Above all, the treasury of all learning and science and art, the Library, needs replenishing in every department.

These are open demands for the upbuilding of a great University. Looking outward as well as inward, see what an office the University has to fill in the community and in the State. It must conserve the best interests of society. It must help to keep the worse elements in check, and to give intelligence, sanity, wisdom to the whole community. Beginning with the children, the University must furnish fit direction for the army of teachers; setting up the right standards, insisting on sound instruction and wholesome influences. It must provide school directors who will know what a good education is, and condemn shams and incompetence in the school-room. In all leading places in the community, official and unofficial, University graduates should constitute a great saving and steadying force. In politics they should stand as a Gibraltar-rock against the waves of intrigue and corruption. high intellectual and moral ends the University should make constantly increasing contributions. It should reach out sympathetic and collaborating hands to the other great universities of the land, near and far, and establish reciprocity with the universities of foreign countries.

To all

By its wide and thorough course of study, by its ample facilities for original investigation, by its well-equipped graduates taking foremost posts in public life and useful places in the leading industries and occupations, by its diffusion of "sweetness and light" at home, and its wellearned reputation abroad as a center of the best culture,by these things alone can a university win a foremost place in the great republic of letters and in the wide. domain of science. Only thus is it justly entitled to call itself great. How long shall it take, with the willing coöperation of benefactors like Phebe A. Hearst, D. O. Mills, and Edward Tompkins, to make this a truly great University, worthy of the California whose name it bears?

EDMUND BURKE AS A STATESMAN.*

By SHELDON G. KELLOGG.

EDMUND BURKE died July 9, 1797. The hundred years which have passed since his death have been crowded with most important events in all portions of the world-events which have tested his theories of government to the utmost, and which make it possible for us now to judge correctly of his merits as a statesman. The British Empire, which he loved so well and served so faithfully, has expanded in every direction under a colonial system which he consistently advocated; and the United States, whose cause, as colonies, he urged with force and justice against the blind obstinacy of the party in power, has thus far remained true to that liberty with order which he never ceased to praise. Though extreme in his opposition to the French Revolution, and apparently forgetful of the gross inequality and long-continued injustice which were, in large measure, its causes, he comprehended its spirit and foresaw its immediate outcome earlier than any public man of his time. In his advocacy of domestic reform, of religious toleration, of the honesty of representatives toward their constituents, and of just treatment of all the subjects of the empire of every color, religion, and language, he was far in advance of his age. It has seemed to me a fitting time to consider the career and political principles of Edmund Burke. That the subject may not prove too broad for the present essay,

*Read before the students in History and Political Science, November 11, 1897.

attention will be given only to Burke's character as a statesman, not as influencing the legislation of his own time, but as exhibiting those qualities which are of permanent advantage to a nation.

Burke was first elected to Parliament for the borough of Wendover near the close of 1765, at the age of thirtyeight. He had graduated at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1748; he had studied law at the Middle Temple, but he had never been called to the bar; he had read a great deal in a desultory way, and had doubtless followed his own advice to his son of cultivating "the power of diversifying the matter infinitely" in his own mind, and "of applying it to every occasion that arises"; he had passed two years in Ireland, and had made excursions in France; he had been, since 1759, the conductor of the Annual Register, a resume of contemporary history, and had acquired the reputation already of being "nothing less than an encyclopædia of political knowledge"; and, for the six months preceding his election, he had been the private secretary of Lord Rockingham. His high ideal as to the preparation necessary for a statesman is shown in two passages in his writings. At Bristol he said: "When I first devoted myself to the public sevice, I considered how I should render myself fit for it; and this I did by endeavoring to discover what it was that gave this country the rank it holds in the world. I found that our prosperity and dignity arose principally, if not solely, from two sources-our constitution and commerce. Both these I have spared no trouble to understand and no endeavor to support." In a passage in a Letter to a Noble Lord, as true as it is fine, he said: "I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator. Nitor in adversum is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favor and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts by imposing on the understandings

of the people. At every step of my progress in life (for in every step was I traversed and opposed), and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honor of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws and the whole system of its interests, both at home and abroad."

Burke at once took an active part in Parliamentary affairs; but his first work of permanent interest was contained in two pamphlets written in support of the Rockingham section of the Whig party, his Observations on the Present State of the Nation, published in 1769, and the Thoughts on the Present Discontents, published in 1770. We are not interested in these pamphlets now as party manifestoes, but they contain political maxims which will never lose their truth and importance. In the Present Discontents we are made acquainted with Burke's opinions as to the proper sphere of parties, and with his lofty ideal of the true statesman. These can be shown in no better way than by quoting a few sentences almost at random from the pamphlet. "Nations are governed," he says, "by the same methods and on the same principles by which an individual without authority is often able to govern those who are his equals or his superiors by a knowledge of their temper, or by a judicious management of it." "The temper of a people amongst whom he presides ought therefore to be the first study of a statesman. And the knowledge of this temper it is by no means impossible for him to attain, if he has not an interest in being ignorant of what it is his duty to learn." "I am not one of those who think that the people are never in the wrong. They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But I do say that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people. Experience may perhaps justify us in going further. When popular discontents have been prevalent, it may well be affirmed and supported that there

has generally been found something amiss in the constitution or in the conduct of the government. The people have no interest in disorder. When they do wrong, it is their error, and not their crime. But with the governing party of the state, it is far otherwise. They certainly may act ill by design as well as by mistake." This game thought was stated in another place in these words: "Whenever the people have a feeling, they commonly are in the right; they sometimes mistake the physician." He believed that men were in public life, as in private, some good, some evil. "The elevation of the one and the depression of the other are the first objects of all true policy." Public duty "demands and requires that what is right should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detested, but defeated. When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect, it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it." Good results can be best brought about by party association. "When bad men combine," Burke says, "the good must associate, else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." "Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interests upon some particular principles in which they are all agreed." "Men thinking freely will, in particular instances, think differently. But still, as the greater part of the measures which arise in the course of public business are related to, and dependent on, some great leading, general principles in government, a man must be peculiarly unfortunate in the choice of his political company, if he does not agree with them at least nine times out of ten." "It is therefore," Burke concludes, "our business carefully to cultivate in our minds, to rear to the most perfect vigor and maturity, every sort of generous and honest feeling that belongs to our nature. To bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots, as