europe, was obliged to be more general in his observations than he had been while he directed his attention entirely to English politics. Ön reviewing his first philosophical treatise, we said that it showed the same aversion to | police, law, or government of any kind, may the philosophy of the French and English perhaps answer this question. And yet the deistical writers that is seen in the publica- Gordon Riots occurred little more than tions of his old age; and we now affirm, seventy years ago, and at the mere whisper that in his first great political work, the of toleration. Observations, the germ of even his later political opinions may be seen. This does not look like inconsistency; and we know well what we are saying. Grenville, little as he was of a popular politician, and with all the contempt that his administration showed for popular prejudices, still, when out of office, such is the wonderful effect of sitting on the opposition benches, became an advocate for parliamentary reform. The man who asserted the omnipotence of general warrants, and would maintain his Stamp Act by fire and sword, when contending for place, proposed, in his State of the Nation, to increase the number of voters in England, and to grant to. America the privilege of sending representatives to the British Parliament. Both of these political nostrums, Burke in his work condemned. He said that he did not mean to reprobate speculative inquiries on such subjects; but that so far from thinking, in the present state of England, that the enlargement of the number of representatives would be a benefit, he thought it might have directly the contrary effect. And as for America, he declared, what was sufficiently evident, that Nature set herself in opposition to Grenville's schemes. We find him protesting against abstract principles as strenuously as he did during the debates on the French Revolution; and this is the great key to Burke's political system. He said at all times that he detested abstract reasonings in politics, that he hated the very sound of them, for that reason was far from being the god of the earth, that it had a very small part in the government of mankind. Nor, when we look at the state of the public mind during his time, when we consider that education was far from being so prevalent as it now is, and consequently that the great majority of the nation was much less enlightened, is it easy to show that even opinions of parliamentary representation were erroneous. Are we justified in believing that, had our Reform Bill been carried a century earlier, it would have been a great blessing? Were the people so much more liberal than their representatives? The prisons and chapels gutted and in flames, the mob prowling about like wild beasts, and threatening the doors of the House of Commons, all London for four days without his In the Observations, there is one important paragraph, that, if we would really take an impartial view of all Burke's political principles, and understand the correspondence of his earlier and later opinions, must not be passed over. It relates to the condition of France. Grenville, after drawing his melancholy picture of the state of England, to comfort the people further, declared that France was in much better circumstances, her revenue in every way superior. Her very bankruptcy proved her superiority, and on that account her cities would be inviting asylums to British manufacturers flying from the ruin of their country. Burke proved, it was not difficult to prove, that the finances of France were in the worst possible condition; that her debt was much heavier than that of England; her resources more scanty, and her credit, indeed, entirely gone. The taxation was not lightened, the charges of the state not disburdened. The annual income was a million and a half short of the provision for the ordinary peace establishment. And the great political philosopher concluded by a declaration, as memorable as Chesterfield's, that the French finances were so distracted, the charges so far outran the supply, that every one might hourly look for some great convulsion, of which the effect on all Europe might be very difficult to conjecture. What we have ventured to say about Burke's political principles, during the first half of his parliamentary life, is still further illustrated and confirmed by the work that, a year afterwards, proceeded from his pen, and by his speeches on the Act of Uniformity, and on Alderman Sawbridge's annual motions for shortening the duration of Parliament. He always spoke contemptuously of this last measure, believing that it would produce, not partial good, but universal evil. He feared that the gentlemen of England could not afford to have frequent contests with the Treasury, for it was very easy to see whose purse would the sooner become empty. The Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents is written with the greatest simplicity. It is one of the best specimens of his less ambitious style, and bears unusual marks of finished and elaborate composition. We know that it was not dashed off in haste, and that it was submitted to the considera- | could believe that he had anything to do tion of the Marquis of Rockingham and the with the composition of these celebrated letprincipal men of his party. It may therefore ters. To us they seem to be contradicted be called the text-book of the old Whig by every part of his character, moral and principles, and as such it is quite evident that intellectual. This even Mr. Macaulay himthe author intended it. self acknowledges, although Lord Brougham, in his Lives of the Statesmen, says, that nothing but Burke's express denial of the authorship of these epistles could rebut the strong internal evidence that they supply. They who cannot see how decidedly these letters are opposed to all his ideas, and who, doubtless with most charitable intentions, and with the most sincere admiration for the author, still wish to consider him as Junius, may see his indignant disavowal in the Correspondence. Mr. Prior would fain make Burke Junius, and seems quite unconscious of the ill effects that the fact of Burke's having the least knowledge of Junius would have on the reputation of the great man whom he reverences and eulogizes. Biographers, indeed, seem to have strange ideas on morality. Burke could not be proved to be Junius, without being proved to be also one of the greatest scoundrels that ever disgraced humanity. It points out with peculiar energy all the evils of the system of favoritism that the reign of George III. introduced, contrasts the turbulence of the times with the glories of the period when the Whig grandees encircled the throne of the reigning monarch's grandfather, and concludes with an elaborate defence of party connections. None of his works exceed it in political wisdom. The king's friends are gibbeted as remorselessly as the Grenvilles in the Observations. It is exactly what it professes to be, a series of "thoughts" on the discontents of the time. Burke also discusses the remedies for such distempers, and, true to the principles which we have endeavored to point out as characteristic of all his works, again expresses his dislike of triennial Parliaments, and of many other very popular medicines for the existing abuses. His ideas here and everywhere are eminently practical. He is never in the clouds, never forming visionary republics, never forgetting the nature of man. He therefore disclaims all intention of pleasing the popular palate, and says he never talked with any one much conversant with public affairs, who considered short Parliaments as a real improvement of the constitution. He says the opinion of such people may be interested, but that it is a vulgar and puerile malignity to imagine that every statesman is of course corrupt, and that the authority of such a man may be of as much weight as the ideas of those who, with purer intentions, have less effectual means of judging, Mr. Macaulay, in his review of Hallam's Constitutional History, however, declares that Burke and Junius, in ascribing the discontents of this period to the system of favoritism, were decidedly in error. This error still appeared to the accomplished Edinburgh reviewer excusable, for they lived too near the events they criticised to form an impartial judgment. We do not mean to say anything about the opinions of Junius, for this masterly satirist was in no sense of the word a political philosopher. He stabbed in the dark, he was surrounded with mystery, and thus acquired a greater reputation for wisdom than he seems to have deserved. No person who has paid the least attention to the spirit of Burke's writings Mr. Macaulay, in the same sentence, manages to praise and blame the author of the Thoughts on the Present Discontents. Thus, in the essay on Hallam, he says that Burke could not form a correct idea of his own times; and again, in his essay on Chatham, when speaking of the king's friends, he says: The character of this faction has been drawn by Burke with even more than his usual force and vivacity. Those who know how strongly, through his whole life, his judgment was biased by his passions, may not unnaturally suspect that he has left us rather a caricature than a likeness; and yet there is scarcely, in the whole portrait, a single touch of which the fidelity is not proved by facts of unquestionable authority." With all due respect to the brilliant essayist and historian, this sentence appears to us almost a contradiction in terms. What! an avowed party politician, writing on the events of his own times, to give such a faithful picture of the enemies of his party, that "there is scarcely in the whole portrait a single touch of which the fidelity is not proved by facts of unquestionable authority," and yet, at the same time, through his whole life, his judgment to be strongly "biased by his passions"? Mr. Macaulay follows Burke's Thoughts almost literally, in his account of the earlier part of George III.'s reign, and yet he says that his great prototype's judg- | era of the Grenvilles, the Bedfords, and the ment was, during his whole life, "biased by king's friends. Burke was, however, graduhis passions." ally working himself clearer and clearer from all obstacles, and acting more and more an independent part. Two subjects of great importance to the civilization of the world were gradually drawing his attention to them. They were subjects admirably fitted to employ the great powers of his mind, and make him ask himself what was the duty of a wise statesman. Burke's life was very peculiar, and his writings will never be properly understood until they are looked at in connection with each other. It must be remembered that the ideas which Lord Bute and the king's friends entertained about government, were principally derived from the writings of Bolingbroke. It was Bolingbroke who first talked about the ambition of the Whig nobles, of the manner in which they had degraded the sovereign, and how, by the exercise of the royal authority alone, all these difficulties might vanish. George III. began to reign by carrying out Bolingbroke's ideas of a patriot king, and the Toryism of that time was altogether the Toryism of Bolingbroke. If there be one author for whom Burke at all times seems to have had the greatest contempt, it was this noble person, whose ideas were now brought into practice. As we have seen, one of his first publications was an attempt to ridicule Bolingbroke's philosophy, and in his old age, he characterized the eloquent peer as a flimsy and superficial writer. "Who now reads Bolingbroke?" he asks-" who ever read him through ?" These Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents are, therefore, as much philosophical as the Vindication of Natural Society, written when he had little thought of being a great politician, and the leader of the Rockingham party. Yet his ideas are the same, and his principles entirely the same. Is it, then, surprising, when, in his later years, he found Bolingbroke's works adopted as part of the gospel of the French revolutionists, that he should have condemned them with as much sincerity and more vehemence, as when they were admired by literary men, and carried into practice, at the risk of shaking the very foundations of society, and at the expense of all the great interests of the empire, by the selfcalled king's friends of George III.? Is this time serving? Is this being inconsistent ? We have dwelt long on these earlier productions, because they are less read, and perhaps less understood, than the other works of this great man. It is necessary that they should be well considered by all who would appreciate the tenor of Burke's life. As yet he had published none of his speeches. The two political pamphlets that we have reviewed are, of all his works, those which are most devoted to party politics; for this was the Since the success of Clive, the East India Company had held a most anomalous position. Professing to be mere merchants, they had acquired a mighty dominion on a foreign soil, and the fate of millions of dusky Asiatics, worshipping strange gods, speaking strange languages, and living in a strange social condition, were dependent upon their wisdom. The spirit of trade and the spirit of philanthropy were at once brought into collision. Many and fearful were the evils that at first arose from this advance of European civilization, with all its strength, and without its humanity, into tropical countries. Lord Chatham, before his genius had become eclipsed, meditated the introduction of a great reform into these Eastern dominions; and this was, perhaps, the question that most perplexed his distracted cabinet. For years, the Eastern empire was the principal subject of the debates in the House of Commons, until even it was for a while forgotten as another menacing meteor appeared in a different part of the heavens. The seeds of great empires, like the germs of all true greatness, in both the natural and the moral world, are imperceptibly sown. The acorn is blown about for months, the sport of every fitful breeze, before it finally takes root in the soil; and season must follow season, and fashions ebb and flow for many years, before the matured oak spreads its branches to the skies, and bids defiance to the wintry blast. Myriads of little shell-fish die, and for centuries the waters roll above them before the coral reef is formed; but it is formed, and slowly yet surely raises its head above the waves, and wrecks the proudest vessel as it proceeds on its way. A Skakspeare lies in his cradle, with a few eyes looking down upon his infant slumbers. He grows up from boyhood to youth, and from youth to manhood, without its being known that a mighty man is born into the world. He wanders among his native woods and streams, inquiring and thinking, thinking and inquiring, little cared for by the great men of the earth. He comes to London, These colonies had flourished by neglect: poor, friendless, and with much difficulty they were not coddled in their infancy; they keeps himself from starving by holding were left to the energies of unassisted nature, horses, and shifting scenes at theatres. He and this was enough to make them great and works for the day that is passing over him, prosperous. Hume, in his History of Engand finds it long before he can spare thought land, during the reigns of James I., Charles for the morrow. He retires, at length, like a I., Charles II., and James II., scarcely deigns respectability, to his native place, dies as his to mention them; and when Grenville first fathers had died before him; and on his determined to tax them, he seemed to care no death-bed, when his last hour is near, the more about what they thought of his financial beams of the sun dance on the window-panes scheme than an omnibus-driver considers the as usual, the grass grows as usual, the flow-weight of the passengers that his horses have ers open their buds as usual, the evening star to draw up Holborn Hill. that night gazes wistfully down as usual, people eat and drink, laugh and chat, make merry and make money, go to bed, put their foolish heads in night-caps, and dream foolish dreams as usual, and the world the next morning rolls on as usual; as though Shakspeare had not died, as though Shakspeare had never lived, as though the world had nothing to do with Shakspeare. But Shakspeare lived, and Shakspeare still lives, and Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and Macbeth still remain, and are realities amid a world of nothings. As it is with the growth of an oak, as it is with the growth of a coral reef, as it is with the growth of a Shakspeare, so it is with the growth of a great empire. Nor, indeed, was Grenville behind his age; nearly all his countrymen shared in his delusion. This is proved by the way in which the Stamp Act was first received. As long as the English language is spoken, that important, that inconsiderate, that most unhappy measure will be remembered; for from the day in which it was introduced into the House of Commons must date the independence of America. It told the hardy laborers across the Atlantic, for the first time, that English statesmen did not consider them as Englishmen, and that they had not the same rights and privileges as the English people. Learning that they were not Englishmen, they began to look upon themselves as Americans; It was thus that the great empire on the and as wrong followed wrong, and oppression American continent at first struggled into ex- was heaped upon oppression, they grasped istence. It was engendered by persecution, their rifles, and swore to make their title good. it had its birth amid darkness, convulsion, When the Stamp Act was passing, so little and blood. Two centuries ago, emigration was thought of it in England, that there was was not the matter of course that it now is. actually only a single division during the A man who left England to cross the Atlantic, whole of its progress through both Houses of did not expect to see another England on the Parliament, and in that division the minority distant shore. Wild Indians brandishing did not amount to forty. Able editors their tomahawks, savage beasts prowling thought it not worthy the employment of their through the forests, and making the solitudes pens; nor great orators of their eloquence; re-echo with their bellowing, were the wel- nor one noble lord of a protest. "See, my come that the daring adventurer had to anti-son," said a great man, "with how little cipate. But the great decree of Providence had gone forth, and the Saxon race was to increase and multiply in a new world, where the soil had not yet been upturned by the plough, where the sky had not yet been darkened with the smoke of great cities, nor the mighty rivers been defiled by the tarry keels of heavily laden vessels. The word "colony" had not at all to English ears a majestic sound it, at most, brought to mind the idea of a handful of men, who were erecting huts, felling trees, and with the utmost difficulty preventing themselves from being scalped and eaten. The Greeks and Romans had a much nobler idea of colonization than any of our countrymen ever entertained until the speeches of Burke were given to the world. wisdom the world is governed." The history of all ages proves the truth of this saying: but never was it found truer than when applied to our quarrels with America. There was, however, one man, and perhaps but one man, in all England at that time aware of the awful responsibility that our legislators were incurring. Burke sat, a mere stranger in the gallery of the House of Commons, and listened to the languid debate; he afterwards declared that it was one of the dullest discussions he had ever heard. He was well acquainted with the subject, much better, indeed, than any one of the honorable gentlemen who exulted in the idea that the colonies should be placed at the feet of the British Parliament. It cannot be |