When the people have once tasted the flattery of knaves, they can no longer endure reason, which appears to them only in the form of censure and reproach. Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. Men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told of their duty. There are times and circumstances in which not to speak out is at least to connive. Indecision is the natural accomplice of violence. A theory concerning government may become as much a cause of fanaticism as a dogma in religion. When a man is from system furious against monarchy or episcopacy, the good conduct of the monarch or the bishop has no other effect than further to irritate the adversary. He is provoked at it, as furnishing a plea for preserving the thing which he wishes to destroy. A constitution on sufferance is a constitution condemned. Sentence is already passed upon it. The execution is only delayed. Provisions for security are not to be received from those who think that there is no danger. The whole scheme of our mixed constitution is to prevent any one of its principles from being carried as far as, taken by itself, and theoretically, it would go. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. They who raise suspicions on the good on account of the behaviour of ill men are of the party of the latter. A conscientious person would rather doubt his own judgment than condemn his species. He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one. It is impossible that anything should be necessary to commerce which is inconsistent with justice. Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. I have no idea of a liberty unconnected with honesty and justice. We are all a sort of children that must be soothed and managed. What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue! man. The use of character is to be a shield against calumny. Obloquy is a necessary ingredient in the composition of all true glory; calumny and abuse are essential parts of triumph. I have known merchants with the sentiments and the abilities of great statesmen; and I have seen persons in the rank of statesmen with the conceptions and character of pedlars. The situation of man is the preceptor of his duty. He who calls in the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own. He who profits of a superior under standing raises his powers to a level with the height of the superior understanding he unites with. The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints. Whenever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own. Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident a security. CHAPTER VII. CONCLUDING REMARKS We have now brought our quotations to a close, and trust that we have achieved, in part at all events, the object which we set before us at the outset. We have endeavoured, as far as possible, to let Burke speak for himself, and have refrained from comment except where absolutely necessary to elucidate the context. The reader of these pages cannot fail to have been struck with the gulf which separates our times from the period in which Burke lived. It has become the habit to sneer at the eighteenth century as an age of shams; of powder and patches; of periwigs, clouded canes, and formal grimacings. Carlyle is mainly responsible for this view, which, in our humble opinion, is an utterly superficial and erroneous one. A century which produced Johnson, Adam Smith, Hume, Gibbon, Goldsmith, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Thomson, and Cowper; Gainsborough, Hogarth, Morland, and Reynolds; Watt, Arkwright, and Crompton; Clive and Warren Hastings; Wolfe, Howe, Rodney, Jervis, and Nelson; Pitt, Fox, Windham, and Burke; and whose annals are illumined by the victories of Plassey, St. Vincent, and "The Glorious First of June," is not one to be dismissed with a sneer. If society is now less brutal, is it not, on the other hand, more neurotic and less virile? The eighteenth century fox-hunting gentry of England, with all their faults, possessed many sterling virtues, which in these days are not so much in evidence as they might be. The present age lacks the dignity which characterised that of Burke. The prevailing mania is restlessness, and from this no class seems to be exempt. The sole desire of vast multitudes of people appears to be to get away, with the utmost possible speed, from any place in which they happen to find themselves at a given moment. The same rush and hurry now extends to all phases of life. A feverish desire to get money without the slow and laborious process of honest work has fostered and developed the gambling spirit among all classes, from the speculator who plunges on a large scale to the working man who has his "bit on" and is the main support of the halfpenny evening news |