the Indian speeches. But it was only at intervals that Parliament turned its attention to the East. In 1766 and for many years to come the American troubles were insistent; since, having driven out our foreign rivals, Britain had already, guided by George Grenville, embarked on the course which made direct for disruption. But the chaos of parliamentary parties, the personal intrigues, the kaleidoscopic permutations and combinations and dissolutions of groups and sections, the King's overt or covert but always unremitting manœuvres to acquire ascendency, forced themselves upon the politician in Parliament with a persistency which obscured and complicated all other issues. Even Burke himself perforce became not the leader but the mouthpiece of a small and not otherwise brilliant group, which was indeed in power at the moment of his début in the House, but after a few months was relegated to the shades of opposition for sixteen momentous years: the years which witnessed a practical restoration of the supremacy of the Crown, when Lord North became Prime Minister in 1770, and the loss of the American colonies. To these years belong Burke's pamphlets on The State of the Nation (1769), and The Present Discontents (1770), with the two great speeches contained in this volume, (1774 and 1775), and the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777).

The fall of North's ministry in 1782 compelled the King to send for Rockingham, under whom Burke took office as Paymaster of the Forces. Charles James Fox and Shelburne were the Secretaries of State. Four months later, Rockingham died; Shelburne became Prime Minister. Fox, Burke, and others resigned, and early the next year the world was astonished by a coalition between Fox and North which drove Shelburne out of office, and provided a new ministry with Lord Portland as its nominal head. Burke again became Paymaster, but again the administration-—owing this time to the action of the King and his friends in the House of Lords—lasted less than a year. Young William Pitt accepted the post of Prime Minister, and on the dissolution

in the spring of 1784 was returned to power with an overwhelming majority behind him.

Until the French Revolution created a hopeless breach between them, Burke and Fox worked together in the closest political union. Fox's India Bill of 1783 had brought about the downfall of the Coalition ministry. It had itself been the outcome of the anomalous conditions under which for ten years Warren Hastings had striven to establish the British dominion on a secure basis. Indian affairs came to the front. Burke was active against Hastings, who had been recalled. His great speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts was made in 1785, and that on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings in 1787.

But with 1789 came the French Revolution; and from that time to the end of his life Burke's whole soul was absorbed in combating that Revolution and its children. From 1790, which saw the publication of the Reflections on the French Revolution, to 1796 when the Letters on a Regicide Peace appeared, hostility to it was the keynote of all Burke's utterances, and the former champion of American and British liberties became the foremost champion of every institution which in the name of Liberty the forces now let loose were threatening to sweep away. But a personal loss which fell upon him in 1794 so crushed him as undoubtedly to shake his vast intellectual powers: his son Richard, in whom all his hopes were centred, dying in that year. Three years later, in July, 1797, he followed his son to the grave.

§ 2. Appreciation.

The fame of Edmund Burke rests upon his achievement as a political thinker and as an orator. Neither his nonpolitical essays in literature nor his record as a party politician in the House of Commons would entitle him to a place in the front rank, even of his contemporaries in those fields of energy. But his printed speeches and disquisitions on political affairs, whatever faults may be found in them, remain

as a storehouse of wisdom, and as masterpieces of rhetorical exposition.

This holds good in spite of the apparent paradox that persons holding the most antagonistic views on current questions find eloquent justification for their doctrines in his pronouncements, and the attitude of his later years is often held to be in flat contradiction to his earlier position. The paradox is more apparent than real. Burke himself was absolutely sincere in the conviction of his own essential consistency throughout his career. As a Whig of the Revolution, he fought the coercive and monarchical policy of a Grenville, a Townshend, or a North; as a Whig of the Revolution, he fought what seemed to him the violent and anarchical principles with which the new Whigs were being inoculated by the new Revolution in France. 'Return to the old paths" is the burthen of his appeal on behalf of Conciliation with America; "stand fast in the old ways" is the burthen of his appeal from the new to the old Whigs. As a matter of course, the attack from a new quarter demands a change of front; but that does not involve a shifting of the ground. Unless we are prepared to maintain that the Revolution of 1789 was the logical corollary of the Revolution of 1688, no inconsistency is implied. The ancient liberties were threatened by one class of innovators; the ancient authorities by another; to both Burke was in unqualified opposition-to the first strenuously, to the second passionately.

We are not here concerned with the question whether Burke was correct in his diagnosis of the motives of the French Revolution or in his estimate of its tendencies. The point is that having arrived at that diagnosis and that estimate, the principle which had led him to support the American colonists drove him with a yet fiercer urgency to battle with all his might against it; in spite of the fact that Boston and Paris alike appealed to the sacred name of Liberty.

More than once a parallel has been drawn and more than

once challenged, between this change of front on Burke's part, and the change of front on the part of Erasmus and his English friends, notably Sir Thomas More, when Luther rose up against the Papacy. The parallel holds. So far as he recognised in the ecclesiastical system innovations on the pure teaching of the Church, More was a Reformer: he desired to go back to the ancient ways. But when among the innovations Luther included doctrines which in More's eyes were fundamental, and when in Germany an attempt at a social revolution was ostensibly based on the new teaching, the author of the Utopia adopted a line which classed him with the reactionaries, and he who had made Toleration a first principle in his ideal Commonwealth was fain to crush heresy by the heavy hand of the Law. More stood for the Church as Burke stood for the Constitution. He would have had Clerical innovations done away, as Burke would have had Tyrannical innovations done away. But when a new set of innovations threatened, which seemed to cut at the roots of all lawful authority, he like Burke found the new danger more appalling than the old. The principle, the motive, actuating both men was the same. Whether the judgment of both was equally at fault may be matter of opinion; but an error of judgment does not involve inconsistency of principle1.

Here then is to be found Burke's cardinal rule: in a dread of innovation. If there are tares among the wheat, we are not to drag them both up and sow the field afresh; it is better to let the wheat and the tares grow together. If it be practicable to weed out the tares, good; but in any case, the wheat must not be destroyed in order to get rid of the

1 It may be noticed in passing, though the remark is not strictly relevant to the point under discussion, that More would have urged a difference between Utopian and European conditions. Authority rested on a different foundation. The Utopians could appeal to no Divine Revelation; the Church, in More's view, most emphatically could. The argument which demanded toleration of diversities in one case ceased to apply in the other.

tares. To escape from the dangerous realm of metaphor; even the reform of abuses, unless they are flagrant, is to be set about with caution; but radical changes, constructive as well as destructive, are inevitably fraught with such danger as in effect to demand prohibition. This may be laid down as Burke's controlling practical principle.

Intimately associated with this principle is Burke's attitude towards all speculative theorising in politics. We live under a system which has stood the test of time; a system not ideally perfect, and containing many anomalies, but still one which has given this country on the whole a government several degrees better than has been enjoyed by any other modern State. It is a compromise based on the fact that human nature is composed of logically discordant elements, that there are diversities of gifts, diversities of mental and moral capacity, in infinitely varying proportions of combination; from which it follows that a certain amount of play must be given to apparently contradictory principles, which cannot be simultaneously carried out to their logical conclusions and at the same time cannot be excluded. Hence there may be a disastrous excess of logic in politics, and the logical perfection of an ideal system or of a scheme of reform is almost enough of itself to carry condemnation. The practical statesman therefore will not turn for guidance to Plato or Harrington or Rousseau. The Constitution is to be maintained not because it is a free system, or a democratic system, or an aristocratic system, but because it has been a natural growth.

This fundamental Conservatism of Burke's-the term is not of course used in a party sense-is obviously a leading factor in determining his attitude to the French Revolution. It is necessarily less so in connexion with Indian affairs, for the position of a British Government on Indian soil was absolutely without precedent. The conditions had no parallel. A huge experiment had been forced upon us, and as a huge experiment it had to be accepted. The Conservatism which set its face against experiments altogether was