The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12). Edmund Burke
of them all. Metaphysics cannot live without definition; but Prudence is cautious how she defines. Our courts cannot be more fearful in suffering fictitious cases to be brought before them for eliciting their determination on a point of law than prudent moralists are in putting extreme and hazardous cases of conscience upon emergencies not existing. Without attempting, therefore, to define, what never can be defined, the case of a revolution in government, this, I think, may be safely affirmed,—that a sore and pressing evil is to be removed, and that a good, great in its amount and unequivocal in its nature, must be probable almost to certainty, before the inestimable price of our own morals and the well-being of a number of our fellow-citizens is paid for a revolution. If ever we ought to be economists even to parsimony, it is in the voluntary production of evil. Every revolution contains in it something of evil.
It must always be, to those who are the greatest amateurs, or even professors, of revolutions, a matter very hard to prove, that the late French government was so bad that nothing worse in the infinite devices of men could come in its place. They who have brought France to its present condition ought to prove also, by something better than prattling about the Bastile, that their subverted government was as incapable as the present certainly is of all improvement and correction. How dare they to say so who have never made that experiment? They are experimenters by their trade. They have made an hundred others, infinitely more hazardous.
The English admirers of the forty-eight thousand republics which form the French federation praise them not for what they are, but for what they are to become. They do not talk as politicians, but as prophets. But in whatever character they choose to found panegyric on prediction, it will be thought a little singular to praise any work, not for its own merits, but for the merits of something else which may succeed to it. When any political institution is praised, in spite of great and prominent faults of every kind, and in all its parts, it must be supposed to have something excellent in its fundamental principles. It must be shown that it is right, though imperfect,—that it is not only by possibility susceptible of improvement, but that it contains in it a principle tending to its melioration.
Before they attempt to show this progression of their favorite work from absolute pravity to finished perfection, they will find themselves engaged in a civil war with those whose cause they maintain. What! alter our sublime Constitution, the glory of France, the envy of the world, the pattern for mankind, the masterpiece of legislation, the collected and concentrated glory of this enlightened age? Have we not produced it ready-made and ready-armed, mature in its birth, a perfect goddess of wisdom and of war, hammered by our blacksmith midwives out of the brain of Jupiter himself? Have we not sworn our devout, profane, believing, infidel people to an allegiance to this goddess, even before she had burst the dura mater, and as yet existed only in embryo? Have we not solemnly declared this Constitution unalterable by any future legislature? Have we not bound it on posterity forever, though our abettors have declared that no one generation is competent to bind another? Have we not obliged the members of every future Assembly to qualify themselves for their seats by swearing to its conservation?
Indeed, the French Constitution always must be (if a change is not made in all their principles and fundamental arrangements) a government wholly by popular representation. It must be this or nothing. The French faction considers as an usurpation, as an atrocious violation of the indefensible rights of man, every other description of government. Take it, or leave it: there is no medium. Let the irrefragable doctors fight out their own controversy in their own way and with their own weapons; and when they are tired, let them commence a treaty of peace. Let the plenipotentiary sophisters of England settle with the diplomatic sophisters of France in what manner right is to be corrected by an infusion of wrong, and how truth may be rendered more true by a due intermixture of falsehood.
Having sufficiently proved that nothing could make it generally improper for Mr. Burke to prove what he had alleged concerning the object of this dispute, I pass to the second question, that is, Whether he was justified in choosing the committee on the Quebec Bill as the field for this discussion? If it were necessary, it might be shown that he was not the first to bring these discussions into Parliament, nor the first to renew them in this session. The fact is notorious. As to the Quebec Bill, they were introduced into the debate upon that subject for two plain reasons: First, that, as he thought it then not advisable to make the proceedings of the factious societies the subject of a direct motion, he had no other way open to him. Nobody has attempted to show that it was at all admissible into any other business before the House. Here everything was favorable. Here was a bill to form a new Constitution for a French province under English dominion. The question naturally arose, whether we should settle that constitution upon English ideas, or upon French. This furnished an opportunity for examining into the value of the French Constitution, either considered as applicable to colonial government, or in its own nature. The bill, too, was in a committee. By the privilege of speaking as often as he pleased, he hoped in some measure to supply the want of support, which he had but too much reason to apprehend. In a committee it was always in his power to bring the questions from generalities to facts, from declamation to discussion. Some benefit he actually received from this privilege. These are plain, obvious, natural reasons for his conduct. I believe they are the true, and the only true ones.
They who justify the frequent interruptions, which at length wholly disabled him from proceeding, attribute their conduct to a very different interpretation of his motives. They say, that, through corruption, or malice, or folly, he was acting his part in a plot to make his friend Mr. Fox pass for a republican, and thereby to prevent the gracious intentions of his sovereign from taking effect, which at that time had begun to disclose themselves in his favor.8 This is a pretty serious charge. This, on Mr. Burke's part, would be something more than mistake, something worse than formal irregularity. Any contumely, any outrage, is readily passed over, by the indulgence which we all owe to sudden passion. These things are soon forgot upon occasions in which all men are so apt to forget themselves. Deliberate injuries, to a degree, must be remembered, because they require deliberate precautions to be secured against their return.
I am authorized to say for Mr. Burke, that he considers that cause assigned for the outrage offered to him as ten times worse than the outrage itself. There is such a strange confusion of ideas on this subject, that it is far more difficult to understand the nature of the charge than to refute it when understood. Mr. Fox's friends were, it seems, seized with a sudden panic terror lest he should pass for a republican. I do not think they had any ground for this apprehension. But let us admit they had. What was there in the Quebec Bill, rather than in any other, which could subject him or them to that imputation? Nothing in a discussion of the French Constitutions which might arise on the Quebec Bill, could tend to make Mr. Fox pass for a republican, except he should take occasion to extol that state of things in France which affects to be a republic or a confederacy of republics. If such an encomium could make any unfavorable impression on the king's mind, surely his voluntary panegyrics on that event, not so much introduced as intruded into other debates, with which they had little relation, must have produced that effect with much more certainty and much greater force. The Quebec Bill, at worst, was only one of those opportunities carefully sought and industriously improved by himself. Mr. Sheridan had already brought forth a panegyric on the French system in a still higher strain, with full as little demand from the nature of the business before the House, in a speech too good to be speedily forgotten. Mr. Fox followed him without any direct call from the subject-matter, and upon the same ground. To canvass the merits of the French Constitution on the Quebec Bill could not draw forth any opinions which were not brought forward before, with no small ostentation, and with very little of necessity, or perhaps of propriety. What mode or what time of discussing the conduct of the French faction in England would not equally tend to kindle this enthusiasm, and afford those occasions for panegyric, which, far from shunning, Mr. Fox has always industriously sought? He himself said, very truly, in the debate, that no artifices were necessary to draw from him his opinions upon that subject. But to fall upon Mr. Burke for making an use, at worst not more irregular, of the same liberty, is tantamount to a plain declaration that the topic of Franco is tabooed or forbidden ground to Mr. Burke, and to Mr. Burke alone. But surely Mr. Fox is not a republican; and what should hinder him, when such a discussion came on, from clearing himself unequivocally (as his friends say he had done near a fortnight before) of all such imputations?
To explain this, it will be necessary to advert to a paragraph which appeared in a paper in the minority interest some time before this debate. "A very dark intrigue has lately been discovered, the authors of which are well known to us; but until the glorious day shall come when it will not be a LIBEL to tell the TRUTH, we must not be so regardless of our own safety as to publish their names. We will, however, state the fact, leaving it to the ingenuity of our readers to discover what we dare not publish.