The Portable Edmund Burke (Portable Library) Read online

  Table of Contents

  THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I - CULTURE AND HISTORY

  The Reformer

  THE CHARACTER OF A FINE GENTLEMAN

  A Vindication of Natural Society

  A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful

  Fragment—An Essay Towards an History of the Laws of England

  Book Reviews in the Annual Register

  Speech on the Repeal of the Marriage Act

  Speeches on Religious Establishment and Toleration

  PART II - POLITICS AND SOCIETY

  Thoughts on the Present Discontents

  Speech on the Middlesex Elections

  Speech at Mr. Burke’s Arrival in Bristol

  Speech on Economical Reform

  Speech on a Bill for Shortening the Duration of Parliaments

  Speech on a Committee to Inquire into the State of the Representation of the ...

  Sketch of a Negro Code

  Thoughts and Details on Scarcity

  A Letter to a Noble Lord

  PART III - AMERICA AND REVOLUTION

  An Account of the European Settlements in America

  Observations on a Late Publication Entitled “The Present State of the Nation”

  Speech on American Taxation

  Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies

  Address to the British Colonists in North America

  A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America

  PART IV - IRELAND AND CATHOLICISM

  Tract on the Popery Laws

  Address at Bristol on the Gordon Riots and the Catholic Question

  A Letter to a Peer of Ireland on tHe Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics

  Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe

  A Letter to Richard Burke, Esq., on Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland

  A Letter to William Smith, Esq., on the Subject of Catholic Emancipation

  PART V - INDIA AND COLONIALISM

  Speech on Mr. Fox’s East India Bill

  Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debt

  Speeches on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings

  PART VI - THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

  Speech on the Army Estimates

  Reflections on the Revolution in France

  An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs

  Thoughts on French Affairs

  Letter to a Member of the National Assembly

  Letters on a Regicide Peace

  PART VII - SELECTED LETTERS

  To the Duke of Richmond

  To William Burgh, Esq.

  To the Marquis of Rockingham

  To Mons. Dupont

  To Philip Francis, Esq.

  To Captain Mercer

  To Chevalier de la Bintinnaye

  To William Weddell, Esq.

  To William Elliot

  FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE

  THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY

  EDMUND BURKE

  EDMUND BURKE (1729-97) was born in Dublin, and educated at Abraham Shackleton’s Quaker school in Balitore and Trinity College, Dublin. In 1730 he entered the Middle Temple in London, but soon left law for literature and, later, politics. His first publication, the parodic A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), was followed in 1757 by A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, a text that was to influence the writers of the Romantic period. His political career began in 1765 when, having become secretary to the then Prime Minister the Marquis of Rockingham, he was made member of Parhament for Wendover. His oratory gained him influence in the Whig party, although he was not to hold office until the downfall of the Tories under Lord North in 1783. Burke became M.P. for Bristol in 1774, but his support for the then unpopular causes of Catholic Emancipation and the relaxation of the Irish Trade laws cost him the seat in 1780. Subsequently elected M.P. for Malton in 1781, he became paymaster of the forces in 1782, resigned with Fox and returned to the same office under the coalition government in 1783. He retired in 1794 and received a large pension from the ministry.

  A large part of Burke’s political career was dedicated to the problem of India (he took part in the investigation of the East India Company affair) and he wrote widely on the subject. Throughout his career he wrote and spoke on many of the major governmental and constitutional issues of his day: the troubles in America resulted in his Thoughts on Present Discontents (1770) and Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777), and the French Revolution produced one of his most famous works, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). This latter work explained at some length his opposition to the doctrines of the revolution and it was this subject that was to be the last great political theme of his public life.

  ISAAC KRAMNICK was born in 1938 and educated at Harvard University, where he received a B.A. degree in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1965, and at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He has taught at Harvard, Brandeis, Yale, and Cornell, where he is now professor of government. He is married to Miriam Brody and lives in Ithaca, NewYork.Among his publications are Bolingbroke and His Circle, The Rage of Edmund Burke, and numerous articles on eighteenth-century topics. He has edited The Federalist Papers, William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and the Thomas Paine Reader for Penguin Classics. Most recently he is the author, with Barry Sheerman, M.P., of Laski:A Life on the Left, and, with R. Laurence Moore, of The Godless Constitution.

  Each volume in the Viking Portable Library either presents a representative selection from the works of a single outstanding writer or offers a comprehensive anthology on a special subject. Averaging 700 pages in length and designed for compactness and readability, these books fill a need not met by other compilations. All are edited by distinguished authorities who have written introductory essays and included other helpful material.

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  First published in Penguin Books 1999

  9 10

  Copyright © Penguin Putnam Inc., 1999

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797.

  [Selections. 1999]

  The portable Edmund Burke / edited with an introduction

  by Isaac Kramnick.

  p. cm.—(The Viking portable library)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-12740-7

  1. Political science—Early works to 1800. 2. Conservatism.

&nb
sp; 3. Great Britain—Politics and government—18th century.

  I. Kramnick, Isaac. II. Title. III. Series.

  JC176.B826 1999

  320’.092—dc21 98-41476

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  INTRODUCTION

  I .

  EDMUND BURKE played a central role in the political history of England during the first forty years of George III’s long reign. In the House of Commons he defended the cause of the American colonies, championed the rights of persecuted Catholics in England and Ireland, criticized the parliamentary meddling of the Hanoverian monarchy, and decried the rape of the Indian subcontinent by English adventurers. In that same house he also rejected pleas for the reform of the archaic English Constitution, ridiculed efforts to lift the civil restrictions on Unitarian and other Protestant dissenters, and, most famously, called down the wrath of God and right-thinking Englishmen on the French revolutionaries and their Jacobin sympathizers in England. Burke’s historical and intellectual importance rests, however, on more than this fascinating and controversial career; he stands, after all, as the intellectual source of one of the modern world’s most influential political visions—conservatism. His writings and speeches are the bible, and he the prophet of that ideology, in much the same way that The Second Treatise of Government and The Communist Manifesto and John Locke and Karl Marx are the bibles and prophets of liberalism and communism respectively. In reviewing and assessing the historical person, role, and impact of Burke one must, thus, confront both the statesman of Georgian England and the philosopher of conservatism.

  Even had Burke not become the philosopher of conservatism and been only the Whig statesman, his parliamentary role would have itself been worthy of posterity’s notice. His was a great success story: an outsider of no great means rises by dint of his own wits, skills, and energy to the inner circles of power in a closed aristocratic political community. To be sure, he never quite made it to the real pinnacles of power; instead he became the articulate defender of a class that refused to accept him as one of its own. Still, his career is linked closely with much of consequence that transpired in the public life of England in the second half of the eighteenth century.

  This prophetic voice of Anglo-American conservatism was Irish, born in Dublin in 1729 to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. He was raised in the faith of his solicitor father and schooled at Dublin’s famous Trinity College, an Anglican institution. In the 1750s Burke moved to London to study law, though he eventually turned to literary and intellectual pursuits in a circle that included Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith. After writing two well-received essays on society and aesthetics, he turned his attention to politics. He entered public life in the middle 1760s as private secretary to the great Whig magnate the marquis of Rockingham, which led to his election in 1765 to the House of Commons, where he would sit until 1794. In the 1770s, as part of Lord Rockingham’s “political connection,” he defended the American colonies in their developing clash with English commercial and imperial policy.

  By 1780 he had also emerged as the principal critic of what was considered George III’s corrupt interference with the independence of the House of Commons. Although Burke saw the power of the Crown as a threat to the ancient English Constitution and its sacred principles of mixed government and the separation of power, in the 1780s he also spoke out strongly against the radical agitation associated with the Yorkshire movement and the reform effort of the Younger Pitt. Democratic enlargement of the suffrage was, he argued, also a threat to the perfectly balanced English Constitution; it would admit the people to too great a share of power.

  In the late 1780s Burke turned much of his parliamentary energy to two causes, the impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, the former governor-general of the East India Company and legislative efforts to improve the status of Catholics in both England and Ireland. These efforts paled in significance, however, as the French Revolution dominated the last years of his life. More than any other figure in English public life, Burke mobilized sentiment against the Jacobin cause at home and abroad. In the course of this, he split the Whig party, denouncing his former colleagues for their continued sympathy with the French experiment.

  Few of his contemporaries had neutral views on this amazing public career. Burke was passionately worshiped and with equal passion hated. With puffy cheeks, fiery red hair, and excessive emotion, he held forth in the senate forum that was the unreformed House of Commons until three years before his death, in 1797. Some would be moved by the fount of republican wisdom, and others would rush for the exits. Perhaps this lay behind his ultimate failure to achieve the heights of political success: his intensity and passionate involvement were not the style appropriate for the pragmatic world of political management and leadership. But this is Burke the statesman; there is also Burke the enduring philosopher of conservatism.

  II.

  Burke’s conservatism is grounded in skepticism. He stands in revolt against the eighteenth century and, as he saw it, the “smugness of adulterated metaphysics.” The “faith in the dogmatism of philosophers” had led Enlightenment thinkers to place faith in reason and abstract ideas, in speculation and a priori principles of natural right, freedom, and equality, as the basis on which to reform existing government. The English had no such illusions, he argued; they understood the complexity and fragility of human nature and human institutions; they were not “the converts of Rousseau ... the disciples ofVoltaire; Helvetius [had] made no progress amongst [them].” The English, according to Burke, regarded the rampant rationalism of the French philosophers and their quest for an ideal and perfect political order with sluggish skepticism. They understood that since the nature of man was intricate and society complex, “simple governments are fundamentally defective.”1

  Burke’s political skepticism was, however, by no means simply a reaction to the trauma of the French Revolution. His opposition to abstract reasoning in philosophy and social matters appeared as early as his undergraduate years at Trinity College, Dublin, during the late 1740s. It also appeared in the religious and philosophical essays he produced between his graduation and the publication, in 1756, of his attack on Lord Bolingbroke’s religious rationalism as politically extrapolated. We know, for example, that in these years Burke attacked “great subtleties and refinements of reasoning,” which, he felt, produced disorders of the brain. “Custom is to be regarded with great deference” as “a more sure guide than our theories.”2 The conservative thrust of the skepticism found in the Reflections on the Revolution in France is also seen writ large in Burke’s response to radical demands in England for democratic reform of Parliament in the early 1780s. The agitation, he declared, approached the Constitution totally oblivious to the fact that the “House of Commons is a legislative body, corporate by prescription, not made upon any given theory.” The English radicals assumed that legislators could remake governments when all wise men knew that “a prescriptive government never was made upon any foregone theory.” How ridiculous, then, to put governments on procrustean beds and make them fit “the theories which learned and speculative men have made.”3 Such speculators, with their ideal blueprints, were political magicians cutting up the Constitution into pieces “in order to boil it, with the puddle of their compounds, into youth and vigor.”4

  But this is by no means the full measure of Burke’s skepticism. It can be seen even more completely in his conception of the art of governing, and in his views on the limited rational capacity of mankind. The conservative skeptic like Burke is deeply interested in the character and style of those who govern.
He is convinced that pursuit of policies, of preconceived speculative plans—in short, of what we might today call ideology—is inappropriate behavior for political leadership. The major function of a magistrate is seen as prudential manager. Stable government must eschew ideology. What matters most is not the pursuit of policy but the quality of leadership. In Burke’s writings, this theme of the importance of wise management is carefully developed.

  Government for Burke was not a science with exact and precise methods and conclusions; it was an art, practiced by artists skilled in prudence. Governors had to approach political issues according to their peculiar circumstances, not in light of abstract ideas or general theories of government. In his speeches on America and the taxation issue, Burke repeatedly insisted that “metaphysical distinctions” of abstract right be kept out of the deliberation and that prudence and virtuous discretion rule the day. Good political leadership was informed by principle, not ruled by it; and, more importantly, it was guided by circumstances. The wise magistrate, Burke argued, ought to respect the temper and opinions of a particular people, the spirit of their age; and, particularly, ought to respect and not tamper with the manners of the people, which in many ways formed the basis of their laws.

  However distinguished his own public career in Parliament was, Burke knew that the likes of himself were not those rightly destined to be in the front ranks of England’s rulers. No matter how much he might proclaim himself not a friend to aristocracy, the overwhelming thrust of his writings insists that only men of breeding possess this quality of prudence so fundamental to the art of governing. This, after all, was the ultimate sin of the French: their failure to recognize the prescriptive role of aristocracy and its production of qualified governors. Governors ought “to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy,” ought to stand upon “elevated ground,” “to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse.”5 Before the great families, Burke humbly denies his capacity to possess the quality of character and skills of learning required to make a prudential magistrate; thus he writes to the duke of Richmond: