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the good of mankind, or even the freedom of France. For if the restless and unlimited ambition of Buonaparte had not united all the leading nations of Europe against his power, and so, in the end, caused his ruin, it is still, at the very least, questionable, whether France would have gained any thing of liberty or of more liberal institutions by her revolution. The truth, however, is that the argument, if it deserves to be called one, might be applied with equal justice to private as to public conduct. Because God's providence works good out of all evil, therefore let us stand idly by, and witness a robbery, or a murder!

But never let the adversaries of Burke forget, that the fate of France was an inferior point in his consideration,-that this was all along the weakest motive of his fears and his exertions. The successful incursion of the principles of anarchy into England, and the consequent injury or ruin of her free institutions, was to his mind the main cause of apprehension. To pronounce this alarm chimerical, is not to settle the question. It neither confirms nor refutes the imputation of folly or of knavery: for the whole question in dispute was to England one of degree; and, in this view, the possible and remote advantages which in the course of years might or might not spring out of present confusion and present oppression, could have no defensible influence on Mr. Burke's conduct as a statesman or a patriot. It could not be questioned that England actually possessed a considerable share of freedom; nor could the most sanguine republican deny that even that portion, in the desperate and lasting contest which must have followed any violent attempt at innovation, might have been totally lost to England. To the country of Burke, then, the acquisition of any improvement was at best uncertain and contingent, while the risk to be incurred was no less than the absolute loss of all the objects in dispute. The case of France, we fully admit, was very different. Her government was in its nature despotic-there was no popular representation, and scarcely even a partial enjoyment of virtual freedom. In her case separately considered, therefore, it might be fair to infer, that without passing through the ordeal of a severe contest and of great though temporary suffering, France could not hope to escape from a pressing and admitted evil. But the circumstances of the time rendered it impossible to look to France alone. That despotism is the worst of national evils, and freedom the greatest of national blessings, was not less the argument of Burke than of his adversaries: but he preferred the imperfect enjoyment of the latter, admitting it to have been imperfect in England, to all the hazards of a contest, which in too many instances has ended in the permanent success and establishment of the former. We have endeavoured to prove that, by constitutional courses, he

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could labour long and well to enlarge and to confirm the liberties of his country. He had limited the power of the crown-he had extended the rights of juries he had exposed and greatly remedied the abuses of authority. We must contend that it is a most difficult task to trace with precision the chain of cause and of effect in the course of national events; but estimating at their highest value the advantages to France and to the world resulting from the French revolution, we are persuaded that, without gross injustice, these cannot be quoted as affecting the honesty or the wisdom of Burke; and it is manifest that they cannot, in the slightest degree, disprove the justice of his fears regarding the success of the revolutionary doctrines in England.

We cannot enter into the latter question, which it is no longer the fashion to treat as an absurd and extravagant theory; but we might safely rest this part of our case on the answer which any honest opponent of Burke in 1792 would at the present time give to the question-whether the experience of the subsequent twenty years had not altered his notions as to the probable consequences upon English freedom, of the adoption in 1792 of the principles which Mr. Burke at that period resisted.

But let us not be misled by words in a case, in which, above all others, words may be strictly said to have been things. We are justly entitled to take a higher ground of defence. Burke had never admitted revolution to be synonimous with freedom, nor reform with improvement. He had not sworn allegiance to all reforms and all revolutions, whether foreign or domestic, whether seasonable or untimely. From his first entrance into public life, reformer as he was in many senses of the word, he had constantly opposed, without exception, all the various projects of reform in parliament. This principle, not assumed by him to meet a particular case, or as a specious disguise of a real inconsistency, may be traced in his speeches and his conduct long before there could be a suspicion, even to his extended forecast, of any event resembling the French revolution. As a consistent statesman, he was not only justified but bound by all his previous opinions, and by the previous actions of his life, to resist the violent and unqualified innovations, the metaphysical tenets of French jacobins and French philosophers. Of the various shades of whiggism, Burke had chosen the Rockingham school; which, whether a good or a bad school in point of doctrine, was not without numbers nor without respect in England. Is it then more fair to judge any statesman by a criterion suggested by his enemies, than by the principles professed and acted upon by himself? Was it rational to expect that, with the pliancy of younger statesmen, Burke could admire that which had, through all his lifetime, been the

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express object of his abhorrence; a liberty unconnected with order, which could exist without honesty or virtue'? It was the principal boast of the party in which he had served and which he had commanded, to be the accurate and even the responsible representatives of the principles by which, in the English revolution of 1688, certain definite rights and securities were obtained for this country; could he, then, in the pursuit of vague and undefined freedom, consent to risk the loss of those defined and constitutional benefits? could he consider the doctrines and the practices, which he was, by every principle of his political creed, bound and sworn to condemn if they had been of English growth, as rendered pure and harmless by their importation from France?

If a statesman can be proved to have been mercenary and treacherous, the remaining parts of his political character may be abandoned to their own merits; and these, therefore, are the favourite and laboured points of attack to the enemies of Burke.

The first charge resolves itself, upon a strict examination, into Mr. Burke's acceptance of a pension at the close of his public life; for, by all the preceding actions of that life, it is refuted in a manner as distinct and unanswerable as Mr. Thomas Moore himself could require. Some allowance, indeed, may be demanded for a scandalous story in certain unpublished papers of Lord Orford: but on the point of scandal purer authority may well be expected, and Mr. Moore has not suggested its existence. But let us come to facts. Nearly the first action of Burke in connection with his political life, when the condition of his private fortune gave the highest value to the sacrifice, was the voluntary abandonment of a pension obtained for him by Mr. Gerard Hamilton, who had made some proposal on the subject implying an expectation of political servitude, and therefore offensive to his feelings; and who will deny that the forbearance of Burke in never proclaiming this action, even as a defence of his supposed desertion of a friend and a patron, greatly enhances its merit? Again, in 1765, Lord Charlemont relates the offer made by Burke to resign his office of private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the moment he learned that prejudices were entertained against him by some of his lordship's colleagues in the government. Lord Charlemont is not a mean authority on any question of political integrity; and it should be observed, that, at the period of this offer, this office was to Burke the only opening to parliament and to political distinction. Again, on the formation of Lord Chathan's administration, though urged by Lord Rockingham himself to accept the office of a lord of trade, Burke refused to abandon the fortunes of his earliest patron. Once more, the seat in parliament for Bristol, so honourably conferred on him, and in

itself an honour of which neither the value nor the effects should be estimated by the feelings of the present times, was risked and lost for no other reason but his intrepid avowal of principles more liberal than those of his constituents. And lastly, in 1782, when paymaster of the army, he voluntarily retrenched from his own emoluments various profits depending on the management of Chelsea Hospital-and the whole interest of the balances of public money, which had been enjoyed by all his predecessors; and even a few years enjoyment of which (for the amount of the interest on these balances was actually upwards of £20,000 per annum) would have made himself infinitely a richer man than he ever was or hoped to be.

If to these unquestionable facts, not arguing corruption or laxity of principle, we add Burke's persevering refusal to accept any office after his junction with Mr. Pitt; if, moreover, we reflect that his pension, the head and front of his offending,' never solicited by himself, was not accepted before 1795, after his retirement from the active pursuits of his political career; that it was neither a retainer for future service in parliament, nor a bribe to indolence or to incapacity, but the hardly-earned recompense of a laborious public life and of many substantial services to the state-If we look to the case in all its bearings as it really stands, we shall impute the charge rather to political malice than to political justice. At the worst, we shall hesitate to admit the propriety of the verdict which, on the ground of a single offence, would obliterate the merits and defame the character of a whole existence; and even find some difficulty in admiring the policy or the candour of those who reject, on this sole plea, the honour and the advantage which the long and disinterested attachment of a splendid genius might shed on their own cause.

With regard to the charge of political treachery, we shall be contented with one observation, and that we borrow from Mr. Moore's Life of Sheridan, of which a very unreasonable portion is filled with the most vulgar common-places of rancorous abuse against Burke. It is, in fact, an unconscious refutation of many of this sprightly partizan's own statements.

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In general,' Mr. Moore remarks, political deserters lose their power and their value in the very act; and bring little more than their treason to the cause which they espouse; but Burke was mighty in either camp,' &c. &c.

What then was the true cause of this rare exception in the instance of Burke to the common fate of political deserters? Why did not his influence, his power and his character expire with his faith to his party? There is but one intelligible solution of this problem that he deserved and received the credit, commonly

his labour and his care. Those who are not ignorant of the less liberal views of Mr. Fox, and of some of his greatest contem→ poraries on this subject, are bound to record that he always supported her interests at the sacrifice of his own; and that on the subject of her trade more especially, all the principles, by which the intercourse between the two countries has in the sequel been regulated and improved, were traced by his sagacity. His exertions in regard to the Roman Catholics of Ireland, whatever may be the natural differences of opinion on the great ques tion yet pending, cannot surely be perverted into proofs of his indifference to the civil rights of mankind. From them at least no evidence of an aristocratical or abstract love of oppression can be extorted. Long before the first relaxation of the penal laws in 1778, Mr. Burke had examined every branch of the subject, and had explained to the more leading statesmen of Ireland his feelings and his opinions. It is not possible to deny that before that period the whole system was odious and unwise, and incapable of producing any other results than those of hatred and turbulence on the one side, of insolence and of fear on the other. Of the first bill of relief, to which Sir George Savile's name was given, Mr. Burke was known to be the author; and after the greater bill of relief in 1792, he continued, to the moment of his death, to urge the policy of granting to the Roman Catholics the political privileges from which they still continued to be excluded. The man who acted thus, whatever else he might be, was not a bigoted advocate of the existing order of things: this Apostle of Institutions could consent without alarm to the removal of political restraints, when the case in his opinion justified such a con

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But to leave Ireland-if the claims of Mr. Burke to be ranked with the most successful friends of English liberty, had rested on the single foundation of his reforms in the public offices, and the public expenditure of the country, the most sincere alarmist on the influence of the crown must surely hesitate to reject them. For he must be sensible that it cannot be deemed the same enterprize, requiring the same spirit, or opposed by the same difficulties, to have attacked the very citadel of royal influence in the year 1780, which it would be considered in the year 1826. He must feel some respect for the hand, which inflicted the first serious wound on the system of sinecures; which deprived the crown of so many sources of influence and means of corruption; which so largely exaited the character, by increasing the independence, of parliament. We have observed that a very narrow and unfair estimate of the national service accomplished by these reforms, is too frequently admitted. It is supposed to consist in fixing a limit to the pension

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