Bot-S: Vol 24: The Classics

Indeed the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments
than churches, where the feelings of humanity are thus out-
raged. Poets who have to deal with an audience not yet
graduated in the school of the rights of men, and who must
apply themselves to the moral constitution of the heart,
would not dare to produce such a triumph as a matter of ex-
ultation. There, where men follow their natural impulses,
they would not bear the odious maxims of a Machiavelian
policy, whether applied to the attainments of monarchical or
democratic tyranny. They would reject them on the modern,
as they once did on the ancient stage, where they could not
bear even the hypothetical proposition of such wickedness
in the mouth of a personated tyrant, though suitable to the
character he sustained. No theatric audience in Athens
would bear what has been borne, in the midst of the real
tragedy of this triumphal day ; a principal actor weighing,
as it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors, — so much
actual crime against so much contingent advantage, — and
after putting in and out weights, declaring that the balance
was on the side of the advantages. They would not bear to
see the crimes of new democracy posted as in a ledger
against the crimes of old despotism, and the book-keepers of
politics finding democracy still in debt, but by no means
unable or unwilling to pay the balance. In the theatre, the
first intuitive glance, without any elaborate process of
reasoning, will show, that this method of political compu-

230 EDMUND BURKE

tation would justify every extent of crime. They would see,
that on these principles, even where the very worst acts were
not perpetrated, it was owing rather to the fortune of the
conspirators, than to their parsimony in the expenditure of
treachery and blood. They would soon see, that criminal
means once tolerated are soon preferred. They present a
shorter cut to the object than through the highway of the
moral virtues. Justifying perfidy and murder for public
benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and
perfidy and murder the end; until rapacity, malice, revenge,
and fear more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their in-
satiable appetites. Such must be the consequences of losing,
in the splendour of these triumphs of the rights of men, all
natural sense of wrong and right.

But the reverend pastor exults in this "leading in tri-
umph," because truly Louis the Sixteenth was "an arbitrary
monarch ;" that is, in other words, neither more nor less
than because he was Louis the Sixteenth, and because he
had the misfortune to be born king of France, with the pre-
rogatives of which, a long line of ancestors, and a long ac-
quiescence of the people, without any act of his, had put him
in possession. A misfortune it has indeed turned out to him,
that he was born king of France. But misfortune is not
crime, nor is indiscretion always the greatest guilt. I shall
never think that a prince, the acts of whose whole reign was
a series of concessions to his subjects, who was willing to
relax his authority, to remit his prerogatives, to call his
people to a share of freedom, not known, perhaps not de-
sired by their ancestors; such a prince, though he should
be subjected to the common frailties attached to men and to
princes, though he should have once thought it necessary to
provide force against the desperate designs manifestly carry-
ing on against his person, and the remnants of his authority;
though all this should be taken into consideration, I shall be
led with great difficulty to think he deserves the cruel and
insulting triumph of Paris and of Dr. Price. I tremble for
the cause of liberty, from such an example to kings. I trem-
ble for the cause of humanity, in the unpunished outrages
of the most wicked of mankind. But there are some people
of that low and degenerate fashion of mind, that they look

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 231

up with a sort of complacent awe and admiration to kings,
who know to keep firm in their seat, to hold a strict hand
over their subjects, to assert their prerogative, and, by the
awakened vigilance of a severe despotism, to guard against
the very first approaches of freedom. Against such as these
they never elevate their voice. Deserters from principle,
listed with fortune, they never see any good in suffering
virtue, nor any crime in prosperous usurpation.

If it could have been made clear to me, that the king and
queen of France (those I mean who were such before the
triumph) were inexorable and cruel tyrants, that they had
formed a deliberate scheme for massacring the National
Assembly, (I think I have seen something like the latter in-
sinuated in certain publications,) I should think their cap-
tivity just. If this be true, much more ought to have been
done, but done, in my opinion, in another manner. The
punishment of real tyrants is a noble and awful act of jus-
tice ; and it has with truth been said to be consolatory to
the human mind. But if I were to punish a wicked king, I
should regard the dignity in avenging the crime. Justice is
grave and decorous, and in its punishments rather seems to
submit to a necessity, than to make a choice. Had Nero, or
Agrippina, or Louis the Eleventh, or Charles the Ninth, been
the subject; if Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, after the
murder of Patkul, or his predecessor Christina, after the
murder of Monaldeschi, had fallen into your hands, Sir, or
into mine, I am sure our conduct would have been different

If the French king, or king of the French, (or by what-
ever name he is known in the new vocabulary of your con-
stitution,) has in his own person, and that of his queen,
really deserved these unavowed, but unavenged, murderous
attempts, and those frequent indignities more cruel than
murder, such a person would ill deserve even that subor-
dinate executory trust, which I understand is to be placed in
him; nor is he fit to be called chief in a nation which he
has outraged and oppressed. A worse choice for such an
office in a new commonwealth, than that of a deposed tyrant,
could not possibly be made. But to degrade and insult a
man as the worst of criminals, and afterwards to trust him
in your highest concerns, as a faithful, honest, and zealous

232 EDMUND BURKE

servant, is not consistent with reasoning, nor prudent in
policy, nor safe in practice. Those who could make such
an appointment must be guilty of a more flagrant breach of
trust than any they have yet committed against the people.
As this is the only crime in which your leading politicians
could have acted inconsistently, I conclude that there is no
sort of ground for these horrid insinuations. I think no
better of all the other calumnies.

In England, we give no credit to them. We are generous
enemies: we are faithful allies. We spurn from us with
disgust and indignation the slanders of those who bring us
their anecdotes with the attestation of the flower-de-luce
on their shoulder. We have Lord George Gordon fast in
Newgate ; and neither his being a public proselyte to Juda-
ism, nor his having, in his zeal against catholic priests and
all sorts of ecclesiastics, raised a mob (excuse the term, it
is still in use here) which pulled down all our prisons, have
preserved to him a liberty, of which he did not render him-
self worthy by a virtuous use of it. We have rebuilt New-
gate, and tenanted the mansion. We have prisons almost
as strong as the Bastile, for those who dare to libel the
queens of France. In this spiritual retreat, let the noble
libeller remain. Let him there meditate on his Thalmud,
until he learns a conduct more becoming his birth and parts,
and not so disgraceful to the ancient religion to which
he has become a proselyte ; or until some persons from your
side of the water, to please your new Hebrew brethren, shall
ransom him. He may then be enabled to purchase, with the
old hoards of the synagogue, and a very small poundage on
the long compound interest of the thirty pieces of silver,
(Dr. Price has shown us what miracles compound interest
will perform in 1790 years,) the lands which are lately dis-
covered to have been usurped by the Gallican church. Send
us your Popish archbishop of Paris, and we will send you our
Protestant Rabbin. We shall treat the person you send us in
exchange like a gentleman and an honest man, as he is ; but
pray let him bring with him the fund of his hospitality,
bounty, and charity ; and, depend upon it, we shall never con-
fiscate a shilling of that honourable and pious fund, nor think
of enriching the treasury with the spoils of the poor-box.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 233

To tell you the truth, my dear Sir, I think the honour of
our nation to be somewhat concerned in the disclaimer of
the proceedings of this society of the Old Jewry and the
London Tavern. I have no man's proxy. I speak only for
myself, when I disclaim, as I do with all possible earnestness,
all communion with the actors in that triumph, or with the
admirers of it. When I assert anything else, as concerning
the people of England, I speak from observation, not from
authority; but I speak from the experience I have had in
a pretty extensive and mixed communication with the in-
habitants of this kingdom, of all descriptions and ranks, and
after a course of attentive observations, began early in life,
and continued for nearly forty years. I have often been
astonished, considering that we are divided from you but
by a slender dyke of about twenty-four miles, and that the
mutual intercourse between the two countries has lately been
very great, to find how little you seem to know of us. I
suspect that this is owing to your forming a judgment of
this nation from certain publications, which do, very er-
roneously, if they do at all, represent the opinions and dis-
positions generally prevalent in England. The vanity, rest-
lessness, petulance, and spirit of intrigue, of several petty
cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of consquence
in bustle and noise, and puffing, and mutual quotation of each
other, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect of
their abilities is a mark of general acquiescence in their
opinions. No such thing, I assure you. Because half a
dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with
their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle,
reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the
cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make
the noise are the only inhabitants of the field ; that, of
course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they
are other than the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though
loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.

I almost venture to affirm, that not one in a hundred
amongst us participates in the "triumph" of the Revolution
Society. If the king and queen of France, and their chil-
dren, were to fall into our hands by the chance of war, in
the most acrimonious of all hostilities, (I deprecate such an

234 EDMUND BURKE

event, I deprecate such hostility,) they would be treated with
another sort of triumphal entry into London. We formerly
have had a king of France in that situation; you have read
how he was treated by the victor in the field; and in what
manner he was afterwards received in England. Four hun-
dred years have gone over us; but I believe we are not
materally changed since that period. Thanks to our sullen
resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of
our national character, we still bear the stamp of our fore-
fathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity
and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as
yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not
the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Vol-
taire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists
are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers.
We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think
that no discoveries are to be made, in morality ; nor many
in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of
liberty, which were understood long before we were born,
altogether as well as they will be after the grave has
heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb
shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In Eng-
land we have not yet been completely embowelled of our
natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we cherish and
cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful
guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true sup-
porters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been
drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed
birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred
shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the
whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated
by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and
blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up
with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty
to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect
to nobility. 1 Why? Because when such ideas are brought

1 The English are, I conceive, misrepresented in a letter published in
one of the papers, by a gentleman thought to be a dissenting minister. —
When writing to Dr. Price of the spirit which prevails at Paris, he says,
"The spirit of the people in this place has abolished all the proud distinc-
tions which the king and nobles had usurped in their minds; whether they
talk of the king, the noble, or the priest, their whole language is that of

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 235

before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because
all other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to cor-
rupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us
unfit for rational liberty; and by teaching us a servile,
licentious, and abandoned insolence, to be our low sport for
a few holidays, to make us perfectly fit for, and justly de-
serving of, slavery, through the whole course of our lives.

You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough
to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings;
that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we
cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take
more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are
prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more
generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them.
We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own
private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock
in each man is small, and that the individuals would do
better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital
of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation,
instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sa-
gacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them.
If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think
it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason in-
volved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to
leave nothing but the naked reason ; because prejudice, with
its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and
an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is
of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages
the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does
not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision,
sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a
man's virtue his habit ; and not a series of unconnected acts.
Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his
nature.

Your literary men, and your politicians, and so do the
whole clan of the enlightened among us, essentially differ in
these points. They have no respect for the wisdom of
others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of con-

the most enlightened and liberal amongst the English." If this gentleman
means to confine the terms enlightened and liberal to one set sf men in
England, it may be true. It is not generally so.

236 EDMUND BURKE

fidence in their own. With them it is a sufficient motive to
destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one.
As to the new, they are in no sort of fear with regard to the
duration of a building run up in haste; because duration is
no object to those who think little or nothing has been done
before their time, and who place all their hopes in discovery.
They conceive, very systematically, that all things which
give perpetuity are mischievous, and therefore they are at
inexpiable war with all establishments. They think that
government may vary like modes of dress, and with as little
ill effect: that there needs no principle of attachment, except
a sense of present conveniency, to any constitution of the
state. They always speak as if they were of opinion that
there is a singular species of compact between them and
their magistrates, which binds the magistrate, but which has
nothing reciprocal in it, but that the majesty of the people
has a right to dissolve it without any reason, but its will.
Their attachment to their country itself is only so far as it
agrees with some of their fleeting projects; it begins and
ends with that scheme of polity which falls in with their
momentary opinion.

These doctrines, or rather sentiments, seem prevalent with
your new statesmen. But they are wholly different from
those on which we have always acted in this country.

I hear it is sometimes given out in France, that what is
doing among you is after the example of England. I beg
leave to affirm, that scarcely anything done with you has
originated from the practice or the prevalent opinions of
this people, either in the act or in the spirit of the
proceeding. Let me add, that we are as unwilling to learn
these lessons from France, as we are sure that we never
taught them to that nation. The cabals here, who take a sort
of share in your transactions, as yet consist of but a handful
of people. If unfortunately by their intrigues, their sermons,
their publications, and by a confidence derived from an ex-
pected union with the counsels and forces of the French
nation, they should draw considerable numbers into their
faction, and in consequence should seriously attempt any-
thing here in imitation of what has been done with you,
the event, I dare venture to prophesy, will be, that, with

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 237

some trouble to their country, they will soon accomplish
their own destruction. This people refused to change their
law in remote ages from respect to the infallibility of popes;
and they will not now alter it from a pious implicit faith
in the dogmatism of philosophers; though the former was
armed with the anathema and crusade, and though the
latter should act with the libel and the lamp-iron.

Formerly your affairs were your own concern only. We
felt for them as men; but we kept aloof from them, be-
cause we were not citizens of France. But when we see
the model held up to ourselves, we must feel as Englishmen,
and feeling, we must provide as Englishmen. Your affairs,
in spite of us, are made a part of our interest; so far at
least as to keep at a distance your panacea, or your plague.
If it be a panacea, we do not want it. We know the conse-
quences of unnecessary physic. If it be a plague, it is such a
plague that the precautions of the most severe quarantine
ought to be established against it.

I hear on all hands that a cabal, calling itself philosophic,
receives the glory of many of the late proceedings; and that
their opinions and systems are the true actuating spirit of
the whole of them. I have heard of no party in England,
literary or political, at any time, known by such a descrip-
tion. It is not with you composed of those men, is it?
whom the vulgar, in their blunt, homely style, commonly call
atheists and infidels? If it be, I admit that we too have had
writers of that description, who made some noise in their
day. At present they repose in lasting oblivion. Who, born
within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and
Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole
race who called themselves Freethinkers? Who now reads
Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through? Ask the book-
sellers of London what is become of all these lights of the
world. In as few years their few successors will go to the
family vault of " all the Capulets." But whatever they were,
or are, with us, they were and are wholly unconnected in-
dividuals. With us they kept the common nature of their
kind, and were not gregarious. They never acted in corps,
or were known as a faction in the state, nor presumed to
influence in that name or character, or for the purposes of

238 EDMUND BURKE

such a faction, on any of our public concerns. Whether they
ought so to exist, and so be permitted to act, is another
question. As such cabals have not existed in England, so
neither has the spirit of them had any influence in establish-
ing the original frame of our constitution, or in any one of
the several reparations and improvements it has undergone.
The whole has been done under the auspices, and is con-
firmed by the sanctions, of religion and piety. The whole
has emanated from the simplicity of our national character,
and from a sort of native plainness and directness of under-
standing, which for a long time characterized those men who
have successively obtained authority amongst us. This dis-
position still remains; at least in the great body of the people.
We know, and what is better, we feel inwardly, that
religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all
good and of all comfort. 1 In England we are so convinced of
this, that there is no rust of superstition, with which the
accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted
it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred
of the people of England would not prefer to impiety. We
shall never be such fools as to call in an enemy to the sub-
stance of any system to remove its corruptions, to supply its
defects, or to perfect its construction. If our religious tenets
should ever want a further elucidation, we shall not call on
atheism to explain them. We shall not light up our temple
from that unhallowed fire. It will be illuminated with other
lights. It will be perfumed with other incense, than the in-
fectious stuff which is imported by the smugglers of adul-
terated metaphysics. If our ecclesiastical establishment
should want a revision, it is not avarice or rapacity, public
or private, that we shall employ for the audit, or receipt, or
application of its consecrated revenue. Violently condemn-
ing neither the Greek nor the Armenian, nor, since heats
are subsided, the Roman system of religion, we prefer the
Protestant; not because we think it has less of the Chris-

1 Sit igitur hoc ab initio pcrsuasum civibus, dominos esse omnium
rerum ac moderatores, deos;eaque, qua? gerantur, eorum geri vi, ditione,
ac numine; eosdemque optime de gencre hominum mereri; et qualis
quisque sit, quid agat, quid in se admittat, qua mente, qua pietate colat
religiones intueri; piorum et impiorum habere rationem. His enim rebus
imbuta: mentes haud sane abhorrebunt ab utili et a vera sententia. Cic.
de Legibus, 1. 2.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 239

tian religion in it, but because, in our judgment, it has more.
We are Protestants, not from indifference, but from zeal.

We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his
constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not
only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail
long. But if, in the moment of riot, and in a drunken
delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembic of hell,
which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should un-
cover our nakedness, by throwing off that Christian religion
which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one
great source of civilization amongst us, and amongst many
other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that
the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, perni-
cious, and degrading superstition might take place of it.

For that reason, before we take from our establishment
the natural, human means of estimation, and give it up to
contempt, as you have done, and in doing it have incurred
the penalties you well deserve to suffer, we desire that some
other may be presented to us in the place of it. We shall
then form our judgment.

On these ideas, instead of quarrelling with establishments,
as some do, who have made a philosophy and a religion of
their hostility to such institutions, we cleave closely to them.
We are resolved to keep an established church, an established
monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established de-
mocracy, each in the degree it exists, and in no greater. I
shall show you presently how much of each of these we
possess.

It has been the misfortune (not, as these gentlemen think
it, the glory) of this age, that everything is to be discussed,
as if the constitution of our country were to be always a
subject rather of altercation, than enjoyment. For this
reason, as well as for the satisfaction of those among you (if
any such you have among you) who may wish to profit of
examples, I venture to trouble you with a few thoughts upon
each of these establishments. I do not think they were un-
wise in ancient Rome, who, when they wished to new-model
their laws, set commissioners to examine the best constituted
republics within their reach.

First, I beg leave to speak of our church establishment,

240 EDMUND BURKE

which is the first of our prejudices, not a prejudice destitute
of reason, but involving in it profound and extensive wisdom.
I speak of it first. It is first, and last, and midst in our
minds. For, taking ground on that religious system, of
which we are now in possession, we continue to act on the
early received and uniformly continued sense of mankind.
That sense not only, like a wise architect, hath built up the
august fabric of states, but like a provident proprietor, to
preserve the structure from profanation and ruin, as a sacred
temple purged from all the impurities of fraud, and violence,
and injustice, and tyranny, hath solemnly and for ever conse-
crated the commonwealth, and all that officiate in it. This
consecration is made, that all who administer in the govern-
ment of men, in which they stand in the person of God him-
self, should have high and worthy notions of their function
and destination ; that their hope should be full of immor-
tality; that they should not look to the paltry pelf of the
moment, nor to the temporary and transient praise of the
vulgar, but to a solid, permanent existence, in the permanent
part of their nature, and to a permanent fame and glory, in
the example they leave as a rich inheritance to the world.

Such sublime principles ought to be infused into persons
of exalted situations; and religious establishments provided,
that may continually revive and enforce them. Every sort
of moral, every sort of civil, every sort of politic institution,
aiding the rational and natural ties that connect the human
understanding and affections to the divine, are not more than
necessary, in order to build up that wonderful structure,
Man; whose prerogative it is, to be in a great degree a
creature of his own making; and who, when made as he
ought to be made, is destined to hold no trivial place in the
creation. But whenever man is put over men, as the better
nature ought ever to preside, in that case more particularly,
he should as nearly as possible be approximated to his per-
fection.

The consecration of the state, by a state religious estab-
lishment, is necessary also to operate with a wholesale awe
upon free citizens ; because, in order to secure their freedom,
they must enjoy some determinate portion of power. To
them therefore a religion connected with the state, and with

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANClfc 241

their duty towards it, becomes even more necessary than in
such societies, where the people, by the terms of their sub-
jection, are confined to private sentiments, and the manage-
ment of their own family concerns. All persons possessing
any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully im-
pressed with an idea that they act in trust: and that they
are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one
great Master, Author, and Founder of society.

This principle ought even to be more strongly impressed
upon the minds of those who compose the collective sover-
eignty, than upon those of single princes. Without instru-
ments, these princes can do nothing. Whoever uses instru-
ments, in finding helps, finds also impediments. Their power
is therefore by no means complete; nor are they safe in
extreme abuse. Such persons, however elevated by flattery,
arrogance, and self-opinion, must be sensible, that, whether
covered or not by positive law, in some way or other they
are accountable even here for the abuse of their trust. If
they are not cut off by a rebellion of their people, they may
be strangled by the very janissaries kept for their security
against all other rebellion. Thus we have seen the king of
France sold by his soldiers for an increase of pay. But
where popular authority is absolute and unrestrained, the peo-
ple have an infinitely greater, because a far better founded,
confidence in their own power. They are themselves, in a
great measure, their own instruments. They are nearer to
their objects. Besides, they are less under responsibility to
one of the greatest controlling powers on earth, the sense of
fame and estimation. The share of infamy, that is likely to
fall to the lot of each individual in public acts, is small
indeed; the operation of opinion being in the inverse ratio
to the number of those who abuse power. Their own appro-
bation of their own acts has to them the appearance of a
public judgment in their favour. A perfect democracy is
therefore the most shameless thing in the world. As it is
the most shameless, it is also the most fearless. No man
apprehends in his person that he can be made subject to
punishment. Certainly the people at large never ought: for
as all punishments are for example towards the conservation
of the people at large, the people at large can never become

242 EDMUND BURKE

the subject of punishment by any human hand. 1 It is there-
fore of infinite importance that they should not be suffered
to imagine that their will, any more than that of kings, is
the standard of right and wrong. They ought to be per-
suaded that they are full as little entitled, and far less quali-
fied with safety to themselves, to use any arbitrary power
whatsoever; that therefore they are not, under a false show
of liberty, but in truth, to exercise an unnatural, inverted
domination, tyrannically to exact, from those who officiate in
the state, not an entire devotion to their interest, which is
their right, but an abject submission to their occasional will;
extinguishing thereby, in all those who serve them, all moral
principle, all sense of dignity, all use of judgment, and all
consistency of character; whilst by the very same process
they give themselves up a proper, a suitable, but a most
contemptible prey to the servile ambition of popular syco-
phants, or courtly flatterers.

When the people have emptied themselves of all the lust
of selfish will, which without religion it is utterly impossible
they ever should, when they are conscious that they exer-
cise, and exercise perhaps in a higher link of the order of
delegation, the power, which to be legitimate must be ac-
cording to that eternal, immutable law, in which will and
reason are the same, they will be more careful how they
place power in base and incapable hands. In their nomina-
tion to office, they will not appoint to the exercise of au-
thority, as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function; not ac-
cording to their sordid, selfish interest, nor to their wanton
caprice, nor to their arbitrary will; but they will confer
that power (which any man may well tremble to give or to
receive) on those only, in whom they may discern that pre-
dominant proportion of active virtue and wisdom, taken
together and fitted to the charge, such, as in the great and
inevitable mixed mass of human imperfections and infirmi-
ties, is to be found.

When they are habitually convinced that no evil can be
acceptable, either in the act or the permission, to him whose
essence is good, they will be better able to extirpate out of
the minds of all magistrates, civil, ecclesiastical, or military,

1 Quicquid multis pcccatur inultem.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 243

anything that bears the least resemblance to a proud and
lawless domination.

But one of the first and most leading principles on which
the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the
temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of
what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is
due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire
masters ; that they should not think it among their rights to
cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by
destroying at their pleasure the who'ic: original fabric of their
society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a
ruin instead of an habitation — and teaching these successors
as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves
respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this un-
principled facility of changing the state as often, and as
much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or
fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the common-
wealth would be broken. No one generation could link with
the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a
summer.

And first of all, the science of jurisprudence, the pride of
the human intellect, which, with all its defects, redundancies,
and errors, is the collected reason of ages, combining the
principles of original justice with the infinite variety of
human concerns, as a heap of old exploded errors, would be
no longer studied. Personal self-sufficiency and arrogance
(the certain attendants upon all those who have never ex-
perienced a wisdom greater than their own) would usurp the
tribunal. Of course no certain laws, establishing invariable
grounds of hope and fear, would keep the actions of men in
a certain course, or direct them to a certain end. Nothing
stable in the modes of holding property, or exercising func-
tion, could form a solid ground on which any parent could
speculate in the education of his offspring, or in a choice for
their future establishment in the world. No principles
would be early worked into the habits. As soon as the most
able instructor had completed his laborious course of institu-
tion, instead of sending forth his pupil, accomplished in a
virtuous discipline, fitted to procure him attention and re-
spect, in his place in society, he would find everything

244 EDMUND BURKE

altered; and that he had turned out a poor creature to the
contempt and derision of the world, ignorant of the true
grounds of estimation. Who would insure a tender and deli-
cate sense of honour to beat almost with the first pulses of
the heart, when no man could know what would be the test
of honour in a nation, continually varying the standard of
its coin? No part of life would retain its acquisitions. Bar-
barism with regard to science and literature, unskilfulness
with regard to arts and manufactures, would infallibly suc-
ceed to the want of a steady education and settled principle ;
and thus the commonwealth itself would, in a few genera-
tions, crumble away, be disconnected into the dust and pow-
der of individuality, and at length dispersed to all the winds
of heaven.

To avoid therefore the evils of inconstancy and versatility,
ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the
blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state, that no
man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions
but with due caution; that he should never dream of begin-
ning its reformation by its subversion; that he should ap-
proach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father,
with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prej-
udice we are taught to look with horror on those children of
their country, who are prompt rashly to hack that aged
parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in
hopes that by their poisonous weeds, and wild incantations,
they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate
their father's life.

Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for
objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleas-
ure — but the state ought not to be considered as nothing
better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and
coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to
be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dis-
solved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with
other reverence ; because it is not a partnership in things sub-
servient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary
and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science ; a
partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in
all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 245

obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not
only between those who are living, but between those who
are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be
born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause
in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the
lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and in-
visible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the
inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures,
each in their appointed place. This law is not subject to the
will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinitely
superior, are bound to submit their will to that law. The
municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not
morally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their specula-
tions of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and
tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and
to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of
elementary principles. It is the first and supreme necessity
only, a necessity that is not chosen, but chooses, a necessity
paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion, and
demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to
anarchy. This necessity is no exception to the rule; because
this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical
disposition of things, to which man must be obedient by con-
sent or force: but if that which is only submission to neces-
sity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken,
nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast
forth, and exiled, from this world of reason, and order, and
peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist
world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing
sorrow.

These, my dear Sir, are, were, and, I think, long will be,
the sentiments of not the least learned and reflecting part
of this kingdom. They, who are included in this descrip-
tion, form their opinions on such grounds as such persons
ought to form them. The less inquiring receive them from
an authority, which those whom Providence dooms to live on
trust need not be ashamed to rely on. These two sorts of
men move in the same direction, though in a different place.
They both move with the order of the universe. They all
know or feel this great ancient truth : " Quod illi principi et

246 EDMUND BURKE

praepotenti Deo qui omnem hunc mundum regit, nihil eorum
qiue quidem fiant in terris acceptius quam concilia et coetus
hominum jure sociati quae civitates appellantur." They
take this tenet of the head and heart, not from the great
name which it immediately bears, nor from the greater from
whence it is derived; but from that which alone can give
true weight and sanction to any learned opinion, the
common nature and common relation of men. Persuaded
that all things ought to be done with reference, and refer-
ring all to the point of reference to which all should be di-
rected, they think themselves bound, not only as individuals
in the sanctuary of the heart, or as congregated in that per-
sonal capacity, to renew the memory of their high origin and
cast; but also in their corporate character to perform their
national homage to the institutor, and author, and protector
of civil society; without which civil society man could not
by any possibility arrive at the perfection of which his na-
ture is capable, nor even make a remote and faint ap-
proach to it. They conceive that He who gave our nature
to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means
of its perfection. — He willed therefore the state — He willed
its connexion with the source and original archetype of all
perfection. They who are convinced of this his will, which
is the law of laws, and the sovereign of sovereigns, cannot
think it reprehensible that this our corporate fealty and hom-
age, that this our recognition of a seigniory paramount, I
had almost said this oblation of the state itself, as a worthy
offering on the high altar of universal praise, should be per-
formed as all public, solemn acts are performed, in buildings,
in music, in decoration, in speech, in the dignity of persons,
according to the customs of mankind, taught by their na-
ture; this is, with modest splendour and unassuming state,
with mild majesty and sober pomp. For those purposes
they think some part of the wealth of the country is as use-
fully employed as it can be in fomenting the luxury of indi-
viduals. It is the public ornament. It is the public con-
solation. It nourishes the public hope. The poorest man
finds his own importance and dignity in it, whilst the wealth
and pride of individuals at every moment makes the man of
humble rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority, and de-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 247

grades and vilifies his condition. It is for the man in hum-
ble life, and to raise his nature, and to put him in mind of a
state in which the privileges of opulence will cease, when he
will be equal by nature, and may be more than equal by vir-
tue, that this portion of the general wealth of his country is
employed and sanctified.

I assure you I do not aim at singularity. I give you
opinions which have been accepted amongst us, from very
early times to this moment, with a continued and general
approbation, and which indeed are so worked into my mind,
that I am unable to distinguish what I have learned from
others from the results of my own meditation.

It is on some such principles that the majority of the peo-
ple of England, far from thinking a religious national estab-
lishment unlawful, hardly think it lawful to be without one.
In France you are wholly mistaken if you do not believe us
above all other things attached to it, and beyond all other
nations; and when this people has acted unwisely and un-
justifiably in its favour, (as in some instances they have done
most certainly,) in their very errors you will at least dis-
cover their zeal.

This principle runs through the whole system of their
polity. They do not consider their church establishment as
convenient, but as essential to their state; not as a thing
heterogeneous and separable; something added for accom-
modation ; what they may either keep or lay aside, according
to their temporary ideas of convenience. They consider it as
the foundation of their whole constitution, with which, and
with every part of which, it holds an indissoluble union.
Church and state are ideas inseparable in their minds, and
scarcely is the one ever mentioned without mentioning the
other.

Our education is so formed as to confirm and fix this im-
pression. Our education is in a manner wholly in the hands
of ecclesiastics, and in all stages from infancy to manhood.
Even when our youth, leaving schools and universities, enter
that most important period of life which begins to link ex-
perience and study together, and when with that view they
visit other countries, instead of old domestics whom we have
seen as governors to principal men from other parts, three-

248 EDMUND BURKE

fourths of those who go abroad with our young nobility and
gentlemen are ecclesiastics; not as austere masters, nor as
mere followers; but as friends and companions of a graver
character, and not seldom persons as well born as them-
selves. With them, as relations, they most constantly keep
up a close connexion through life. By this connexion we
conceive that we attach our gentlemen to the church; and
we liberalize the church by an intercourse with the leading
characters of the country.

So tenacious are we of the old ecclesiastical modes and
fashions of institution, that very little alteration has been
made in them since the fourteenth or fifteenth century:
adhering in this particular, as in all things else, to our old
settled maxim, never entirely nor at once to depart from
antiquity. We found these old institutions, on the whole,
favourable to morality and discipline; and we thought they
were susceptible of amendment, without altering the ground.
We thought that they were capable of receiving and melio-
rating, and above all of preserving, the accessions of science
and literature, as the order of Providence should successively
produce them. And after all, with this Gothic and monkish
education (for such it is in the ground-work) we may put in
our claim to as ample and as early a share in all the improve-
ments in science, in arts, and in literature, which have illu-
minated and adorned the modern world, as any other nation
in Europe: we think one main cause of this improvement
was our not despising the patrimony of knowledge which
was left us by our forefathers.

It is from our attachment to a church establishment, that
the English nation did not think it wise to intrust that
great, fundamental interest of the whole to what they trust
no part of their civil or military public service, that is,
to the unsteady and precarious contribution of individuals.
They go further. They certainly never have suffered, and
never will suffer, the fixed estate of the church to be con-
verted into a pension, to depend on the treasury, and to be
delayed, withheld, or perhaps to be extinguished, by fiscal
difficulties: which difficulties may sometimes be pretended
for political purposes, and are in fact often brought on by
the extravagance, negligence, and rapacity of politicians.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 249

The people of England think that they have constitutional
motives, as well as religious, against any project of turning
their independent clergy into ecclesiastical pensioners of
state. They tremble for their liberty, from the influence of
a clergy dependent on the crown; they tremble for the pub-
lic tranquillity from the disorders of a factious clergy, if it
were made to depend upon any other than the crown. They
therefore made their church, like their king and their no-
bility, independent.

From the united considerations of religion and constitu-
tional policy, from their opinion of a duty to make sure pro-
vision for the consolation of the feeble and the instruction
of the ignorant, they have incorporated and identified the
estate of the church with the mass of private property, of
which the state is not the proprietor, either for use or do-
minion, but the guardian only and the regulator. They
have ordained that the provision of this establishment might
be as stable as the earth on which it stands, and should not
fluctuate with the Euripus of funds and actions.

The men of England, the men, I mean, of light and leading
in England, whose wisdom (if they have any) is open and
direct, would be ashamed, as of a silly, deceitful trick, to
profess any religion in name, which by their proceedings,
they appear to contemn. If by their conduct (the only lan-
guage that rarely lies) they seemed to regard the great ruling
principle of the moral and the natural world, as a mere in-
vention to keep the vulgar in obedience, they apprehend that
by such a conduct they would defeat the politic purpose they
have in view. They would find it difficult to make others
believe in a system to which they manifestly give no credit
themselves. The Christian statesmen of this land would in-
deed first provide for the multitude; because it is the multi-
tude; and is therefore, as such, the first object in the eccle-
siastical institution, and in all institutions. They have
been taught, that the circumstance of the gospel's being
preached to the poor, was one of the great tests of its true
mission. They think, therefore, that those do not believe it,
who do not take care it should be preached to the poor.
But as they know that charity is not confined to any one
description, but ought to apply itself to all men who have

250 EDMUND BURKE

wants, they are not deprived of a due and anxious sensation
of pity to the distresses of the miserable great. They are
not repelled through a fastidious delicacy, at the stench of
their arrogance and presumption, from a medicinal attention
to their mental blotches and running sores. They are sensi-
ble that religious instruction is of more consequence to them
than to any others; from the greatness of the temptation to
which they are exposed; from the important consequences
that attend their faults; from the contagion of their ill ex-
ample; from the necessity of bowing down the stubborn
neck of their pride and ambition to the yoke of moderation
and virtue; from a consideration of the fat stupidity and
gross ignorance concerning what imports men most to know,
which prevails at courts, and at the head of armies, and in
senates, as much as at the loom and in the field.

The English people are satisfied, that to the great the con-
solations of religion are as necessary as its instructions.
They too are among the unhappy. They feel personal pain,
and domestic sorrow. In these they have no privilege, but
are subject to pay their full contingent to the contributions
levied on mortality. They want this sovereign balm under
meir gnawing cares and anxieties, which, being less conver-
sant about the limited wants of animal life, range without
limit, and are diversified by infinite combinations, in the wild
and unbounded regions of imagination. Some charitable dole
is wanting to these, our often very unhappy brethren, to fill
the gloomy void that reigns in minds which have nothing
on earth to hope or fear; something to relieve in the kill-
ing languor and over-laboured lassitude of those who have
nothing to do; something to excite an appetite to existence
in the palled satiety which attends on all pleasures which
may be bought, where nature is not left to her own process,
where even desire is anticipated, and therefore fruition de-
feated by meditated schemes and contrivances of delight;
and no interval, no obstacle, is interposed between the wish
and the accomplishment.

The people of England know how little influence the
teachers of religion are likely to have with the wealthy and
powerful of long standing, and how much less with the newly
fortunate, if they appear in a manner no way assorted to

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 251

those with whom they must associate, and over whom they
must even exercise, in some cases, something like an author-
ity. What must they think of that body of teachers, if they
see it in no part above the establishment of their domestic
servants? If the poverty were voluntary, there might be
some difference. Strong instances of self-denial operate
powerfully on our minds; and a man who has no wants has
obtained great freedom, and firmness, and even dignity. But
as the mass of any description of men are but men, and their
poverty cannot be voluntary, that disrespect, which attends
upon all lay poverty, will not depart from the ecclesiastical.
Our provident constitution has therefore taken care that
those who are to instruct presumptuous ignorance, those who
are to be censors over insolent vice, should neither incur
their contempt, nor live upon their alms; nor will it tempt
the rich to a neglect of the true medicine of their minds.
For these reasons, whilst we provide first for the poor, and
with a parental solicitude, we have not relegated religion
(like something we were ashamed to show) to obscure mu-
nicipalities, or rustic villages. No ! we will have her to
exalt her mitred front in courts and parliaments. We will
have her mixed throughout the whole mass of life, and
blended with all the classes of society. The people of Eng-
land will show to the haughty potentates of the world, and
to their talking sophisters, that a free, a generous, an in-
formed nation honours the high magistrates of its church;
that it will not suffer the insolence of wealth and titles, or
any other species of proud pretension, to look down with
scorn upon what they look up to with reverence ; nor pre-
sume to trample on that acquired personal nobility, which
they intend always to be, and which often is, the fruit, not
the reward, (for what can be the reward?) of learning,
piety, and virtue. They can see, without pain or grudging,
an archbishop precede a duke. They can see a bishop of
Durham, or a bishop of Winchester, in possession of ten
thousand pounds a year ; and cannot conceive why it is in
worse hands than estates to the like amount in the hands of
this earl, or that squire; although it may be true, that so
many dogs and horses are not kept by the former, and fed
with the victuals which ought to nourish the children of the

252 EDMUND BURKE

people. It is true, the whole church revenue is not always
employed, and to every shilling, in charity; nor perhaps
ought it; but something is generally so employed. It is
better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to
free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt
to make men mere machines and instruments of a political
benevolence. The world en the whole *.vill gain by a liberty,
without which virtue cannot exist.

When once the commonwealth has established the estates
of the church as property, it can, consistently, hear nothing
of the more or the less. Too much and too little are treason
against property. What evil can arise from the quantity in
any hand, whilst the supreme authority has the full, sover-
eign superintendence over this, as over all property, to pre-
vent every species of abuse; and, whenever it notably de-
viates, to give to it a direction agreeable to the purposes of
its institution.

In England most of us conceive that it is envy and malig-
nity towards those who are often the beginners of their own
fortune, and not a love of the self-denial and mortification
of the ancient church, that makes some look askance at the
distinctions, and honours, and revenues, which, taken from
no person, are set apart for virtue. The ears of the people
of England are distinguishing. They hear these men speak
broad. Their tongue betrays them. Their language is in
the patois of fraud; in the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy.
The people of England must think so, when these praters
affect to carry back the clergy to that primitive, evangelic
poverty, which, in the spirit, ought always to exist in them,
(and in us too, however we may like it,) but in the thing
must be varied, when the relation of that body to the state
is altered; when manners, when modes of life, when indeed
the whole order of human affairs, has undergone a total
revolution. We shall believe those reformers then to be
honest enthusiasts, not, as now we think them, cheats and
deceivers, when we see them throwing their own goods into
common, and submitting their own persons to the austere
discipline of the early church.

With these ideas rooted in their minds, the Commons
of Great Britain, in the national emergencies, will never

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 253

seek their resource from the confiscation of the estates
of the church and poor. Sacrilege and proscription are
not among the ways and means of our committee of supply.
The Jews in Change Alley have not yet dared to hint
their hopes of a mortgage on the revenues belonging to
the see of Canterbury. I am not afraid that I shall be disa-
vowed, when I assure you, that there is not one public
man in this kingdom, whom you would wish to quote, no
not one, of any party or description, who does not reprobate
the dishonest, perfidious, and cruel confiscation which the
National Assembly has been compelled to make of that prop-
erty, which it was their first duty to protect.

It is with the exultation of a little national pride I tell
you, that those amongst us who have wished to pledge the
societies of Paris in the cup of their abominations have been
disappointed. The robbery of your church has proved a
security to the possession of ours. It has roused the people.
They see with horror and alarm that enormous and shame-
less act of proscription. It has opened, and will more and
more open, their eyes upon the selfish enlargement of mind,
and the narrow liberality of sentiment, of insidious men,
which, commencing in close hypocrisy and fraud, have ended
in open violence and rapine. At home we behold similar be-
ginnings. We are on our guard against similar conclusions.

I hope we shall never be so totally lost to all sense of the
duties imposed upon us by the law of social union, as upon
any pretext of public service, to confiscate the goods of a
single unoffending citizen. Who but a tyrant (a name ex-
pressive of everything which can vitiate and degrade human
nature) could think of seizing on the property of men, un-
accused, unheard, untried, by whole descriptions, by hun-
dreds and thousands together? Who, that had not lost
every trace of humanity, could think of casting down men of
exalted rank and sacred function, some of them of an age to
call at once for reverence and compassion, of casting them
down from the highest situation in the commonwealth,
wherein they were maintained by their own landed property,
to a state of indigence, depression, and contempt?

The confiscators truly have made some allowance to their
victims from the scraps and fragments of their own tables,

254 EDMUND BURKE

from which they have been so harshly driven, and which have
been so bountifully spread for a feast to the harpies of
usury. But to drive men from independence to live on alms,
is itself great cruelty. That which might be a tolerable con-
dition to men in one state of life, and not habituated to other
things, may, when all these circumstances are altered, be a
dreadful revolution ; and one to which a virtuous mind would
feel pain in condemning any guilt, except that which would
demand the life of the offender. But to many minds this
punishment of degradation and infamy is worse than death.
Undoubtedly it is an infinite aggravation of this cruel suf-
fering, that the persons who were taught a double prejudice
in favour of religion, by education, and by the place they
held in the administration of its functions, are to receive the
remnants of their property as alms from the profane and im-
pious hands of those who had plundered them of all the rest ;
to receive (if they are at all to receive) not from the chari-
table contributions of the faithful, but from the insolent ten-
derness of known and avowed atheism, the maintenance of
religion, measured out to them on the standard of the con-
tempt in which it is held; and for the purpose of rendering
those who receive the allowance vile, and of no estimation,
in the eyes of mankind.

But this act of seizure of property, it seems, is a judgment
in law, and not a confiscation. They have, it seems, found
out in the academies of the Palais Royal, and the Jacobins,
that 7 certain men had no right to the possessions which they
held under law, usage, the decisions of courts, and the ac-
cumulated prescription of a thousand years. They say that
ecclesiastics are fictitious persons, creatures of the state,
whom at pleasure they may destroy, and of course limit and
modify in every particular; that the goods they possess are
not properly theirs, but belong to the state which created
the fiction; and we are therefore not to trouble ourselves
with what they may suffer in their natural feelings and
natural persons, on account of what is done towards them
in this their constructive character. Of what import is it
under what names you injure men, and deprive them of the
just emoluments of a profession, in which they were not
only permitted but encouraged by the state to engage; and

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 255

upon the supposed certainty of which emoluments they had
formed the plan of their lives, contracted debts, and led mul-
titudes to an entire dependence upon them?

You do not imagine, Sir, that I am going to compliment
this miserable distinction of persons with any long discus-
sion. The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as
its force is dreadful. Had not your confiscators, by their
early crimes, obtained a power which secures indemnity to
all the crimes of which they have since been guilty, or that
they can commit, it is not the syllogism of the logician, but
the lash of the executioner, that would have refuted a so-
phistry which becomes an accomplice of theft and murder.
The sophistic tyrants of Paris are loud in their declamations
against the departed regal tyrants, who in former ages have
vexed the world. They are thus bold, because they are safe
from the dungeons and iron cages of their old masters. Shall
we be more tender of the tyrants of our own time, when we
see them acting worse tragedies under our eyes? shall we
not use the same liberty that they do, when we can use it
with the same safety? when to speak honest truth only re-
quires a contempt of the opinions of those whose actions we
abhor?

This outrage on all the rights of property was at first
covered with what, on the system of their conduct, was the
most astonishing of all pretexts — a regard to national faith.
The enemies to property at first pretended a most tender,
delicate, and scrupulous anxiety for keeping the king's en-
gagements with the public creditor. These professors of
the rights of men are so busy in teaching others, that they
have not leisure to learn anything themselves ; otherwise
they would have known, that it is to the property of the
citizen, and not to the demands of the creditor of the state,
that the first and original faith of civil society is pledged.
The claim of the citizen is prior in time, paramount in title,
superior in equity. The fortunes of individuals, whether
possessed by acquisition, or by descent, or in virtue of a
participation in the goods of some community, were no part
of the creditor's security, expressed or implied. They never
so much as entered into his head when he made his bargain.
He well knew that the public, whether represented by a

256 EDMUND BURKE

monarch or by a senate, can pledge nothing but the public
estate; and it can have no public estate, except in what it
derives from a just and proportioned imposition upon the
citizens at large. This was engaged, and nothing else could
be engaged, to the public creditor. No man can mortgage
his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.

It is impossible to avoid some observation on the contra-
dictions caused by the extreme rigour and the extreme laxity
of this new public faith, which influenced in this transaction,
and which influenced not according to the nature of the obli-
gation, but to the description of the persons to whom it was
engaged. No acts of the old government of the kings of
France are held valid in the National Assembly, except his
pecuniary engagements; acts of all others of the most
ambiguous legality. The rest of all the acts of that royal
government are considered in so odious a light, that to have
a claim under its authority is looked on as a sort of crime.
A pension, given as a reward for service to the state, is
surely as good a ground of property as any security for
money advanced to the state. It is better ; for money is paid,
and well paid, to obtain that service. We have, however, seen
multitudes of people under this description in France, who
never had been deprived of their allowances by the most
arbitrary ministers, in the most arbitrary times, by this
assembly of the rights of men, robbed without mercy. They
were told, in answer to their claim to the bread earned with
their blood, that their services had not been rendered to the
country that now exists.

This laxity of public faith is not confined to those un-
fortunate persons. The Assembly, with perfect consistency
it must be owned, is engaged in a respectable deliberation
how far it is bound by the treaties made with other nations
under the former government, and their committee is to
report which of them they ought to ratify, and which not.
By this means they have put the external fidelity of this
virgin state on a par with its internal.

It is not easy to conceive upon what rational principle the
royal government should not, of the two, rather have pos-
sessed the power of rewarding service, and making treaties,
in virtue of its prerogative, than that of pledging to creditors

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 257

the revenue of the state, actual and possible. The treasure
of the nation, of all things, has been the least allowed to the
prerogative of the king of France, or to the prerogative of
any king in Europe. To mortgage the public revenue im-
plies the sovereign dominion, in the fullest sense, over the
public purse. It goes far beyond the trust even of a tem-
porary and occasional taxation. The acts, however, of that
dangerous power (the distinctive mark of a boundless des-
potism) have been alone held sacred. Whence arose this
preference given by a democratic assembly to a body of
property deriving its title from the most critical and ob-
noxious of all the exertions of monarchical authority? Rea-
son can furnish nothing to reconcile inconsistency; nor can
partial favour be accounted for upon equitable principles.
But the contradiction and partiality which admit no justifi-
cation, are not the less without an adequate cause; and that
cause I do not think it difficult to discover.

By the vast debt of France a great monied interest has
insensibly grown up, and with it a great power. By the
ancient usages which prevailed in that kingdom, the general
circulation of property, and in particular the mutual converti-
bility of land into money, and of money into land, had always
been a matter of difficulty. Family settlements, rather more
general and more strict than they are in England, the jus
retractus, the great mass of landed property held by the
crown, and, by a maxim of the French law, held unalienably,
the vast estates of the ecclesiastical corporations, — all these
had kept the landed and monied interests more separated
in France, less miscible, and the owners of the two distinct
species of property not so well disposed to each other as they
are in this country.

The monied property was long looked on with rather an
evil eye by the people. They saw it connected with their dis-
tresses, and aggravating them. It was no less envied by the
old landed interests, partly for the same reasons that ren-
dered it obnoxious to the people, but much more so as it
eclipsed, by the splendour of an ostentatious luxury, the
unendowed pedigrees and naked titles of several among the
nobility. Even when the nobility, which represented the
more permanent landed interest, united themselves by mar-
hc i— vol. xxiv

258 EDMUND BURKE

riage (which sometimes was the case) with the other de-
scription, the wealth which saved the family from ruin,
was supposed to contaminate and degrade it. Thus the en-
mities and heart-burnings of these parties were increased
even by the usual means by which discord is made to
cease and quarrels are turned into friendship. In the mean
time, the pride of the wealthy men, not noble or newly noble,
increased with its cause. They felt with resentment an
inferiority, the grounds of which they did not acknowledge.
There was no measure to which they were not willing to
lend themselves, in order to be revenged of the outrages of
this rival pride, and to exalt their wealth to what they con-
sidered as its natural rank and estimation. They struck at
the nobility through the crown and the church. They at-
tacked them particularly on the side on which they thought
them the most vulnerable, that is, the possessions of the
church, which, through the patronage of the crown, gener-
ally devolved upon the nobility. The bishoprics, and the
great commendatory abbeys, were, with few exceptions, held
by that order.

In this state of real, though not always perceived, warfare
between the noble ancient landed interest and the new
monied interest, the greatest because the most applicable
strength was in the hands of the latter. The monied interest
is in its nature more ready for any adventure; and its pos-
sessors more disposed to new enterprises of any kind. Being
of a recent acquisition, it falls in more naturally with any
novelties. It is therefore the kind of wealth which will be
resorted to by all who wish for change.

Along with the monied interest, a new description of men
had grown up, with whom that interest soon formed a close
and marked union; I mean the political men of letters.
Men of letters, fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely
averse to innovation. Since the decline of the life and
greatness of Louis the Fourteenth, they were not so much
j cultivated either by him, or by the regent, or the successors
to the crown ; nor were they engaged to the court by fa-
vours and emoluments so systematically as during the splen-
did period of that ostentatious and not impolitic reign.
What they lost in the old court protection, they endeavoured

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 259

to make up by joining in a sort of incorporation of their
own ; to which the two academies of France, and afterwards
the vast undertaking of the Encyclopaedia, carried on by a
society of these gentlemen, did not a little contribute.

The literary cabal had some years ago formed something
like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian re-
ligion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal
which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators
of some system of piety. They were possessed with a spirit
of proselytism in the most fanatical degree; and from thence,
by an easy progress, with the spirit of persecution according
to their means. 1 What was not to be done towards their
great end by any direct or immediate act, might be wrought
by a longer process through the medium of opinion. To
command that opinion, the first step is to establish a do-
minion over those who direct it. They contrived to possess
themselves, with great method and perseverance, of all the
avenues to literary fame. Many of them indeed stood high
in the ranks of literature and science. The world had done
them justice; and in favour of general talents forgave the
evil tendency of their peculiar principles. This was true
liberality ; which they returned by endeavouring to confine
the reputation of sense, learning, and taste to themselves or
their followers. I will venture to say that this narrow, ex-
clusive spirit has not been less prejudicial to literature and
to taste, than to morals and true philosophy. These athe-
istical fathers have a bigotry of their own; and they have
learnt to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk. But
in some things they are men of the world. The resources of
intrigue are called in to supply the defects of argument and
wit. To this system of literary monopoly was joined an un-
remitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way,
and by every means, all those who did not hold to their fac-
tion. To those who have observed the spirit of their con-
duct, it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the
power of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the
pen into a persecution which would strike at property, lib-
erty, and life.

1 This (down to the end of the first sentence in the next paragraph) and
some other parts here and there, were inserted on his reading the manu-
script, by my lost Son.

260 EDMUND BURKE

The desultory and faint persecution carried on against
them, more from compliance with form and decency, than
with serious resentment, neither weakened their strength,
nor relaxed their efforts. The issue of the whole was, that,
what with opposition, and what with success, a violent and
malignant zeal, of a kind hitherto unknown in the world,
had taken an entire possession of their minds, and rendered
their whole conversation, which otherwise would have been
pleasing and instructive, perfectly disgusting. A spirit of
cabal, intrigue, and proselytism, pervaded all their thoughts,
words, and actions. And, as controversial zeal soon turns
its thoughts on force, they began to insinuate themselves into
a correspondence with foreign princes ; in hopes, through
their authority, which at first they flattered, they might bring
about the changes they had in view. To them it was in-
different whether these changes were to be accomplished by
the thunderbolt of despotism, or by the earthquake of popu-
lar commotion. The correspondence between this cabal and
the late king of Prussia will throw no small light upon the
spirit of all their proceedings. 1 For the same purpose for
which they intrigued with princes, they cultivated, in a dis-
tinguished manner, the monied interest of France; and
partly through the means furnished by those whose peculiar
offices gave them the most extensive and certain means of
communication, they carefully occupied all the avenues to
opinion.

Writers, especially when they act in a body, and with one
direction, have great influence on the public mind ; the
alliance, therefore, of these writers with the monied in-
terest 3 had no small effect in removing the popular odium
and envy which attended that species of wealth. These
writers, like the propagators of all novelties, pretended to
a great zeal for the poor, and the lower orders, whilst in their
satires they rendered hateful, by every exaggeration, the
faults of courts, of nobility, and of priesthood. They became
a sort of demagogues. They served as a link to unite, in
favour of one object, obnoxious wealth to restless and des-
perate poverty.

1 I do not choose to shock the feeling of the moral reader with any
quotation of their vulgar, base, and profane language.

2 Their connexion with Turgot and almost all the people of the finance.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 261

As these two kinds of men appear principal leaders in all
the late transactions, their junction and politics will serve
to account, not upon any principles of law or of policy, but
as a cause, for the general fury with which all the landed
property of ecclesiastical corporations has been attacked;
and the great care which, contrary to their pretended princi-
ples, has been taken, of a monied interest originating from
the authority of the crown. All the envy against wealth and
power was artificially directed against other descriptions of
riches. On what other principle than that which I have
stated can we account for an appearance so extraordinary
and unnatural as that of the ecclesiastical possessions, which
had stood so many successions of ages and shocks of civil
violences, and were girded at once by justice, and by preju-
dice, being applied to the payment of debts, comparatively
recent, invidious, and contracted by a decried and sub-
verted government?

Was the public estate a sufficient stake for the public
debts? Assume that it was not, and that a loss must be in-
curred somewhere — When the only estate lawfully pos-
sessed, and which the contracting parties had in contempla-
tion at the time in which their bargain was made, happens
to fail, who according to the principles of natural and
legal equity, ought to be the sufferer? Certainly it ought to
be either the party who trusted, or the party who persuaded
him to trust ; or both ; and not third parties who had no
concern with the transaction. Upon any insolvency they
ought to suffer who are weak enough to lend upon bad
security, or they who fraudulently held out a security that
was not valid. Laws are acquainted with no other rules of
decision. But by the new institute of the rights of men,
the only persons, who in equity ought to suffer, are the
only persons who are to be saved harmless : those are to
answer the debt who neither were lenders nor borrowers,
mortgagers nor mortgagees.

What had the clergy to do with these transactions ? What
had they to do with any public engagement further than the
extent of their own debt? To that, to be sure, their estates
were bound to the last acre. Nothing can lead more to the
true spirit of the Assembly, which fits for public confisca-

262

EDMUND BURKE

tion, with its new equity, and its new morality, than an at-
tention to their proceeding with regard to this debt of the
clergy. The body of confiscators, true to that monied in-
terest for which they were false to every other, have found
the clergy competent to incur a legal debt. Of course they
declared them legally entitled to the property which their
power of incurring the debt and mortgaging the estate
implied; recognizing the rights of those persecuted citizens,
in the very act in which they were thus grossly violated.

If, as I said, any persons are to make good deficiencies
to the public creditor, besides the public at large, they
must be those who managed the agreement. Why therefore
are not the estates of all the comptrollers-general confis-
cated? 1 Why not those of the long succession of ministers,
financiers, and bankers who have been enriched whilst the
nation was impoverished by their dealings and their coun-
sels? Why is not the estate of M. Laborde declared for-
feited rather than of the archbishop of Paris, who has had
nothing to do in the creation or in the jobbing of the j ublic
funds? Or, if you must confiscate old landed estates in
favour of the money-jobbers, why is the penalty confined
to one description? I do not know whether the expenses of
the Duke de Choiseul have left anything of the infinite
sums which he had derived from the bounty of his i laster,
during the transactions of a reign which contributed i argely
by every species of prodigality in war and peace, -to the
present debt of France. If any such remains, why is not
this confiscated? I remember to have been in Paris during
the time of the old government. I was there just after the
Duke d'Aiguillon had been snatched (as it was generally
thought) from the block by the hand of a protecting des-
potism. He was a minister, and had some concern in the
afifairs of that prodigal period. Why do I not see his
estate delivered up to the municipalities in which it is sit-
uated? The noble family of Noailles have long been serv-
ants (meritorious servants I admit) to the crown of France,
and have had of course some share in its bounties. Why
do I hear nothing of the application of their estates to the
public debt? Why is the estate of the Duke de Roche-

1 All have been confiscated in their turn.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 263

foucault more sacred than that of the Cardinal de Roche-
foucault? The former is, I doubt not, a worthy person;
and (if it were not a sort of profaneness to talk of the use,
as affecting the title to the property) he makes a good use
of his revenues; but it is no disrespect to him to say, what
authentic information well warrants me in saying, that the
use made of a property equally valid, by his brother 1 the
cardinal archbishop of Rouen, was far more laudable and
far more public-spirited. Can one hear of the proscription
of such persons, and the confiscation of their effects, with-
out indignation and horror? He is not a man who does
not feel such emotions on such occasions. He does not de-
serve the name of a free-man who will not express them.

Few barbarous conquerors have ever made so terrible a
revolution in property. None of the heads of the Roman
factions, when they established "crudelem illam hast am" in
all their auctions of rapine, have ever set up to sale the
goods of the conquered citizen to such an enormous amount.
It must be allowed in favour of those tyrants of antiquity,
that what was done by them could hardly be said to be done
in cold blood. Their passions were inflamed, their tempers
soured, their understandings confused, with the spirit of
revenge, with the innumerable reciprocated and recent in-
flictions and retaliations of blood and rapine. They were
driven beyond all bounds of moderation by the apprehension
of the return of power with the return of property, to the
families of those they had injured beyond all hope of for-
giveness.

These Roman confiscators, who were yet only in the ele-
ments of tyranny, and were not instructed in the rights of
men to exercise all sorts of cruelties on each other without
provocation, thought it necessary to spread a sort of colour
over their injustice. They considered the vanquished party
as composed of traitors who had borne arms, or otherwise
had acted with hostility, against the commonwealth. They
regarded them as persons who had forfeited their property
by their crimes. With you, in your improved state of the
human mind, there was no such formality. You seized upon

1 Not his brother, nor any near relation; but this mistake does not affect

the argument.

264 EDMUND BURKE

five millions sterling of annual rent, and turned forty or
fifty thousand human creatures out of their houses, because
"such was your pleasure." The tyrant Harry the Eighth
of England, as he was not better enlightened than the
Roman Mariuses and Syllas, and had not studied in your
new schools, did not know what an effectual instrument of
despotism was to be found in that grand magazine of of-
fensive weapons, the rights of men. When he resolved to
rob the abbeys, as the club of the Jacobins have robbed all
the ecclesiastics, he began by setting on foot a commission
to examine into the crimes and abuses which prevailed in
those communities. As it might be expected, his com-
mission reported truths, exaggerations, and falsehoods. But
truly or falsely, it reported abuses and offences. However,
as abuses might be corrected, as every crime of persons
does not infer a forfeiture with regard to communities, and
as property, in that dark age, was not discovered to be a
creature of prejudice, all those abuses (and there were
enow of them) were hardly thought sufficient ground for
such a confiscation as it was for his purpose to make. He
therefore procured the formal surrender of these estates.
All these operose proceedings were adopted by one of the
most decided tyrants in the rolls of history, as necessary
preliminaries, before he could venture, by bribing the mem-
bers of his two servile houses with a share of the spoil,
and holding out to them an eternal immunity from taxation,
to demand a confirmation of his iniquitous proceedings by an
act of Parliament. Had fate reserved him to our times,
four technical terms would have done his business, and
saved him all this trouble; he needed nothing more than
one short form of incantation — "Philosophy, Light, Liber-
ality, the Rights of Men."

I can say nothing in praise of those acts of tyranny,
which no voice has hitherto ever commended under any of
their false colours ; yet in these false colours an homage
was paid by despotism to justice. The power which was
above all fear and all remorse was not set above all shame.
Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extin-
guished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled
from the minds of tyrants.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 265

I believe every honest man sympathizes in his reflections
with our political poet on that occasion, and will pray to
avert the omen whenever these acts of rapacious despotism
present themselves to his view or his imagination:

— " May no such storm
Fall on our times, where ruin must reform.
Tell me (my Muse) what monstrous dire offence,
What crimes could any Christian king incense
To such a rage ? Was 't luxury, or lust ?
Was he so temperate, so chaste, so just?
Were these their crimes? they were his own much more,
But wealth is crime enough to him that's poor." 1

This same wealth, which is at all times treason and Use
nation to indigent and rapacious despotism, under all modes
of polity, was your temptation to violate property, law, and
religion, united in one object. But was the state of France
so wretched and undone, that no other recourse but rapine

1 The rest of the passage is this —

" Who having spent the treasures of his crown,
Condemns their luxury to feed his own.
And yet this act, to varnish o'er the shame
Of sacrilege, must bear devotion's name.
No crime so bold, but would be understood
A real, or at least a seeming good;
Who fears not to do ill, yet fears the name,
And, free from conscience, is a slave to fame.
Thus he the church at once protects, and spoils;
But princes' swords are sharper than their styles.
And thus to th' ages past he makes amends,
Their charity destroys, their faith defends.
Then did religion in a lazy cell,
In empty aery contemplation dwell;
And, like the block, unmoved lay; but ours,
As much too active, like the stork devours.
Is there no temperate region can be known,
Betwixt their frigid and our torrid zone?
Could we not wake from that lethargic dream,
But to be restless in a worse extreme?
And for that lethargy was there no cure,
But to be cast into a calenture;
Can knowledge have no bound, but must advance
So far, to make us wish for ignorance?
And rather in the dark to grope our way,
Than, led by a false guide, to err by day?
Who sees these dismal heaps, but would demand,
What barbarous invader sacked the land?
But when he hears, no Goth, no Turk did bring
This desolation, but a Christian king;
When nothing, but the name of zeal, appears
'Twixt our best actions and the worst of theirs,
What does he think our sacrilege would spare,
When such th' effects of our devotion are? "

Cooper's Hill, by Sir John Denham.

266 EDMUND BURKE

remained to preserve its existence? On this point I wish
to receive some information. When the states met, was
the condition of the finances of France such, that, after
economizing on principles of justice and mercy through all
departments, no fair repartition of burthens upon all the
orders could possibly restore them? If such an equal im-
position would have been sufficient, you well know it might
easily have been made. M. Necker, in the budget which he
laid before the orders assembled at Versailles, made a de-
tailed exposition of the state of the French nation. 1

If we give credit to him, it was not necessary to have
recourse to any new impositions whatsoever, to put the
receipts of France on a balance with its expenses. He stated
the permanent charges of all descriptions, including the
interest of a new loan of four hundred millions, at 531,-
444,000 livres; the fixed revenue at 475,294,000, making the
deficiency 56,150,000, or short of £2,200,000 sterling. But to
balance it, he brought forward savings and improvements of
revenue (considered as entirely certain) to rather more than
the amount of that deficiency; and he concludes with these
emphatical words, (p. 39,) " Quel pays, Messieurs, que celui,
011, sans impots et avec de simples objets inappergus, on peut
faire disparoitre un deficit qui a fait tant de bruit en Eu-
rope." As to the reimbursement, the sinking of debt, and
the other great objects of public credit and political ar-
rangement indicated in Mons. Necker's speech, no doubt
could be entertained, but that a very moderate and pro-
portioned assessment on the citizens without distinction
would have provided for all of them to the fullest extent
of their demand.

If this representation of Mons. Necker was false, then the
Assembly are in the highest degree culpable for having
forced the king to accept as his minister, and since the king's
deposition, for having employed, as their minister, a man
who had been capable of abusing so notoriously the confi-
dence of his master and their own ; in a matter too of the
highest moment, and directly appertaining to his particular
office. But if the representation was exact, (as having al-

1 Rapport de Mons. le Directeur-General des Finances, fait par ordre
du Roi a Versailles. Mai 5, 1789-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 267

ways, along with you, conceived a high degree of respect
for M. Necker, I make no doubt it was,) then what can be
said in favour of those, who, instead of moderate, reason-
able, and general contribution, have in cold blood, and im-
pelled by no necessity, had recourse to a partial and cruel
confiscation ?

Was that contribution refused on a pretext of privilege,
either on the part of the clergy, or on that of the nobility?
No, certainly. As to the clergy, they even ran before the
wishes of the third order. Previous to the meeting of the
states, they had in all their instructions expressly directed
their deputies to renounce every immunity, which put them
upon a footing distinct from the condition of their fellow-
subjects. In this renunciation the clergy were even more
explicit than the nobility.

But let us suppose that the deficiency had remained at the
fifty-six millions, (or £2,200,000 sterling), as at first stated
by M. Necker. Let us allow that all the resources he op-
posed to that deficiency were impudent and groundless fic-
tions; and that the Assembly (or their lords of articles 1 at
the Jacobins) were from thence justified in laying the whole
burthen of that deficiency on the clergy, — yet allowing all
this, a necessity of £2,200,000 sterling will not support a con-
fiscation to the amount of five millions. The imposition of
£2,200,000 on the clergy, as partial, would have been oppres-
sive and unjust, but it would not have been altogether
ruinous to those on whom it was imposed; and therefore it
would not have answered the real purpose of the managers.

Perhaps persons unacquainted with the state of France,
on hearing the clergy and the noblesse were privileged in
point of taxation, may be led to imagine, that, previous to
the Revolution, these bodies had contributed nothing to the
state. This is a great mistake. They certainly did not con-
tribute equally with each other, nor either of them equally
with the commons. They both, however, contributed largely.
Neither nobility nor clergy enjoyed any exemption from the
excise on consumable commodities, from duties of custom,
or from any of the other numerous indirect impositions,

1 In the constitution of Scotland, during the Stuart reigns, a committee
sat for preparing bills; and none could pass, but those previously approved
by them. This committee was called lords of articles.

268

EDMUND BURKE

which in France, as well as here, make so very large a pro-
portion of all payments to the public. The noblesse paid the
capitation. They paid also a land-tax, called the twentieth
penny, to the height sometimes of three, sometimes of four,
shillings in the pound; both of them direct impositions of no
light nature, and no trivial produce. The clergy of the
provinces annexed by conquest to France, (which in extent
make about an eighth part of the whole, but in wealth a
much larger proportion,) paid likewise to the capitation
and the twentieth penny, at the rate paid by the nobility.
The clergy in the old provinces did not pay the capitation;
but they had redeemed themselves at the expense of about
24 millions, or a little more than a million sterling. They
were exempted from the twentieths : but then they made
free gifts; they contracted debts for the state; and they were
subject to some other charges, the whole computed at about
a thirteenth part of their clear income. They ought to have
paid annually about forty thousand pounds more, to put
them on a par with the contribution of the nobility.

When the terrors of this tremendous proscription hung
over the clergy, they made an offer of a contribution,
through the archbishop of Aix, which, for its extravagance,
ought not to have been accepted. But it was evidently and
obviously more advantageous to the public creditor than any-
thing which could rationally be promised by the confiscation.
Why was it not accepted? The reason is plain — There was
no desire that the church should be brought to serve the
state. The service of the state was made a pretext to de-
stroy the church. In their way to the destruction of the
church they would not scruple to destroy their country
and they have destroyed it. One great end in the project
would have been defeated if the plan of extortion had been
adopted in lieu of the scheme of confiscation. The new
landed interest connected with the new republic, and con-
nected with it for its very being, could not have been created.
This was among the reasons why that extravagant ransom
was not accepted.

The madness of the project of confiscation, on the plan
that was first pretended, soon became apparent. To bring
this unwieldy mass of landed property, enlarged by the con-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 269

fiscation of all the vast landed domain of the crown, at once
into market, was obviously to defeat the profits proposed by
the confiscation, by depreciating the value of those lands,
and indeed of all the landed estates throughout France.
Such a sudden diversion of all its circulating money from
trade to land, must be an additional mischief. What step
was taken? Did the Assembly, on becoming sensible of the
inevitable ill effects of their projected sale, revert to the
offers of the clergy? No distress could oblige them to
travel in a course which was disgraced by any appearance of
justice. Giving over all hopes from a general immediate
sale, another project seems to have succeeded. They pro-
posed to take stock in exchange for the church lands. In
that project great difficulties arose in equalizing the objects
to be exchanged. Other obstacles also presented themselves,
which threw them back again upon some project of sale.
The municipalities had taken an alarm. They would not
hear of transferring the whole plunder of the kingdom to
the stock-holders in Paris. Many of those municipalities
had been (upon system) reduced to the most deplorable in-
digence. Money was nowhere to be seen. They were
therefore led to the point that was so ardently desired.
They panted for a currency of any kind which might revive
their perishing industry. The municipalities were then to
be admitted to a share in the spoil, which evidently rendered
the first scheme (if ever it had been seriously entertained)
altogether impracticable. Public exigencies pressed upon all
sides. The minister of finance reiterated his call for supply
with a most urgent, anxious, and boding voice. Thus press-
ed on all sides, instead of the first plan of converting their
bankers into bishops and abbots, instead of paying the old
debt, they contracted a new debt, at 3 per cent., creating a
new paper currency, founded on an eventual sale of the
church lands. They issued this paper currency to satisfy in
the first instance chiefly the demands made upon them by
the bank of discount, the great machine, or paper-mill, of
their fictitious wealth.

The spoil of the church was now become the only re-
source of all their operations in finance, the vital principle
of all their politics, the sole security for the existence of

270 EDMUND BURKE

their power. It was necessary by all, even the most violent
means, to put every individual on the same bottom, and to
bind the nation in one guilty interest to uphold this act, and
the authority of those by whom it was done. In order to
force the most reluctant into a participation of their pillage,
they rendered their paper circulation compulsory in all pay-
ments. Those who consider the general tendency of their
schemes to this one object as a centre, and a centre from
which afterwards all their measures radiate, will not think
that I dwell too long upon this part of the proceedings of
the National Assembly.

To cut off all appearance of connexion between the crown
and public justice, and to bring the whole under implicit
obedience to the dictators in Paris, the old independent judi-
cature of the parliaments, with all its merits, and all its
faults, was wholly abolished. Whilst the parliaments ex-
isted, it was evident that the people might some time or
other come to resort to them, and rally under the standard
of their ancient laws. It became however a matter of con-
sideration that the magistrates and officers, in the courts
now abolished, had purchased their places at a very high
rate, for which, as well as for the duty they performed, they
received but a very low return of interest. Simple confisca-
tion is a boon only for the clergy; — to the lawyers some
appearances of equity are to be observed; and they are to
receive compensation to an immense amount. Their com-
pensation becomes part of the national debt, for the liquida-
tion of which there is the one exhaustless fund. The lawyers
are to obtain their compensation in the new church paper,
which is to march with the new principles of judicature
and legislature. The dismissed magistrates are to take their
share of martyrdom with the ecclesiastics, or to receive their
own property from such a fund, and in such a manner, as
all those, who have been seasoned with th? ( ancient principles
of jurisprudence, and had been the SwOrn guardians of
property, must look upon with horror. Ever the clergy
are to receive their miserable allowance out of the depre-
ciated paper, which is stamped with the indelible character
of sacrilege, and with the symbols of their own ruin, or
they must starve. So violent an outrage upon credit, prop-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 271

erty, and liberty, as this compulsory paper currency, has
seldom been exhibited by the alliance of bankruptcy and
tyranny, at any time, or in any nation.

In the course of all these operations, at length comes out the
grand arcanum; — that in reality, and in a fair sense, the
lands of the church (so far as anything certain can be gath-
ered from their proceedings) are not to be sold at all. By
the late resolutions of the National Assembly, they are in-
deed to be delivered to the highest bidder. But it is to be
observed, that a certain portion only of the purchase money
is to be laid down. A period of twelve years is to be given
for the payment of the rest. The philosophic purchasers are
therefore, on payment of a sort of fine, to be put instantly
into possession of the estate. It becomes in some respects
a sort of gift to them; to be held on the feudal tenure of
zeal to the new establishment. This project is evidently to
let in a body of purchasers without money. The conse-
quence will be, that these purchasers, or rather grantees,
will pay, not only from the rents as they accrue, which
might as well be received by the state, but from the spoil of
the materials of buildings, from waste in woods, and from
whatever money, by hands habituated to the gripings of
usury, they can wring from the miserable peasant. He is
to be delivered over to the mercenary and arbitrary discre-
tion of men, who will be stimulated to every species of ex-
tortion by the growing demands on the growing profits of
an estate held under the precarious settlement of a new
political system.

When all the frauds, impostures, violences, rapines, burn-
ings, murders, confiscations, compulsory paper currencies,
and every description of tyranny and cruelty employed to
bring about and to uphold this Revolution, have their natural
effect, that is, to shock the moral sentiments of all virtuous
and sober minds, the abettors of this philosophic system
immediately strain their throats in a declamation against the
old monarchical government of France. When they have
rendered that deposed power sufficiently black, they then
proceed in argument, as if all those who disapprove of their
new abuses must of course be partisans of the old; that
those who reprobate their crude and violent schemes of

272 EDMUND BURKE

liberty ought to be treated as advocates for servitude. I
admit that their necessities do compel them to this base and
contemptible fraud. Nothing can reconcile men to their
proceedings and projects, but the supposition that there is
no third option between them and some tyranny as odious
as can be furnished by the records of history, or by the in-
vention of poets. This prattling of theirs hardly deserves
the name of sophistry. It is nothing but plain impudence.
Have these gentlemen never heard, in the whole circle of
the worlds of theory and practice, of anything between the
despotism of the monarch and the despotism of the mul-
titude? Have they never heard of a monarchy directed
by laws, controlled and balanced by the great hereditary
wealth and hereditary dignity of a nation ; and both again
controlled by a judicious check from the reason and
feeling of the people at large, acting by a suitable
and permanent organ? Is it then impossible that a man
may be found, who, without criminal ill intention, or pitiable
absurdity, shall prefer such a mixed and tempered govern-
ment to either of the extremes ; and who may repute that na-
tion to be destitute of all wisdom and of all virtue, which,
having in its choice to obtain such a government with ease,
or rather to confirm it when actually possessed, thought
proper to commit a thousand crimes, and to subject their
country to a thousand evils, in order to avoid it? Is it then
a truth so universally acknowledged, that a pure democracy
is the only tolerable form into which human society can be
thrown, that a man is not permitted to hesitate about its
merits, without the suspicion of being a friend to tyranny,
that is, of being a foe to mankind?

I do not know under what description to class the present
ruling authority in France. It affects to be a pure democ-
racy, though I think it in a direct train of becoming shortly
a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy. But for the present
I admit it to be a contrivance of the nature and effect of
what it pretends to. I reprobate no form of government
merely upon abstract principles. There may be situations in
which the purely democratic form will become necessary.
There may be some (very few, and very particularly cir-
cumstanced) where it would be clearly desirable. This I do

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 273

not take to be the case of France, or of any other great
country. Until now, we have seen no examples of consider-
able democracies. The ancients were better acquainted
with them. Not being wholly unread in the authors, who
had seen the most of those constitutions, and who best
understood them, I cannot help concurring with their
opinion, that an absolute democracy, no more than abso-
lute monarchy, is to be reckoned among the legitimate forms
of government. They think it rather the corruption and
degeneracy, than the sound constitution of a republic. If
I recollect rightly, Aristotle observes, that a democracy has
many striking points of resemblance with a tyranny. 1 Of
this I am certain, that in a democracy, the majority of the
citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions
upon the minority, whenever strong divisions prevail in
that kind of polity, as they often must; and that oppression
of the minority will extend to far greater numbers, and
will be carried on with much greater fury, than can al-
most ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single
sceptre. In such a popular persecution, individual sufferers
are in a much more deplorable condition than in any other.
Under a cruel prince they have the balmy compassion of
mankind to assuage the smart of their wounds; they have
the plaudits of the people to animate their generous con-
stancy under their sufferings: but those who are subjected
to wrong under multitudes, are deprived of all external con-
solation. They seem deserted by mankind, overpowered by
a conspiracy of their whole species.

But admitting democracy not to have that inevitable tend-
ency to party tyranny, which I suppose it to have, and ad-
mitting it to possess as much good in it when unmixed, as I

1 When I wrote this I quoted from memory, after many years had
elapsed from my reading the passage. A learned friend has found it,
and it is as follows:

To $0o? to avrb, Kal qfupoi SetnroTuca twv fle\Ti6vav, Kal to. ^jr)f>CafiaTa y wo-7rep enei
ra €7rtTa-y/aaTa • Kal 6 &r)[x.ayu}yos Kal 6 Ko\a£, 01 auTOt Kal avdKoyoi' Kal /u.aAioTa
eKarepot nap' ejcaTepois larxvovatv, ol nkv (coAoxe? napa rupavvois, 01 &e Srniayuiyol irapa
T01S SlJjUOlS toZ? toioi5toi?. —

" The ethical character is the same; both exercise despotism over the
better class of citizens; and decrees are in the one, what ordinances and
arrets are in the other: the demagogue too, and the court favourite, are
not unfrequently the same identical men, and always bear a close analogy;
and these have the principal power, each in their respective forms of gov-
ernment, favourites with the absolute monarch, and demagogues with a
people such as I have described." Arist. Politic, lib. iv. cap. 4.

274

EDMUND BURKE

am sure it possesses when compounded with other forms;
does monarchy, on its part, contain nothing at all to rec-
ommend it? I do not often quote Bolingbroke, nor hav N .
bis works in general left any permanent impression on my
mind. He is a presumptuous and a superficial writer. But
he has one observation, which, in my opinion, is not with-
out depth and solidity. He says, that he prefers a monarchy
to other governments; because you can better ingraft any
description of republic on a monarchy than anything of
monarchy upon the republican forms. I think him perfectly
in the right. The fact is so historically; and it agrees well
with the speculation.

I know how easy a topic it is to dwell on the faults of de-
parted greatness. By a revolution in the state, the fawning
sycophant of yesterday is converted into the austere critic of
the present hour. But steady, independent minds, when they
have an object of so serious a concern to mankind as govern-
ment under their contemplation, will disdain to assume the
part of satirists and declaimers. They will judge of human
institutions as they do of human characters. They will sort
out the good from the evil, which is mixed in mortal institu-
tions, as it is in mortal men.

Your government in France, though usually, and I think
justly, reputed the best of the unqualified or ill-qualified
monarchies, was still full of abuses. These abuses accumu-
lated in a length of time, as they must accumulate in
every monarchy not under the constant inspection of a popu-
lar representative. I am no stranger to the faults and
defects of the subverted government of France ; and I think
I am not inclined by nature or policy to make a panegyric
upon anything which is a just and natural object of cen-
sure. But the question is not now of the vices of that mon-
archy, but of its existence. Is it then true, that the French
government was such as to be incapable or undeserving of
reform; so that it was of absolute necessity that the whole
fabric should be at once pulled down, and the area cleared
for the erection of a theoretic, experimental edifice in its
place? All France was of a different opinion in the begin-
ning of the year 1789. The instructions to the representatives
to the states-general, from every district in that kingdom,

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 275

were filled with projects for the reformation of that govern-
ment, without the remotest suggestion of a design to destroy
it Had such a design been even insinuated, I believe there
would have been but one voice, and that voice for rejecting
it with scorn and horror. Men have been sometimes led by
degrees, sometimes hurried, into things of which, if they
could have seen the whole together, they never would have
permitted the most remote approach. When those instruc-
tions were given, there was no question but that abuses
existed, and that they demanded a reform ; nor is there now.
In the interval between the instructions and the Revolution,
things changed their shape; and, in consequence of that
change, the true question at present is, Whether those who
would have reformed, or those who have destroyed, are in
the right?

To hear some men speak of the late monarchy of France,
you would imagine that they were talking of Persia bleeding
under the ferocious sword of Tahmas Kouli Khan ; or at
least describing the barbarous anarchic despotism of Turkey,
where the finest countries in the most genial climates in
the world are wasted by peace more than any countries
have been worried by war; where arts are unknown, where
manufactures languish, where science is extinguished, where
agriculture decays, where the human race itself melts away
and perishes under the eye of the observer. Was this
the case of France? I have no way of determining the
question but by reference to facts, "^acts do not support
this resemblance. Along with much evil, there is some
good in monarchy itself; and some corrective to its evil from
religion, from laws, from manners, from opinions, the
French monarchy must have received; which rendered it
(though by no means a free, and therefore by no means a
good, constitution) a despotism rather in appearance than
in reality.

Among the standards upon which the effects of govern-
ment on any country are to be estimated, I must consider
the state of its population as not the least certain. No
country in which population flourishes, and is in progressive
improvement, can be under a very mischievous government.
About sixty years ago, the Intendants of the generalities of

276 EDMUND BURKE

France made, with other matters, a report of the population
of their several districts. I have not the books, which are
very voluminous, by me, nor do I know where to pro-
cure them, (I am obliged to speak by memory, and therefore
the less positively,) but I think the population of France was
by them, even at that period, estimated at twenty-two millions
of souls. At the end of the last century it had been gener-
ally calculated at eighteen. On either of these estimations,
France was not ill peopled. M. Necker, who is an author-
ity for his own time at least equal to the Intendants for theirs,
reckons, and upon apparently sure principles, the people
of France, in the year 1780, at twenty-four millions six
hundred and seventy thousand. But was this the probable
ultimate term under the old establishment? Dr. Price is of
opinion, that the growth of population in France was
by no means at its acme in that year. I certainly defer to
Dr. Price's authority a good deal more in these speculations,
than I do in his general politics. This gentleman, taking
ground on M. Necker's data, is very confident that since
the period of that minister's calculation, the French popula-
tion has increased rapidly; so rapidly, that in the year 1789
he will not consent to rate the people of that kingdom at a
lower number than thirty millions. After abating much
(and much I think ought to be abated) from the sanguine
calculation of Dr. Price, I have no doubt that the population
of France did increase considerably during this later period :
but supposing that it increased to nothing more than will be
sufficient to complete the twenty-four millions six hundred
and seventy thousand to twenty-five millions, still a popula-
tion of twenty-five millions, and that in an increasing prog-
ress, on a space of about twenty-seven thousand square
leagues, is immense. It is, for instance, a good deal more
than the proportionable population of this island, or even
than that of England, the best peopled part of the united
kingdom.

It is not universally true, that France is a fertile country.
Considerable, tracts of it are barren, and labour under other
natural disadvantages. In the portions of that territory
where things are more favourable, as far as I am able to dis-
cover, the numbers of the people correspond to the indul-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 27?

gence of nature. 1 The Generality of Lisle (this I admit is
the strongest example) upon an extent of four hundred and
four leagues and a half, about ten years ago, contained seven
hundred and thirty-four thousand six hundred souls, which
is one thousand seven hundred and seventy-two inhabitants
to each square league. The middle term for the rest of
France is about nine hundred inhabitants to the same admea-
surement.

I do not attribute this population to the deposed govern-
ment; because I do not like to compliment the contrivances
of men with what is due in a great degree to the bounty of
Providence. But that decried government could nci have
obstructed, most probably it favoured, the operation of those
causes, (whatever they were,) whether of nature in the soil,
or habits of industry among the people, which has produced
so large a number of the species throughout that whole
kingdom, and exhibited in some particular places such prod-
igies of population. I never will suppose that fabric of a
state to be the worst of all political institutions, which, by
experience, is found to contain a principle favourable (how-
ever latent it may be) to the increase of mankind.

The wealth of a country is another, and no contemptible
standard, by which we may judge whether, on the whole, a
government be protecting or destructive. France far ex-
ceeds England in the multitude of her people; but I appre-
hend that her comparative wealth is much inferior to ours;
that it is not so equal in the distribution, nor so ready in
the circulation. I believe the difference in the form of the
two governments to be amongst the causes of this advantage
on the side of England. I speak of England, not of the
whole British dominions ; which, if compared with those of
France, will, in some degree, weaken the comparative rate of
wealth upon our side. But that wealth, which will not
endure a comparison with the riches of England, may con-
stitute a very respectable degree of opulence. M. Necker's
book published in 1785, 2 contains an accurate and interest-
ing collection of facts relative to public economy and to
political arithmetic; and his speculations on the subject are

1 De l'Administration des Finances de la France, par Mons. Necker,
vol. i. p. 288.

a De l'Administration des Finances de la France, par Mons. Necker.

278 EDMUND BURKE

in general wise and liberal. In that work he gives an idea
of the state of France, very remote from the portrait of a
country whose government was a perfect grievance, an
absolute evil, admitting no cure but through the violent and
uncertain remedy of a total revolution. He affirms, that
from the year 1726 to the year 1784, there was coined at the
mint of France, in the species of gold and silver, to the
amount of about one hundred millions of pounds sterling. 1

It is impossible that M. Necker should be mistaken in the
amount of the bullion which has been coined in the mint.
It is a matter of official record. The reasonings of this able
financier, concerning the quantity of gold and silver which
remained for circulation, when he wrote in 1785, that is,
about four years before the deposition and imprisonment
of the French king, are not of equal certainty; but
they are laid on grounds so apparently solid, that it is
not easy to refuse a considerable degree of assent to his
calculation. He calculates the numeraire, or what we call
specie, then actually existing in France, at about eighty-eight
millions of the same English money. A great accumulation
of wealth for one country, large as that country is ! M.
Necker was so far from considering this influx of wealth
as likely to cease, when he wrote in 1785, that he presumes
upon a future annual increase of two per cent, upon the
money brought into France during the periods from which
he computed.

Some adequate cause must have originally introduced all
the money coined at its mint into that kingdom; and some
cause as operative must have kept at home, or returned into
its bosom, such a vast flood of treasure as M. Necker cal-
culates to remain for domestic circulation. Suppose any
reasonable deductions from M. Necker's computation, the
remainder must still amount to an immense sum. Causes
thus powerful to acquire, and to retain, cannot be found
in discouraged industry, insecure property, and a positively
destructive government. Indeed, when I consider the face
of the kingdom of France; the multitude and opulence of
her cities; the useful magnificence of her spacious high
roads and bridges; the opportunity of her artificial canals

1 Vol. iii. chap. 8 and chap. 9.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 279

and navigations opening the conveniences of maritime
communication through a solid continent of so im-
mense an extent; when I turn my eyes to the stupendous
works of her ports and harbours, and to her whole naval
apparatus, whether for war or trade; when I bring before
my view the number of her fortifications, constructed with
so bold and masterly a skill, and made and maintained at
so prodigious a charge, presenting an armed front and im-
penetrable barrier to her enemies upon every side; when
I recollect how very small a part of that extensive region
is without cultivation, and to what complete perfection the
culture of many of the best productions of the earth have
been brought in France ; when I reflect on the excellence
of her manufactures and fabrics, second to none but ours,
and in some particulars not second; when I contemplate
the grand foundations of charity, public and private; when
I survey the state of all the arts that beautify and polish
life; when I reckon the men she has bred for extend-
ing her fame in war, her able statesmen, the multitude of
her profound lawyers and theologians, her philosophers, her
critics, her historians and antiquaries, her poets and her
orators, sacred and profane; I behold in all this something
which awes and commands the imagination, which checks
the mind on the brink of precipitate and indiscriminate cen-
sure, and which demands that we should very seriously ex-
amine, what and how great are the latent vices that could
authorize us at once to level so spacious a fabric with the
ground. I do not recognize in this view of things, the des-
potism of Turkey. Nor do I discern the character of a
government, that has been, on the whole, so oppressive, or
so corrupt, or so negligent, as to be utterly unfit for all ref-
ormation. I must think such a government well deserved
to have its excellencies heightened, its faults corrected, and
its capacities improved into a British constitution.

Whoever has examined into the proceedings of that de-
posed government for several years back, cannot fail to have
observed, amidst the inconstancy and fluctuation natural to
* courts, an earnest endeavour towards the prosperity and
improvement of the cpuntry ; he must admit, that it had
long been emnloyed, in some instances wholly to remove,

280 EDMUND BURKE

in many considerably to correct, the abusive practices and
usages that had prevailed in the state; and that even the
unlimited power of the sovereign over the persons of his
subjects, inconsistent, as undoubtedly it was, with law and
liberty, had yet been every day growing more mitigated in
the exercise. So far from refusing itself to reformation,
that government was open, with a censurable degree of
facility, to all sorts of projects and projectors on the subject.
Rather too much countenance was given to the spirit of
innovation, which soon was turned against those who fos-
tered it, and ended in their ruin. It is but cold, and no
very flattering, justice to that fallen monarchy, to say, that,
for many years, it trespassed more by levity and want of
judgment in several of its schemes, than from any defect in
diligence or in public spirit. To compare the government
of France for the last fifteen or sixteen years with wise and
well-constituted establishments during that, or during any
period, is not to act with fairness. But if in point of prodi-
gality in the expenditure of money, or in point of rigour in
the exercise of power, it be compared with any of the former
reigns, I believe candid judges will give little credit to the
good intentions of those who dwell perpetually on the dona-
tions to favourites, or on the expenses of the court, or on the
horrors of the Bastile, in the reign of Louis the Sixteenth. 1
Whether the system, if it deserves such a name, now
built on the ruins of that ancient monarchy, will be able to
give a better account of the population and wealth of the
country, which it has taken under its care, is a matter very
doubtful. Instead of improving by the change, I apprehend
that a long' series of years must be told, before it can re-
cover in any degree the effects of this philosophic revolu-
tion, and before the nation can be replaced on its former
footing. If Dr. Price should think fit, a few years hence, to
favour us with an estimate of the population of France, he
will hardly be able to make up his tale of thirty millions of
souls, as computed in 1789, or the Assembly's computation
of twenty-six millions of that year; or even M. Necker's

1 The world is obliged to M. de Calonne for the pains he has taken to
refute the scandalous exaggerations relative to some of the royal expenses,
and to detect the fallacious account given of pensions, for the wicked pur-
pose of provoking the populace to all sorts of crimes.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 281

twenty-five millions in 1780. I hear that there are consider-
able emigrations from France; and that many, quitting that
voluptuous climate, and that seductive Circean liberty, have
taken refuge in the frozen regions, and under the British
despotism, of Canada.

In the present disappearance of coin, no person could
think it the same country, in which the present minister of
the finances has been able to discover fourscore millions ster-
ling in specie. From its general aspect one would conclude
that it had been for some time past under the special direc-
tion of the learned academicians of Laputa and Balnibarbi. 1
Already the population of Paris has so declined, that M.
Necker stated to the National Assembly the provision to be
made for its subsistence at a fifth less than what had for-
merly been found requisite. 2 It is said (and I have never
heard it contradicted) that a hundred thousand people are
out of employment in that city, though it is become the seat
of the imprisoned court and National Assembly. Nothing,
I am credibly informed, can exceed the shocking and dis-
gusting spectacle of mendicancy displayed in that capital.
Indeed the votes of the National Assembly leave no doubt
of the fact. They have lately appointed a standing committee
of mendicancy. They are contriving at once a vigorous police
on this subject, and, for the first time, the imposition of a
tax to maintain the poor, for whose present relief great sums
appear on the face of the public accounts of the year. 3 In

1 See Gulliver's Travels for the idea of countries governed by philosophers.

2 M. de Calonne states the falling off of the population of Paris as far
more considerable; and it may be so, since the period of M. Necker's
calculation.

3 Travaux de charite pour subvenir au

manque de travail a Paris et dans les Livres. £ 5. d.

provinces 3,866,920 — 161,121 13 4

Destruction de vagabondage et de fa

mendicite 1,671,417 — 69,642 7 6

Primes pour l'importation de grains . . 5,671,907 — 236,329 9 2

Depenses relatives aux subsistances, de-
duction fait des recouvrements qui ont
eu lieu 39,871,790 — 1,661,324 11 8

Total Liv. 51,082,034 — £2,128,418 1 8
When I sent this book to the press, I entertained some doubt concern-
ing the nature and extent of the last article in the above accounts, which
is only under a general head, without any detail. Since then I have seen
M. de Calonne's work. I must think it a great loss to me that I had not
that advantage earlier. M. de Calonne thinks this article to be on account
of general subsistence; but as he is not able to comprehend how so great
a loss as upwards of £1,661,000 sterling could be sustained on the difference

282

EDMUND BURKE

the mean time the leaders of the legislative clubs and coffee-
houses are intoxicated with admiration at their own wisdom
and ability. They speak with the most sovereign contempt
of the rest of the world. They tell the people, to comfort
them in the rags with which they have clothed them, that
they are a nation of philosophers; and sometimes, by all
the arts of quackish parade, by show, tumult, and bustle,
sometimes by the alarms of plots and invasions, they attempt
to drown the cries of indigence, and to divert the eyes of the
observer from the ruin and wretchedness of the state. A
brave people will certainly prefer liberty accompanied with
a virtuous poverty to a depraved and wealthy servitude.
But before the price of comfort and opulence is paid, one
ought to be pretty sure it is real liberty which is purchased,
and that she is to be purchased at no other price. I shall
always, however, consider that liberty as very equivocal in
her appearance, which has not wisdom and justice for her
companions ; and does not lead prosperity and plenty in
her train.

The advocates for this Revolution, not satisfied with ex-
aggerating the vices of their ancient government, strike at
the fame of their country itself, by painting almost all that
could have attracted the attention of strangers, I mean their
nobility and their clergy, as objects of horror. If this were
only a libel, there had not been much in it. But it has
practical consequences. Had your nobility and gentry, who
formed the great body of your landed men, and the whole of
your military officers, resembled those of Germany, at the
period when the Hanse-towns were necessitated to confeder-
ate against the nobles in defence of their property — had they
been like the Orsini and Vitelli in Italy, who used to sally
from their fortified dens to rob the trader and traveller — had
they been such as the Mamelukes in Egypt, or the Nayres on
the coast of Malabar, I do admit, that too critical an inquiry
might not be advisable into the means of freeing the world
from such a nuisance. The statues of Equity and Mercy

between the price and the sale of grain, he seems to attribute this enormous
head of charge to secret expenses of the Revolution. I cannot say anything
positively on that subject. The reader is capable of judging, by the aggre-
gate of these immense charges, on the state and condition of France; and
the system of public economy adopted in that nation. These articles of
account produced no inquiry or discussion in the National Assembly.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 283

might be veiled for a moment. The tenderest minds, con-
founded with the dreadful exigence in which morality sub-
mits to the suspension of its own rules in favour of its own
principles, might turn aside whilst fraud and violence were
accomplishing the destruction of a pretended nobility which
disgraced, whilst it persecuted, human nature. The persons
most abhorrent from blood, and treason, and arbitrary con-
fiscation, might remain silent spectators of this civil war
between the vices.

But did the privileged nobility who met under the king's
precept at Versailles, in 1789, or their constituents, deserve
to be looked on as the Nayres or Mamelukes of this age, or
as the Orsini and Vitelli of ancient times? If I had then
asked the question I should have passed for a madman.
What have they since done that they were to be driven into
exile, that their persons should be hunted about, mangled,
and tortured, their families dispersed, their houses laid in
ashes, and that their order should be abolished, and the
memory of it, if possible, extinguished, by ordaining them to
change the very names by which they were usually known?
Read their instructions to their representatives. They
breathe the spirit of liberty as warmly, and they recommend
reformation as strongly, as any other order. Their privi-
leges relative to contribution were voluntarily surrendered;
as the king, from the beginning, surrendered all pretence to
a right of taxation. Upon a free constitution there was but
one opinion in France. The absolute monarchy was at an
end. It breathed its last, without a groan, without struggle,
without convulsion. All the struggle, all the dissension,
arose afterwards upon the preference of a despotic demo-
cracy to a government of reciprocal control. The triumph
of the victorious party was over the principles of a British
constitution.

I have observed the affectation, which for many years
past, has prevailed in Paris even to a degree perfectly child-
ish, of idolizing the memory of your Henry the Fourth. If
anything could put one out of humour with that ornament
to the kingly character, it would be this overdone style of
insidious panegyric. The persons who have worked this
engine the most busily, are those who have ended their

284 EDMUND BURKE

panegyrics in dethroning his successor and descendant ; a
man, as good-natured, at the least, as Henry the Fourth ;
altogether as fond of his people; and who has done infinitely
more to correct the ancient vices of the state than that great
monarch did, or we are sure he ever meant to do. Well it
is for his panegyrists that they have not him to deal with.
For Henry of Navarre was a resolute, active, and politic
prince. He possessed indeed great humanity and mildness;
but a humanity and mildness that never stood in the way of
his interests. He never sought to be loved without putting
himself first in a condition to be feared. He used soft
language with determined conduct. He asserted and main-
tained his authority in the gross, and distributed his acts of
concession only in the detail. He spent the income of his
prerogative nobly ; but he took care not to break in upon
the capital; never abandoning for a moment any of the
claims which he made under the fundamental laws, nor
sparing to shed the blood of those who opposed him, often
in the field, sometimes upon the scaffold. Because he knew
how to make his virtues respected by the ungrateful, he has
merited the praises of those, whom, if they had lived in his
time, he would have shut up in the Bastile, and brought to
punishment along with the regicides whom he hanged after
he had famished Paris into a surrender.

If these panegyrists are in earnest in their admiration of
Henry the Fourth, they must remember, that they cannot
think more highly of him than he did of the noblesse of
France; whose virtue, honour, courage, patriotism, and loy-
alty were his constant theme.

But the nobility of France are degenerated since the days
of Henry the Fourth. This is possible. But it is more than
I can believe to be true in any great degree. I do not pre-
tend to know France as correctly as some others ; but I have
endeavoured through my whole life to make myself ac-
quainted with human nature; otherwise I should be unfit to
take even my humble part in the service of mankind. In
that study I could not pass by a vast portion of our nature,
as it appeared modified in a country but twenty-four miles
from the shore of this island. On my best observation, com-
pared with my best inquiries, I found your nobility for the

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 285

greater part composed of men of high spirit, and of a deli-
cate sense of honour, both with regard to themselves indi-
vidually, and with regard to their whole corps, over whom
they kept, beyond what is common in other countries, a
censorial eye. They were tolerably well bred; very officious,
humane, and hospitable ; in their conversation frank and
open ; with a good military tone ; and reasonably tinctured
with literature, particularly of the authors in their own
language. Many had pretensions far above this description.
I speak of those who were generally met with.

As to their behaviour to the inferior classes, they ap-
peared to me to comport themselves towards them with good-
nature, and with something more nearly approaching to
familiarity, than is generally practised with us in the inter-
course between the higher and lower ranks of life. To
strike any person, even in the most abject condition, was a
thing in a manner unknown, and would be highly disgrace-
ful. Instances of other ill-treatment of the humble part of
the community were rare : and as to attacks made upon the
property or the personal liberty of the commons, I never
heard of any whatsoever from them; nor, whilst the laws
were in vigour under the ancient government, would such
tyranny in subjects have been permitted. As men of landed
estates, I had no fault to find with their conduct, though
much to reprehend, and much to wish changed, in many of
the old tenures. Where the letting of their land was by
rent, I could not discover that their agreements with their
farmers were oppressive ; nor when they were in partnership
with the farmer, as often was the case, have I heard that
they had taken the lion's share. The proportions seemed not
inequitable. There might be exceptions; but certainly they
were exceptions only. I have no reason to believe that in
these respects the landed noblesse of France were worse
than the landed gentry of this country; certainly in no re-
spect more vexatious than the landholders, not noble, of
their own nation. In cities the nobility had no manner of
power ; in the country very little. You know, Sir, that much
of the civil government, and the police in the most essential
parts was not in the hands of that nobility which presents
itself first to our consideration. The revenue, the system

286 EDMUND BURKE

and collection of which were the most grievous parts of the
French government, was not administered by the men of the
sword; nor were they answerable for the vices of its princi-
ple, or the vexations, where any such existed, in its man-
agement.

Denying, as I am well warranted to do, that the nobility
had any considerable share in the oppression of the people,
in cases in which real oppression existed, I am ready to admit
that they were not without considerable faults and errors.
A foolish imitation of the worst part of the manners of Eng-
land, which impaired their natural character, without sub-
stituting in its place what perhaps, they meant to copy, has
certainly rendered them worse than formerly they were.
Habitual dissoluteness of manners continued beyond the
pardonable period of life, was more common amongst them
than it is with us; and it reigned with the less hope of
remedy, though possibly with something of less mischief by
being covered with more exterior decorum. They counten-
anced too much that licentious philosophy, which has helped
to bring on their ruin. There was another error amongst
them more fatal. Those of the commons, who approached
to or exceeded many of the nobility in point of wealth, were
not fully admitted to the rank and estimation which wealth,
in reason and good policy, ought to bestow in every country ;
though I think not equally with that of other nobility. The
two kinds of aristocracy were too punctiliously kept asunder,
less so, however, than in Germany and some other nations.

This separation, as I have already taken the liberty of
suggesting to you, I conceive to be one principal cause of
the destruction of the old nobility. The military, particularly,
was tco exclusively reserved for men of family. But, after
all, this was an error of opinion, which a conflicting opinion
would have rectified. A permanent assembly, in which the
commons had their share of power, would soon abolish
whatever was too invidious and insulting in these distinc-
tions; and even the faults in the morals of the nobility
would have been probably corrected, by the greater varieties
of occupation and pursuit to which a constitution by orders
would have given rise.

All this violent cry against the nobility I take to be a mere

ON THE REVOLUTION TN FRANCE 287

work of art. To be honoured and even privileged by the
laws, opinions, and inveterate usages of our country, growing
out of the prejudice of ages, has nothing to provoke horror
and indignation in any man. Even to be too tenacious of
those privileges is not absolutely a crime. The strong
struggle in every individual to preserve possession of what
he has found to belong to him, and to distinguish him is
one of the securities against injustice and despotism im-
planted in our nature. It operates as an instinct to secure
property, and to preserve communities in a settled state.
What is there to shock in this? Nobility is a graceful
ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital
of polished society. Otnnes boni nobiiitati semper favemus,
was the saying of a wise and good man. It is indeed one
sign of a liberal and benevolent mind to incline to it with
some sort of partial propensity. He feels no ennobling prin-
ciple in his own heart, who wishes to level all the arti-
ficial institutions which have been adopted for giving a
body to opinion, and permanence to fugitive esteem. It is
a sour, malignant, envious disposition, without taste for the
reality, or for any image or representation of virtue, that
sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished
in splendour and in honour. I do not like to see anything
destroyed; any void produced in society; any ruin on the
face of the land. It was therefore with no disappointment
or dissatisfaction that my inquiries and observations did
not present to me any incorrigible vices in the noblesse of
France, or any abuse which could not be removed by a re-
form very short of abolition. Your noblesse did not deserve
punishment: but to degrade is to punish.

It was with the same satisfaction I found that the result
of my inquiry concerning your clergy was not dissimilar.
It is no soothing news to my ears, that great bodies of men
are incurably corrupt. It is not with much credulity I listen
to any, when they speak evil of those whom they are going
to plunder. I rather suspect that vices are feigned or
exaggerated, when profit is looked for in their punishment.
An enemy is a bad witness ; a robber is a worse. Vices and
abuses there were undoubtedly in that order, and must be.
It was an old establishment, and not frequently revised.

288 EDMUND BURKE

But I saw no crimes in the individuals that merited con-
fiscation of their substance, nor those cruel insults and
degradations, and that unnatural persecution, which have
been substituted in the place of meliorating regulation.

If there had been any just cause for this new religious
persecution, the atheistic libellers, who act as trumpeters to
animate the populace to plunder, do not love any body so
much as not to dwell with complacence on the vices of the
existing clergy. This they have not done. They find them-
selves obliged to rake into the histories of former ages
(which they have ransacked with a malignant and profligate
industry) for every instance of oppression and persecution
which has been made by that body or in its favour, in order
to justify, upon very iniquitous, because very illogical,
principles of retaliation, their own persecutions, and their
own cruelties. After destroying all other genealogies and
family distinctions, they invent a sort of pedigree of crimes.
It is not very just to chastise men for the offences of their
natural ancestors: but to take the fiction of ancestry in a
corporate succession, as a ground for punishing men who
have no relation to guilty acts, except in names and general
descriptions, is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging
to the philosophy of this enlightened age. The Assembly
punishes men, many, if not most, of whom abhor the violent
conduct of ecclesiastics in former times as much as their
present persecutors can do, and who would be as loud and
as strong in the expression of that sense, if they were not
well aware of the purposes for which all this declamation
is employed.

Corporate bodies are immortal for the good of the mem-
bers, but not for their punishment. Nations themselves are
such corporations. As well might we in England think of
waging inexpiable war upon all Frenchmen for the evils
which they have brought upon us in the several periods of
our mutual hostilities. You might, on your part, think your-
selves justified in falling upon all Englishmen on account
of the unparalleled calamities brought on the people of
France by the unjust invasions of our Henries and our
Edwards. Indeed we should be mutually justified in this
exterminatory war upon each other, full as much as you are

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 289

in the unprovoked persecution of your present countrymen,
on acount of the conduct of men of the same name in
other times.

We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history.
On the contrary, without care it may be used to vitiate our
minds and to destroy our happiness. In history a great
volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials
of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of
mankind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine,
furnishing offensive and defensive weapons for parties in
church and state, and supplying the means of keeping alive,
or reviving, dissensions and animosities, and adding fuel to
civil fury. History consists, for the greater part, of the
miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice,
revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all
the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public
with the same

— " troublous storms that toss
The private state, and render life unsweet."

These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals,
laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are
the pretexts. The pretexts are always found in some spe-
cious appearance of a real good. You would not secure men
from tyranny and sedition, by rooting out of the mind the
principles to which these fraudulent pretexts apply? If
you did, you would root out everything that is valuable in
the human breast. As these are the pretexts, so the ordinary
actors and instruments in great public evils are kings, priests,
magistrates, senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges,
and captains. You would not cure the evil by resolving,
that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of
state, nor of the gospel; no interpreters of law; no general
officers ; no public councils. You might change the names.
The things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum
of power must always exist in the community, in some hands,
and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their
remedies to vices, not to names ; to the causes of evil which
are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they
act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Other-

Hc j— vol. xxiv

290

EDMUND BURKE

wise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice. Sel-
dom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and
the same modes of mischief. Wickedness is a little more in-
ventive. Whilst you are discussing fashion, the fashion is
gone by. The very same vice assumes a new body. The
spirit transmigrates ; and, far from losing its principle of life
by the change of its appearance, it is renovated in its new
organs with a fresh vigour of a juvenile activity. It walks
abroad, it continues its ravages, whilst you are gibbeting
the carcase, or demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying
yourselves with ghosts and apparitions, whilst your house is
the haunt of robbers. It is thus with all those, who, attending
only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging
war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilst, under colour
of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are
authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different
factions, and perhaps in worse.

Your citizens of Paris formerly had lent themselves as
the ready instruments to slaughter the followers of Calvin,
at the infamous massacre of St. Bartholomew. What should
we say to those who could think of retaliating on the
Parisians of this day the abominations and horrors of that
time? They are indeed brought to abhor that massacre.
Ferocious as they are, it is not difficult to make them dis-
like it; because the politicians and fashionable teachers have
no interest in giving their passions exactly the same direc-
tion. Still, however, they find it their interest to keep the
same savage dispositions alive. It was but the other day
that they caused this very massacre to be acted on the stage
for the diversion of the descendants of those who committed
it. In this tragic farce they produced the cardinal of Lor-
raine in his robes of function, ordering general slaughter.
Was this spectacle intended to make the Parisians abhor
persecution, and loathe the effusion of blood? — No; it was
to teach them to persecute their own pastors ; it was to
excite them, by raising a disgust and horror of their clergy,
to an alacrity in hunting down to destruction an order, which,
if it ought to exist at all, ought to exist not only in safety,
but in reverence. It was to stimulate their cannibal ap-
petites (which one would think had been gorged sufficiently)

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 291

by variety and seasoning ; and to quicken them to an alertness
in new murders and massacres, if it should suit the purpose
of the Guises of the day. An assembly, in which sat a multi-
tude of priests and prelates, was obliged to suffer this in-
dignity at its door. The author was not sent to the galleys,
nor the players to the house of correction. Not long after
this exhibition, those players came forward to the Assembly
to claim the rites of that very religion which they had dared
to expose, and to show their prostituted faces in the senate,
whilst the archbishop of Paris, whose function was known
to his people only by his prayers and benedictions, and his
wealth only by his alms, is forced to abandon his house, and
to fly from his flock, (as from ravenous wolves,) because,
truly, in the sixteenth century, the cardinal of Lorraine was
a rebel and a murderer. 1

Such is the effect of the perversion of history, by those,
who, for the same nefarious purposes, have perverted every
other part of learning. But those who will stand upon that
elevation of reason, which places centuries under our eye,
and brings things to the true point of comparison, which
obscures little names, and effaces the colours of little parties,
and to which nothing can ascend but the spirit and moral
quality of human actions, will say to the teachers of the
Palais Royal, — The cardinal of Lorraine was the murderer of
the sixteenth century, you have the glory of being the mur-
derers in the eighteenth; and this is the only difference be-
tween you. But history in the ninteenth century, better
understood, and better employed, will, I trust, teach a civil-
ized posterity to abhor the misdeeds of both these barbar-
ous ages. It will teach future priests and magistrates not
to retaliate upon the speculative and inactive atheists of
future times, the enormities committed by the present prac-
tical zealots and furious fanatics of that wretched error,
which, in its quiescent state, is more than punished, when-
ever it is embraced. It will teach posterity not to make war
upon either religion or philosophy, for the abuse which the
hypocrites of both have made of the two most valuable
blessings conferred upon us by the bounty of the universal

1 This is on a supposition of the truth of this story, but he was not in
France at the time. One name serves as well as another.

292 EDMUND BURKE

Patron, who in all things eminently favours and protects
the race of man.

If your clergy, or any clergy, should show themselves
vicious beyond the fair bounds allowed to human infirmity,
and to those professional faults which can hardly be sepa-
rated from professional virtues, though their vices never can
countenance the exercise of oppression, I do admit, that they
would naturally have the effect of abating very much of our
indignation against the tyrants who exceed measure and
justice in their punishment. I can allow in clergymen,
through all their divisions, some tenaciousness of their own
opinion, some overflowings of zeal for its propagation, some
predilection to their own state and office, some attachment
to the interests of their own corps, some preference to those
who listen with docility to their doctrines, beyond those who
scorn and deride them. I allow all this, because I am a man
who have to deal with men, and who would not, through a
violence of toleration, run into the greatest of all intoler-
ance. I must bear with infirmities until they fester into
crimes.

Undoubtedly, the natural progress of the passions, from
frailty to vice, ought to be prevented by a watchful eye and
a firm hand. But it is true that the body of your clergy
had past those limits of a just allowance. From the general
style of your late publications of all sorts, one would be led
to believe that your clergy in France were a sort of mon-
sters; an horrible composition of superstition, ignorance,
sloth, fraud, avarice, and tyranny. But is this true ? Is it true,
that the lapse of time, the cessation of conflicting interests,
the woeful experience of the evils resulting from party rage,
have had no sort of influence gradually to meliorate their
minds? Is it true, that they were daily renewing invasions
on the civil power, troubling the domestic quiet of their
country, and rendering the operations of its government
feeble and precarious? Is it true, that the clergy of our
times have pressed down the laity with an iron hand, and
were in all places, lighting up the fires of a savage persecu-
tion? Did they by every fraud endeavour to increase their
estates ? Did they use to exceed the due demands on estates
that were their own? Or, rigidly screwing up right into

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 293

wrong, did they convert a legal claim into a vexatious extor-
tion? When not possessed of power, were they filled with
the vices of those who envy it? Were they inflamed with a
violent, litigious spirit of controversy? Goaded on with the
ambition of intellectual sovereignty, were they ready to fly
in the face of all magistracy, to fire churches, to massacre
the priests of other descriptions, to pull down altars, and to
make their way over the ruins of subverted governments to
an empire or doctrine sometimes flattering, sometimes for-
cing the consciences of men from the jurisdiction of public
institutions into a submission of their personal authority,
beginning with a claim of liberty, and ending with an abuse
of power?

These, or some of these, were the vices objected, and not
wholly without foundation, to several of the churchmen of
former times, who belonged to the two great parties, which
then divided and distracted Europe.

If there was in France, as in other countries there visibly
is, a great abatement, rather than any increase of these vices,
instead of loading the present clergy with the crimes of
other men, and the odious character of other times, in com-
mon equity they ought to be praised, encouraged, and sup-
ported, in their departure from a spirit which disgraced
their predecessors, and for having assumed a temper of mind
and manners more suitable to their sacred function.

When my occasions took me into France, towards the
close of the late reign, the clergy, under all their forms, en-
gaged a considerable part of my curiosity. So far from
finding (except from one set of men, not then very numer-
ous, though very active) the complaints and discontents
against that body, which some publications had given me
reason to expect, I perceived little or no public or private un-
easiness on their account. On further examination, I found
.the clergy, in general, persons of moderate minds and decor-
ous manners ; I include the seculars, and the regulars of both
sexes. I had not the good fortune to know a great many of
the parochial clergy : but in general I received a perfectly
good account of their morals, and of their attention to their
duties. With some of the higher clergy I had a personal
acquaintance ; and of the rest in that class, a very good

294 EDMUND BURKE

means of information. They were, almost all of them, per-
sons of noble birth. They resembled others of their own
rank; and where there was any difference, it was in their
favour. They were more fully educated than the military
noblesse; so as by no means to disgrace their profession by
ignorance, or by want of fitness for the exercise of their
authority. They seemed to me, beyond the clerical charac-
ter, liberal and open ; with the hearts of gentlemen, and men
of honour; neither insolent nor servile in their manners and
conduct. They seemed to me rather a superior class; a set
of men, amongst whom you would not be surprised to find a
Fenelon. I saw among the clergy in Paris (many of the
description are not to be met with anywhere) men of great
learning and candour ; and I had reason to believe, that this
description was not confined to Paris. What I found in
other places, I know was accidental ; and therefore to be
presumed a fair example. I spent a few days in a provincial
town, where, in the absence of the bishop, I passed my
evenings with three clergymen, his vicars-general, persons
who would have done honour to any church. They were all
well informed; two of them of deep, general, and extensive
erudition, ancient and modern, oriental and western ; particu-
larly in their own profession. They had a more extensive
knowledge of our English divines than I expected and they
entered into the genius of those writers with a critical accu-
racy. One of these gentlemen is since dead, the Abbe
Morangis. I pay this tribute, without reluctance, to the
memory of that noble, reverend, learned, and excellent per-
son ; and I should do the same with equal cheerfulness, to
the merits of the others, who I believe are still living, if I
did not fear to hurt those whom I am unable to serve.

Some of these ecclesiastics of rank are, by all titles, per-
sons deserving of general respect. They are deserving of
gratitude from me, and from many English. If this letter
should ever come into their hands, I hope they will believe
there are those of our nation who feel for their unmerited
fall, and for the cruel confiscation of their fortunes, with
no common sensibility. What I say of them is a testimony,
as far as one feeble voice can go, which I owe to truth.
Whenever the question of this unnatural persecution is con-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 295

cerned, I will pay it. No one shall prevent me from fteing
just and grateful. The time is fitted for the duty; and it is
particularly becoming to show our justice and gratitude,
when those, who have deserved well of us and of mankind,
are labouring under popular obloquy, and the persecutions of
oppressive power.

You had before your Revolution about an hundred and
twenty bishops. A few of them were men of eminent sanc-
tity, and charity without limit. When we talk of the heroic,
of course we talk of rare virtue. I believe the instances of
eminent depravity may be as rare amongst them as those of
transcendent goodness. Examples of avarice and of licen-
tiousness may be picked out, I do not question it, by those
who delight in the investigation which leads to such dis-
coveries. A man as old as I am will not be astonished that
several, in every description, do not lead that perfect life
of self-denial, with regard to wealth or to pleasure, which
is wished for by all, by some expected, but by none exacted
with more rigour, than by those who are the most attentive
to their own interests, or the most indulgent to their own
passions. When I was in France, I am certain that the num-
ber of vicious prelates was not great. Certain individuals
among them, not distinguishable for the regularity of their
lives, made some amends for their want of the severe vir-
tues, in their possession of the liberal; and were endowed
with qualities which made them useful in the church and
state. I am told, that, with few exceptions, Louis the Six-
teenth had been more attentive to character, in his promo-
tions to that rank, than his immediate predecessor; and I
believe (as some spirit of reform has prevailed through the
whole reign) that it may be true. But the present ruling
power has shown a disposition only to plunder the church.
It has punished all prelates; which is to favour the vicious,
at least in point of reputation. It has made a degrading
pensionary establishment, to which no man of liberal ideas
or liberal condition will destine his children. It must settle
into the lowest classes of the people. As with you the in-
ferior clergy are not numerous enough for their duties; as
these duties are, beyond measure, minute and toilsome, as
you have left no middle classes of clergy at their ease, in

296 EDMUND BURKE

future nothing of science or erudition can exist in the Galil-
ean church. To complete the project, without the least at-
tention to the rights of patrons, the Assembly has provided
in future an elective clergy ; an arrangement which will
drive out of the clerical profession all men of sobriety; all
who can pretend to independence in their function or their
conduct; and which will throw the whole direction of the
public mind into the hands of a set of licentious, bold, crafty,
factious, flattering wretches, of such condition and such
habits of life as will make their contemptible pensions (in
comparison of which the stipend of an exciseman is lucrative
and honourable) an object of low and illiberal intrigue.
Those officers, whom they still call bishops, are to be elected
to a provision comparatively mean, through the same arts,
(that is, electioneering arts,) by men of all religious tenets
that are known or can be invented. The new lawgivers have
not ascertained anything whatsoever concerning their quali-
fications, relative either to doctrine or to morals ; no more
than they have done with regard to the subordinate clergy:
nor does it appear but that both the higher and the lower
may, at their discretion, practise or preach any mode of re-
ligion or irreligion that they please. I do not yet see what
the jurisdiction of bishops over their subordinates is to be,
or whether they are to have any jurisdiction at all.

In short, Sir, it seems to me, that this new ecclesiastical
establishment is intended only to be temporary, and pre-
paratory to the utter abolition, under any of its forms, of
the Christian religion, whenever the minds of men are pre-
pared for this last stroke against it, by the accomplishment
of the plan for bringing its ministers into universal contempt.
They who will not believe, that the philosophical fanatics,
who guide in these matters, have long entertained such a
design, are utterly ignorant of their character and proceed-
ings. These enthusiasts do not scruple to avow their opinion,
that a state can subsist without any religion better than
with one and that they are able to supply the place of any
good which may be in it, by a project of their own — namely,
by a sort of education they have imagined, founded in a
knowledge of the physical wants of men ; progressively
carried to an enlightened self-interest, which, when well

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 297

understood, they tell us, will identify with an interest more
enlarged and public. The scheme of this education has been
long known. Of late they distinguish it (as they have got
an entirely new nomenclature of technical terms) by the
name of a Civic Education.

I hope their partisans in England (to whom I rather at-
tribute very inconsiderate conduct, than the ultimate object
in this detestable design) will succeed neither in the pillage
of the ecclesiastics, nor in the introduction of a principle of
popular election to our bishoprics and parochial cures. This,
in the present condition of the world, would be the last cor-
ruption of the church; the utter ruin of the clerical charac-
ter; the most dangerous shock that the state ever received
through a misunderstood arrangement of religion. I know
well enough that the bishoprics and cures, under kingly and
seignioral patronage, as now they are in England, and as they
have been lately in France, are sometimes acquired by un-
worthy methods ; but the other mode of ecclesiastical can-
vass subjects them infinitely more surely and more generally
to all the evil arts of low ambition, which, operating on and
through greater numbers, will produce mischief in propor-
tion.

Those of you, who have robbed the clergy, think that they
shall easily reconcile their conduct to all Protestant nations ;
because the clergy, whom they have thus plundered, de-
graded, and given over to mockery and scorn, are of the
Roman Catholic, that is, of their own pretended persuasion.
I have no doubt that some miserable bigots will be found
here, as well as elsewhere, who hate sects and parties differ-
ent from their own, more than they love the substance of
religion ; and who are more angry with those who differ
from them in their particular plans and systems, than dis-
pleased with those who attack the foundation of our common
hope. These men will write and speak on the subject in the
manner that is to be expected from their temper and char-
acter. Burnet says, that when he was in France, in the year
1683, " the method which carried over the men of the finest
parts to Popery was this — they brought themselves to doubt
of the whole Christian religion. When that was once done,
it seemed a more indifferent thing of what side or form they

298 EDMUND BURKE

continued outwardly." If this was then the ecclesiastical
policy of France, it is what they have since but too much
reason to repent of. They preferred atheism to a form of
religion not agreeable to their ideas. They succeeded in de-
stroying that form; and atheism has succeeded in destroying
them. I can readily give credit to Burnet's story; because
I have observed too much of a similar spirit (for a little of
it is " much too much ") amongst ourselves. The humour,
however, is not general.

The teachers who reformed our religion in England bore
no sort of resemblance to your present reforming doctors in
Paris. Perhaps they were (like those whom they opposed)
rather more than could be wished under the influence of a
party spirit ; but they were more sincere believers ; men
of the most fervent and exalted piety; ready to die (as some
of them did die) like true heroes in defence of their particu-
lar ideas of Christianity ; as they would with equal fortitude,
and more cheerfully, for that stock of general truth, for the
branches of which they contended with their blood. These
men would have disavowed with horror those wretches who
claimed a fellowship with them upon no other titles than
those of their having pillaged the persons with whom they
maintained controversies, and their having despised the com-
mon religion, for the purity of which they exerted them-
selves with a zeal, which unequivocally bespoke their highest
reverence for the substance of that system which they wished
to reform. Many of their descendants have retained the
same zeal, but (as less engaged in conflict) with more moder-
ation. They do not forget that justice and mercy are sub-
stantial parts of religion. Impious men do not recommend
themselves to their communion by iniquity and cruelty
towards any description of their fellow-creatures.

We hear these new teachers continually boasting of their
spirit of toleration. That those persons should tolerate all
opinions, who think none to be of estimation, is a matter of
small merit. Equal neglect is not impartial kindness. The
species of benevolence, which arises from contempt, is no
true charity. There are in England abundance of men who
tolerate in the true spirit of toleration. They think the dog-
mas of religion, though in different degrees, are all of mo-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 299

ment: and that amongst them there is, as amongst all things
of value, a just ground of preference. They favour, there-
fore, and they tolerate. They tolerate, not because they
despise opinions, but because they respect justice. They
would reverently and affectionately protect all religions,
because they love and venerate the great principle upon which
they all agree, and the great object to which they are all
directed. They begin more and more plainly to discern, that
we have all a common cause, as against a common enemy.
They will not be so misled by the spirit of faction, as not to
distinguish what is done in favour of their subdivision, from
those acts of hostility, which, through some particular de-
scription, are aimed at the whole corps, in which they them-
selves, under another denomination, are included. It is im-
possible for me to say what may be the character of every
description of men amongst us. But I speak for the greater
part ; and for them, I must tell you, that sacrilege is no part
of their doctrine of good works ; that, so far from calling
you into their fellowship on such title, if your professors are
admitted to their communion, they must carefully conceal
their doctrine of the lawfulness of the prescription of inno-
cent men; and that they must make restitution of all stolen
goods whatsoever. Till then they are none of ours.

You may suppose that we do not approve your confisca-
tion of the revenues of bishops, and deans, and chapters, and
parochial clergy possessing independent estates arising from
land, because we have the same sort of establishment in
England. That objection, you will say, cannot hold as to the
confiscation of the goods of monks and nuns, and the aboli-
tion of their order. It is true that this particular part of
your general confiscation does not affect England, as a pre-
cedent in point: but the reason implies, and it goes a great
way. The long parliament confiscated the lands of deans
and chapters in England on the same ideas upon which your
assembly set to sale the lands of the monastic orders. But
it is in the principle of injustice that the danger lies, and
not in the description of persons on whom it is first exer-
cised. I see, in a country very near us, a course of policy
pursued, which sets justice, the common concern of mankind,
at defiance. With the National Assembly of France, pos-

300 EDMUND BURKE

session is nothing, law and usage are nothing. I see the
National Assembly openly reprobate the doctrine of pre-
scription, which one of the greatest of their own lawyers 1
tells us, with great truth, is a part of the law of nature. He
tells us, that the positive ascertainment of its limits, and its
security from invasion, were among the causes for which
civil society itself has been instituted. If prescription be
once shaken, no species of property is secure, when it once
becomes an object large enough to tempt the cupidity of
indigent power. I see a practice perfectly correspondent to
their contempt of this great fundamental part of natural
law. I see the confiscators begin with bishops and chapters,
and monasteries ; but I do not see them end there. I see the
princes of the blood, who by the oldest usages of that king-
dom, held large landed estates, (hardly with the compliment
of a debate,) deprived of their possessions, and, in lieu of
their stable, independent property, reduced to the hope of
some precarious, charitable pension, at the pleasure of an
assembly, which of course will pay little regard to the rights
of pensioners at pleasure, when it despises those of legal
proprietors. Flushed with the insolence of their first inglori-
ous victories, and pressed by the distresses caused by their
lust of unhallowed lucre, disappointed but not discouraged,
they have at length ventured completely to subvert all prop-
erty of all descriptions throughout the extent of a great
kingdom. They have compelled all men, in all transactions
of commerce, in the disposal of lands, in civil dealing, and
through the whole communion of life, to accept as perfect
payment and good and lawful tender, the symbols of their
speculations on a projected sale of their plunder. What
vestiges of liberty or property have they left? The tenant-
right of a cabbage-garden, a year's interest in a hovel, the
good-will of an ale-house or a baker's shop, the very shadow
of a constructive property, are more ceremoniously treated
in our parliament, than with you the oldest and most valu-
able landed possessions, in the hands of the most respectable
personages, or than the whole body of the monied and com-
mercial interest of your country. We entertain a high
opinion of the legislative authority; but we have never

1 Domat.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 301

dreamt that parliaments had any right whatever to violate
property, to overrule prescription, or to force a currency of
their own fiction in the place of that which is real, and re-
cognised by the law of nations. But you, who began with
refusing to submit to the most moderate restraints, have
ended by establishing an unheard-of despotism. I find the
ground upon which your confiscators go is this; that indeed
their proceedings could not be supported in a court of jus-
tice; but that the rules of prescription cannot bind a legis-
lative assembly. 1 So that this legislative assembly of a free
nation sits, not for the security, but for the destruction, of
property, and not of property only, but of every rule and
maxim which can give it stability, and of those instruments
which can alone give it circulation.

When the Anabaptists of Munster, in the sixteenth cen-
tury, had filled Germany with confusion, by their system of
levelling, and their wild opinions concerning property, to
what country in Europe did not the progress of their fury
furnish just cause of alarm? Of all things, wisdom is the
most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because of all ene-
mies it is that against which she is the least able to furnish
any kind of resource. We cannot be ignorant of the spirit
of atheistical fanaticism, that is inspired by a multitude of
writings, dispersed with incredible assiduity and expense,
and by sermons delivered in all the streets and places of
public resort in Paris. These writings and sermons have
filled the populace with a black and savage atrocity of mind,
which supersedes in them the common feelings of nature,
as well as all sentiments of morality and religion ; insomuch
that these wretches are induced to bear with a sullen pa-
tience the intolerable distresses brought upon them by the
violent convulsions and permutations that have been made
in property. 2 The spirit of proselytism attends this spirit

1 Speech of Mr. Camus, published by order of the National Assembly.

'Whether the following description is strictly true, I know not; but
it is what the publishers would have pass for true in order to animate
others. In a letter from Toul, given in one of their papers, is the follow-
ing passage concerning the people of that district: Dans la Revolution
actuelle, ils ont resiste a toutes les seductions du bigotisme, aux persecu-
tions, et aux tracasseries des ennemis de la Revolution. Oubliant leurs
plus grands^ interHs pour rendre hommage aux vues d'ordre general qui
ont determine l'Assemblee Nationale, ils voient, sans se plaindre, suppri-
mer cette fqule d'etablissemens ecclesiastiques par lesquels Us subsis-
toient; et meme, en perdant leur siege episcopal, la seul de toutes ses

302

EDMUND BURKE

of fanaticism. They have societies to cabal and correspond
at home and abroad for the propagation of their tenets. The
republic of Berne, one of the happiest, the most prosperous,
and the best governed countries upon earth, is one of the
great objects, at the destruction of which they aim. I am
told they have in some measure succeeded in sowing there
the seeds of discontent. They are busy throughout Germany.
Spain and Italy have not been untried. England is not left
out of the comprehensive scheme of their malignant charity :
jmd in England we find those who stretch out their arms to
them, who recommend their example from more than one
pulpit, and who choose in more than one periodical meeting,
publicly to correspond with them, to applaud them, and to
hold them up as objects for imitation; who receive from
them tokens of confraternity, and standards consecrated
amidst their rights and mysteries ;* who suggest to them
leagues of perpetual amity, at the very time when the power,
to which our constitution has exclusively delegated the
federative capacity of this kingdom, may find it expedient
to make war upon them.

It is not the confiscation of our church property from this
example in France that I dread, though I think this would
be no trifling evil. The great source of my solicitude is, lest
it should ever be considered in England as the policy of a
state to seek a resource in confiscations of any kind; or
that any one description of citizens should be brought to
regard any of the others as their proper prey. 2 Nations

ressources qui pouvoit, ou plutot qui devoit, en toute cquite, leur etre con-
servee: condamnes a la plus effrayante miscre, sans avoir ete^ ni pu etre
entendus, ils ne murmurent point, ils restent fideles aux principes du plus
pur patriotisme ; ils sont encore prets a verser leur sang pour le maintien
de la Constitution, qui va reduire leur ville d la plus deplorable nullite."
These people are not supposed to have endured those sufferings and in-
justices in a struggle for liberty, for the same account states truly that
they had been always free; their patience in beggary and ruin,_ and their
suffering, without remonstrance, the most flagrant and confessed injustice, if
strictly true, can be nothing but the effect of this dire fanaticism. A great
multitude all over France is in the same condition and the same temper.

1 See the proceedings of the confederation at Nantz.

2 " Si plures sunt ii quibus improbe datum est, quam illi quibus injuste
ademptum est, idcirco plus etiam valent? Non enim numero hsec judi-
cantur sed pondere. Quam autem habct rcquitatem, ut agrum multis
annis, aut etiam s.Tculis ante possessum, qui nullum habuit habeat; qui
autem habuit amittat? Ac, propter hoc injuria; genus, Lacedsemonii Ly-
sandrum Ephnrum expulerunt: Agin regem (quod nunqunm antca apud
eos acciderat) nccaverunt: exque eo tempore tanlje discordiae secutae
sunt, ut et tyranni existcrint, et optimates exterminarentur, ct preclaris-
sime constituta respublica dilaberetur. Nee vero solum ipsa cecidit, sed

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 303

are wading deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless
debt. Public debts, which at first were a security to gov-
ernments, by interesting many in the public tranquillity, are
likely in their excess to become the means of their sub-
version. If governments provide for these debts by heavy
impositions, they perish by becoming odious to the people.
If they do not provide for them they will be undone by the
efforts of the most dangerous of all parties; I mean an
extensive, discontented monied interest, injured and not de-
stroyed. The men who compose this interest look for their
security, in the first instance, to the fidelity of government;
in the second, to its power. If they find the old governments
effete, worn out, and with their springs relaxed, so as not to
be of sufficient vigour for their purposes, they may seek
new ones that shall be possessed of more energy; and this
energy will be derived, not from an acquisition of resources,
but from a contempt of justice. Revolutions are favourable
to confiscation; and it is impossible to know under what ob-
noxious names the next confiscations will be authorized. I
am sure that the principles predominant in France extend
to very many persons, and descriptions of persons, in all
countries who think their innoxious indolence their security.
This kind of innocence in proprietors may be argued into
inutility; and inutility into an unfitness for their estates.
Many parts of Europe are in open disorder. In many others
there is a hollow murmuring under ground; a confused
movement is felt, that threatens a general earthquake in
the political world. Already confederacies and correspond-
encies of the most extraordinary nature are forming, in
several countries. 1 In such a state of things we ought to
hold ourselves upon our guard. In all mutations (if muta-
tions must be) the circumstance which will serve most to
blunt the edge of their mischief, and to promote what good

etiam reliquam Gneciam evertit contagionibus malorum, quae a Lacedae-
moniis profectse manarunt latius." — After speaking of the conduct of the
model of true patriots, Aratus of Sicyon, which was in a very different
spirit, he says, " Sic par est agere cum civibus; non ut bis jam vidimus,
hastam in foro ponere et bona civium voci subjicere praeconis. At ille
Graecus (id quod fuit sapientis et praastantis viri) omnibus jconsulendum
esse putavit: eaque est summa ratio et sapientia boni civis, commoda
civium non divellere, sed omnes eadem a;quitate continere." — Cic. Off. 1. 2.
1 See two books entitled, Enige Originalschriften des llluminatenordens.
—System und Folgen des llluminatenordens. Munchen, 1787.

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EDMUND BURKE

may be in them, is that they should find us with our minds
tenacious of justice, and tender of property.

But it will be argued, that this confiscation in France
ought not to alarm other nations. They say it is not made
from wanton rapacity ; that it is a great measure of national
policy, adopted to remove an extensive, inveterate, supersti-
tious mischief. It is with the greatest difficulty that I am
able to separate policy from justice. Justice itself is the
great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent de-
parture from it, under any circumstances, lies under the sus-
picion of being no policy at all.

When men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of
life by the existing laws; and protected in that mode as in a
lawful occupation — when they have accommodated all their
ideas and all their habits to it — when the law had long made
their adherence to its rules a ground of reputation, and their
departure from them a ground of disgrace and even of
penalty — I am sure it is unjust in legislature, by an arbitrary
act, to offer a sudden violence to their minds and their feel-
ings; forcibly to degrade them from their state and
condition, and to stigmatize with shame and infamy that
character, and those customs, which before had been made
the measure of their happiness and honour. If to this
be added an expulsion from their habitations, and a confis-
cation of all their goods, I am not sagacious enough to
discover how this despotic sport, made of the feelings, con-
sciences, prejudices, and properties of men, can be discrimi-
nated from the rankest tyranny.

If the injustice of the course pursued in France be clear,
the policy of the measure, that is, the public benefit to be
expected from it, ought to be at least as evident, and at
least as important. To a man who acts under the influence
of no passion, who has nothing in view in his projects but
the public good, a great difference will immediately strike
him between what policy would dictate on the original in-
troduction of such institutions, and on a question of their
total abolition, where they have cast their roots wide and
deep, and where, by long habit, things more valuable than
themselves are so adapted to them, and in a manner inter-
woven with them, that the one cannot be destroyed without

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 305

notably impairing the other. He might be embarrassed if
the case were really such as sophisters represent it in their
paltry style of debating. But in this, as in most questions
of state, there is a middle. There is something else than the
mere alternative of absolute destruction, or unreformed ex-
istence. Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna. This is, in my
opinion, a rule of profound sense, and ought never to depart
from the mind of an honest reformer. I cannot conceive
how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of pre-
sumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte
blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.
A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his
society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good
patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall
make the most of the existing materials of his country. A
disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken to-
gether, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything
else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.

There are moments in the fortune of states, when particu-
lar men are called to make improvements, by great mental
exertion. In those moments, even when they seem to enjoy
the confidence of their prince and country, and to be in-
vested with full authority, they have not always apt in-
struments. A politician, to do great things, looks for a
power, what our workmen call a purchase; and if he finds
that power, in politics as in mechanics, he cannot be at a
loss to apply it. In the monastic institutions, in my opinion,
was found a great power for the mechanism of politic
benevolence. There were revenues with a public direction;
there were men wholly set apart and dedicated to public
purposes, without any other than public ties and public
principles ; men without the possibility of converting the
estate of the community into a private fortune; men denied
to self-interests, whose avarice is for some community ; men
to whom personal poverty is honour, and implicit obedience
stands in the place of freedom. In vain shall a man look
to the possibility of making such things when he wants them.
The winds blow as they list. These institutions are the
products of enthusiasm ; they are the instruments of wisdom.
Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of nature

306 EDMUND BURKE

or of chance; her pride is in the use. The perennial ex-
istence of bodies corporate and their fortunes are things
particularly suited to a man who has long views ; who medi-
tates designs that require time in fashioning, and which
propose duration when they are accomplished. He is not
deserving to rank high, or even to be mentioned in the order
of great statesmen, who, having obtained the command and
direction of such a power as existed in the wealth, the
discipline, and the habits of such corporations, as those
which you have rashly destroyed, cannot find any way of
converting it to the great and lasting benefit of his country.
On the view of this subject, a thousand uses suggest them-
selves to a contriving mind. To destroy any power, grow-
ing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind,
is almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction
of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material.
It would be like the attempt to destroy (if it were in our
competence to destroy) the expansive force of fixed air in
nitre, or the power of steam, or of electricity, or of mag-
netism. These energies always existed in nature, and they
were always discernible. They seemed, some of them un-
serviceable, some noxious, some no better than a sport to
children; until contemplative ability, combining with prac-
tic skill, tamed their wild nature, subdued them to use, and
rendered them at once the most powerful and the most
tractable agents, in subservience to the great views and de-
signs of men. Did fifty thousand persons, whose mental and
whose bodily labour you might direct, and so many hundred
thousand a year of a revenue, which was neither lazy nor
superstitious, appear too big for your abilities to wield ? Had
you no way of using them but by converting monks into
pensioners? Had you no way of turning the revenue to
account, but through the improvident resource of a spend-
thrift sale? If you were thus destitute of mental funds,
the proceeding is in its natural course. Your politicians
do not understand their trade; and therefore they sell their
tools.

But the institutions savour of superstition in their very
principle; and they nourish it by a permanent and standing
influence. This I do not mean to dispute ; but this ought not

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 307

to hinder you from deriving from superstition itself any re-
sources which may thence be furnished for the public advan-
tage. You derive benefits from many dispositions and many
passions of the human mind, which are of as doubtful a
colour, in the moral eye, as superstition itself. It was your
business to correct and mitigate everything which was
noxious in this passion, as in all the passions. But is super-
stition the greatest of all possible vices? In its possible
excess I think it becomes a very great evil. It is, however,
a moral subject; and of course admits of all degrees and all
modifications. Superstition is the religion of feeble minds;
and they must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in some
trifling or some enthusiastic shape or other, else you will
deprive weak minds of a resource found necessary to the
strongest. The body of all true religion consists, to be sure,
in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world; in a
confidence in his declarations ; and in imitation of his per-
fections. The rest is our own. It may be prejudicial to the
great end ; it may be auxiliary. Wise men, who as such are
not admirers, (not admirers at least of the Munera Terra?,)
are not violently attached to these things, nor do they vio-
lently hate them. Wisdom is not the most severe corrector
of folly. They are the rival follies, which mutually wage so
unrelenting a war; and which make so cruel a use of their
advantages, as they can happen to engage the immoderate
vulgar, on the one side, or the other, in their quarrels. Pru-
dence would be neuter; but if, in the contention between
fond attachment and fierce antipathy concerning things in
their nature not made to produce such heats, a prudent man
were obliged to make a choice of what errors and excesses
of enthusiasm he would condemn or bear, perhaps he would
think the superstition which builds, to be more tolerable
than that which demolishes — that which adorns a country,
than that which deforms it — that which endows, than that
which plunders — that which disposes to mistaken benefi-
cence, than that which stimulates to real justice — that which
leads a man to refuse to himself lawful pleasures, than that
which snatches from others the scanty subsistence of their
self-denial. Such, I think, is very nearly the state of the
question between the ancient founders of monkish super-

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stition, and the superstition of the pretended philosophers of
the hour.

For the present I postpone all consideration of the sup-
posed public profit of the sale, which however I conceive to
be perfectly delusive. I shall here only consider it as a
transfer of property. On the policy of that transfer I shall
trouble you with a few thoughts.

In every prosperous community something more is pro-
duced than goes to the immediate support of the producer.
This surplus forms the income of the landed capitalist. It
will be spent by a proprietor who does not labour. But this
idleness is itself the spring of labour; this repose the spur
to industry. The only concern of the state is, that the capi-
tal taken in rent from the land, should be returned again to
the industry from whence it came; and that its expenditure
should be with the least possible detriment to the morals of
those who expend it, and to those of the people to whom it
is returned.

In all the views of receipt, expenditure, and personal em-
ployment, a sober legislator would carefully compare the
possessor whom he was recommended to expel, with the
stranger who was proposed to fill his place. Before the in-
conveniencies are incurred which must attend all violent
revolutions in property through extensive confiscation, we
ought to have some rational assurance that the purchasers
of the confiscated property will be in a considerable degree
more laborious, more virtuous, more sober, less disposed to
extort an unreasonable proportion of the gains of the la-
bourer, or to consume on themselves a larger share than is
fit for the measure of an individual ; or that they should be
qualified to dispense the surplus in a more steady and equal
mode, so as to answer the purposes of a politic expenditure,
than the old possessors, call those possessors bishops, or
canons, or commendatory abbots, or monks, or what you
please. The monks are lazy. Be it so. Suppose them no
otherwise employed than by singing in the choir. They are
as usefully employed as those who neither sing nor say. As
usefully even as those who sing upon the stage. They are
as usefully employed as if they worked from dawn to dark
in the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly,

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 309

and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations, to
which by the social economy so many wretches are inevita-
bly doomed. If it were not generally pernicious to disturb
the natural course of things, and to impede in any degree,
the great wheel of circulation which is turned by the
strangely-directed labour of these unhappy people, I should
be infinitely more inclined forcibly to rescue them from their
miserable industry, than violently to disturb the tranquil
repose of monastic quietude. Humanity, and perhaps policy,
might better justify me in the one than in the other. It is a
subject on which I have often reflected, and never reflected
without feeling from it. I am sure that no consideration,
except the necessity of submitting to the yoke of luxury, and
the despotism of fancy, who in their own imperious way will
distribute the surplus product of the soil, can justify the
toleration of such trades and employments in a well-regu-
lated state. But for this purpose of distribution, it seems
to me, that the idle expenses of monks are quite as well
directed as the idle expenses of us lay-loiterers.

When the advantages of the possession and of the project
are on a par, there is no motive for a change. But in the
present case, perhaps, they are not upon a par, and the differ-
ence is in favour of the possession. It does not appear to
me, that the expenses of those whom you are going to expel,
do in fact take a course so directly and so generally leading
to vitiate and degrade and render miserable those through
whom they pass, as the expenses of those favourites whom
you are intruding into their houses. Why should the ex-
penditure of a great landed property, which is a dispersion
of the surplus product of the soil, appear intolerable to you
or to me, when it takes its course through the accumulation
of vast libraries, which are the history of the force and
weakness of the human mind; through great collections of
ancient records, medals, and coins, which attest and explain
laws and customs ; through paintings and statues, that, by
imitating nature, seem to extend the limits of creation;
through grand monuments of the dead, which continue the
regards and connexions of life beyond the grave; through
collections of the specimens of nature which become a repre-
sentative assembly of all the classes and families of the

310 EDMUND BURKE

world, that by disposition facilitate, and, by exciting curi-
osity, open the avenues to science? If by great permanent
establishments, all these objects of expense are better
secured from the inconstant sport of personal caprice and
personal extravagance, are they worse than if the same
tastes prevailed in scattered individuals? Does not the
sweat of the mason and carpenter, who toil in order to par-
take of the sweat of the peasant, flow as pleasantly and as
salubriously, in the construction and repair of the majestic
edifices of religion, as in the painted booths and sordid sties
of vice and luxury; as honourably and as profitably in re-
pairing those sacred works, which grow hoary with innu-
merable years, as on the momentary receptacles of transient
voluptuousness; in opera-houses, and brothels, and gaming-
houses, and club-houses, and obelisks in the Champ de
Mars? Is the surplus product of the olive and the vine
worse employed in the frugal sustenance of persons, whom
the fictions of a pious imagination raise to dignity by con-
struing in the service of God, than in pampering the innu-
merable multitude of those who are degraded by being made
useless domestics, subservient to the pride of man? Are
the decorations of temples an expenditure less worthy a wise
man, than ribbons, and laces, and national cockades, and petit
maisons, and petit soupers, and all the innumerable fopperies
and follies, in which opulence sports away the burthen of
its superfluity?

We tolerate even these; not from love of them, but for
fear of worse. We tolerate them, because property and
liberty, to a degree, require that toleration. But why pro-
scribe the other, and surely, in every point of view, the more
laudable use of estates? Why, through the violation of all
property, through an outrage upon every principle of lib-
erty, forcibly carry them from the better to the worse ?

This comparison between the new individuals and the old
corps is made upon a supposition that no reform could be
made in the latter. But in a question of reformation, I
always consider corporate bodies, whether sole or consisting
of many, to be much more susceptible of a public direction
by the power of the state, in the use of their property, and
in the regulation of modes and habits of life in their mem-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 311

bers, than private citizens ever can be, or perhaps ought to
be: and this seems to me a very material consideration for
those who undertake anything which merits the name of a
politic enterprise. — So far as to the estates of monasteries.

With regard to the estates possessed by bishops and
canons, and commendatory abbots, I cannot find out for what
reason some landed estates may not be held otherwise than
by inheritance. Can any philosophic spoiler undertake to
demonstrate the positive or the comparative evil of having a
certain, and that too a large, portion of landed property,
passing in succession through persons whose title to it is,
always in theory, and often in fact, an eminent degree of
piety, morals, and learning; a property, which, by its des-
tination, in their turn, and on the score of merit, gives to the
noblest families renovation and support, to the lowest the
means of dignity and elevation; a property, the tenure ol
which is the performance of some duty, (whatever value
you may choose to set upon that duty,) and the character of
whose proprietors demands, at least, an exterior decorum,
and gravity of manners ; who are to exercise a generous but
temperate hospitality; part of whose income they are to
consider as a trust for charity ; and who, even when they fail
in their trust, when they slide from their character, and
degenerate into a mere common secular nobleman or gentle-
man, are in no respect worse than those who may succeed
them in their forfeited possessions? Is it better that estates
should be held by those who have no duty, than by those
who have one? — by those whose character and destination
point to virtues, than by those who have no rule and direc-
tion in the expenditure of their estates but their own will
and appetite? Nor are these estates held altogether in the
character or with the evils supposed inherent in mortmain.
They pass from hand to hand with a more rapid circulation
than any other. No excess is good; and therefore too great
a proportion of landed property may be held officially for
life: but it does not seem to me of material injury to any
commonwealth, that there should exist some estates that
have a chance of being acquired by other means than the
previous acquisition of money.

This letter has grown to a great length, though it is in-

312 EDMUND BURKE

deed short with regard to the infinite extent of the subject.
Various avocations have from time to time called my mind
from the subject. I was not sorry to give myself leisure to
observe whether, in the proceedings of the National Assem-
bly, I might not find reasons to change or to qualify some
of my first sentiments. Everything has confirmed me more
strongly in my first opinions. It was my original purpose
to take a view of the principles of the National Assembly
with regard to the great and fundamental establishments;
and to compare the whole of what you have substituted in
the place of what you have destroyed, with the several mem-
bers of our British constitution. But this plan is of a
greater extent than at first I computed, and I find that you
have little desire to take the advantage of any examples. At
present I must content myself with some remarks upon your
establishments ; reserving for another time what I proposed
to say concerning the spirit of our British monarchy, aris-
tocracy, and democracy, as practically they exist.

I have taken a view of what has been done by the gov-
erning power in France. I have certainly spoke of it with
freedom. Those whose principle it is to despise the ancient,
permanent sense of mankind, and to set up a scheme of
society on new principles, must naturally expect that such
of us, who think better of the judgment of the human race
than of theirs, should consider both them and their devices,
as men and schemes upon their trial. They must take it for
granted that we attend much to their reason, but not at all
to their authority. They have not one of the great influ-
encing prejudices of mankind in their favor. They avow
their hostility to opinion. Of course they must expect no
support from that influence, which, with every other author-
ity, they have deposed from the seat of its jurisdiction.

I can never consider this Assembly as anything else than
a voluntary association of men, who have availed themselves
of circumstances to seize upon the power of the state. They
have not the sanction and authority of the character under
which they first met. They have assumed another of a very
different nature; and have completely altered and inverted
all the relations in which they originally stood. They do
not hold the authority they exercise under any constitutional

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 313

law of the state. They have departed from the instructions,
of the people by whom they were sent; which instructions,
as the Assembly did not act in virtue of any ancient usage
or settled law, were the sole source of their authority. The
most considerable of their acts have not been done by great
majorities; and in this sort of near divisions, which carry
only the constructive authority of the whole, .strangers will
consider reasons as well as resolutions.

If they had set up this new experimental government, as
a necessary substitute for an expelled tyranny, mankind
would anticipate the time of prescription, which, through
long usage, mellows into legality governments that were
violent in their commencement. All those who have affec-
tions which lead them to the conservation of civil order
would recognize, even in its cradle, the child as legitimate,
which has been produced from those principles of cogent
expediency to which all just governments owe their birth,
and on which they justify their continuance. But they will
be late and reluctant in giving any sort of countenance to
the operations of a power, which has derived its birth from
no law and no necessity ; but which on the contrary has had
its origin in those vices and sinister practices by which the
social union is often disturbed and sometimes destroyed.
This Assembly has hardly a year's prescription. We have
their own word for it that they have made a revolution. To
make a revolution is a measure which, prima fronte, requires
an apology. To make a revolution is to subvert the ancient
state of our country ; and no common reasons are called for
to justify so violent a proceeding. The sense of mankind
authorizes us to examine into the mode of acquiring new
power, and to criticise on the use that is made of it, with
less awe and reverence than that which is usually conceded
to a settled and recognized authority.

In obtaining and securing their power, the Assembly pro-
ceeds upon principles the most opposite to those which
appear to direct them in the use of it. An observation on
this difference will let us into the true spirit of their conduct.
Everything which they have done, or continue to do, in
order to obtain and keep their power, is by the most common
arts. They proceed exactly as their ancestors of ambition

314

EDMUND BURKE

have done before them. — Trace them through all their arti-
fices, frauds, and violences, you can find nothing at all that
is new. They follow precedents and examples with the
punctilious exactness of a pleader. They never depart an
iota from the authentic formulas of tyranny and usurpation.
But in all the regulations relative to the public good, the
spirit has been the very reverse of this. There they commit
the whole to the mercy of untried speculations; they
abandon the dearest interests of the public to those loose
theories, to which none of them would choose to trust the
slightest of his private concerns. They make this difference,
because in their desire of obtaining and securing power
they are thoroughly in earnest; there they travel in the
beaten road. The public interests, because about them they
have no real solicitude, they abandon wholly to chance : I
say to chance, because their schemes have nothing in ex-
perience to prove their tendency beneficial.

We must always see with a pity not unmixed with respect,
the errors of those who are timid and doubtful of them-
selves with regard to points wherein the happiness of man-
kind is concerned. But in these gentlemen there is nothing
of the tender, parental solicitude, which fears to cut up the
infant for the sake of an experiment. In the vastness of
their promises, and the confidence of their predictions, they
far outdo all the boasting of empirics. The arrogance of
their pretensions, in a manner provokes and challenges us
to an inquiry into their foundation.

I am convinced that there are men of considerable parts
among the popular leaders in the National Assembly. Some
of them display eloquence in their speeches and their writ-
ings. This cannot be without powerful and cultivated
talents. But eloquence may exist without a proportionable
degree of wisdom. When I speak of ability, I am obliged
to distinguish. What they have done towards the support
of their system bespeaks no ordinary men. In the system
itself, taken as the scheme of a republic constructed for
procuring the prosperity and security of the citizen, and for
promoting the strength and grandeur of the state, I confess
myself unable to find out anything which displays, in a
single instance the work of a comprehensive and disposing

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 315

mind, or even the provisions of a vulgar prudence. Their
purpose everywhere seems to have been to evade and slip
aside from difficulty. This it has been the glory of the great
masters in all the arts to confront, and to overcome; and
when they had overcome the first difficulty, to turn it into
an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties ; thus
to enable them to extend the empire of their science; and
even to push forward, beyond the reach of their original
thoughts, the land-marks of the human understanding it-
self. Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the
supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian and Legislator,
who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us
better too. Pater ipse colendi hand facilem esse viam voluit.
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharp-
ens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable
conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance
with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its re-
lations. It will not suffer us to be superficial. It is the
want of nerves of understanding for such a task, it is the
degenerate fondness for tricking short-cuts, and little fal-
lacious facilities, that has in so many parts of the world
created governments with arbitrary powers. They have
created the late arbitrary monarchy of France. They have
created the arbitrary republic of Paris. With them defects
in wisdom are to be supplied by the plentitude of force.
They get nothing by it. Commencing their labours on a
principle of sloth, they have the common fortune of sloth-
ful men. The difficulties, which they rather had eluded than
escaped, meet them again in their course; they multiply and
thicken on them; they are involved, through a labyrinth of
confused detail, in an industry without limit, and without
direction ; and, in conclusion, the whole of their work be-
comes feeble, vicious, and insecure.

It is this inability to wrestle with difficulty which has
obliged the arbitrary Assembly of France to commence their
schemes of reform with abolition and total destruction. 1

1 A leading member of the Assembly, M. Rabaud de St. Etienne, has
expressed the principle of all their proceedings as clearly as possible. —
Nothing can be more simple: — " Tous les etablissetnens en France cou-
ronnent le malheur du peuple : pour le rendre heureux il faut le renouveler ;
changer ses idees; changer ses loix; changer ses mceurs; . . . changer les

316 EDMUND BURKE

But is it in destroying and pulling down that skill is dis-
played? Your mob can do this as well at least as your as-
semblies. The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand,
is more than equal to that task. Rage and phrensy will pull
down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and
foresight can build up in a hundred years. The errors and
defects of old establishments are visible and palpable. It
calls for little ability to point them out; and where abso-
lute power is given, it requires but a word wholly to abolish
the vice and the establishment together. The same lazy but
restless disposition, which loves sloth and hates quiet, di-
rects the politicians, when they come to work for supplying
the place of what they have destroyed. To make everything
the reverse of what they have seen is quite as easy as to
destroy. No difficulties occur in what has never been tried.
Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what
has not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope
have all the wide field of imagination, in which they may
expatiate with little or no opposition.

At once to preserve and to reform is quite another thing.
When the useful parts of an old establishment are kept, and
what is superadded is to be fitted to what is retained, a
vigorous mind, steady, persevering attention, various powers
of comparison and combination, and the resources of an un-
derstanding fruitful in expedients, are to be exercised ; they
are to be exercised in a continued conflict with the combined
force of opposite vices, with the obstinacy that rejects all
improvement, and the levity that is fatigued and disgusted
with everything of which it is in possession. But you may
object — " A process of this kind is slow. It is not fit for an
assembly, which glories in performing in a few months the
work of ages. Such a mode of reforming, possibly, might
take up many years." Without question it might; and it
ought. It is one of the excellencies of a method in which
time is amongst the assistants, that its operation is slow,

hommes; changer les choses; changer les mots . . . tout detruire; out, tout
detruire; puisque tout est d r eerier." This gentleman was chosen presi-
dent in an assembly not sitting at the Quinze-vingt, or the Petits Maisons;
and composed of persons giving themselves out to be rational beings; but
neither his ideas, language, or conduct, differ in the smallest degree from
the discourses, opinions, and actions of those within and without the Assem-
bly, who direct the operations of the machine now at work in France.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 317

and in some cases almost imperceptible. If circumspection
and caution are a part of wisdom, when we work only upon
inanimate matter, surely they become a part of duty too,
when the subject of our demolition and construction is not
brick and timber, but sentient beings, by the sudden altera-
tion of whose state, condition, and habits, multitudes may be
rendered miserable. But it seems as if it were the preva-
lent opinion in Paris, that an unfeeling heart, and an un-
doubting confidence, are the sole qualifications for a per-
fect legislator. Far different are my ideas of that high
office. The true lawgiver ought to have a heart full of sensi-
bility. He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear
himself. It may be allowed to his temperament to catch his
ultimate object with an intuitive glance; but his movements
towards it ought to be deliberate. Political arrangement,
as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought by
social means. There mind must conspire with mind. Time
is required to produce that union of minds which alone can
produce all the good we aim at. Our patience will achieve
more than our force. If I might venture to appeal to what
is so much out of fashion in Paris, I mean to experience, I
should tell you, that in my course I have known, and, accord-
ing to my measure, have co-operated with great men; and
I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended
by the observations of those who were much inferior in un-
derstanding to the person who took the lead in the business.
By a slow but well-sustained progress, the effect of each step
is watched ; the good or ill success of the first gives light to
us in the second; and so, from light to light, we are con-
ducted with safety through the whole series. We see that
the parts or the system do not clash. The evils latent in the
most promising contrivances are provided for as they arise.
One advantage is as little as possible sacrificed to another.
We compensate, we reconcile, we balance. We are enabled
to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and
contending principles that are found in the minds and af-
fairs of men. From hence arises, not an excellence in sim-
plicity, but one far superior, an excellence in composition.
Where the great interests of mankind are concerned
through a long succession of generations, that succession

318 EDMUND BURKE

ought to be admitted into some share in the councils, which
are so deeply to affect them. If justice requires this, the
work itself requires the aid of more minds than one age can
furnish. It is from this view of things that the best legis-
lators have been often satisfied with the establishment of
some sure, solid, and ruling principle in government; a
power like that which some of the philosophers have called
a plastic nature; and having fixed the principle, they have
left it afterwards to its own operation.

To proceed in this manner, that is, to proceed with a pre-
siding principle, and a prolific energy, is with me the cri-
terion of profound wisdom. What your politicians think the
marks of a bold, hardy genius, are only proofs of a de-
plorable want of ability. By their violent haste and their
defiance of the process of nature, they are delivered over
blindly to every projector and adventurer, to every alchymist
and empiric. They despair of turning to account anything
that is common. Diet is nothing in their system of remedy.
The worst of it is, that this their despair of curing common
distempers by regular methods, arises not only from defect
of comprehension, but, I fear, from some mnlignity of dis-
position. Your legislators seem to have taken their opinions
of all professions, ranks, and offices, from the declamations
and buffooneries of satirists; who would themselves be as-
tonished if they were held to the letter of their own descrip-
tions. By listening only to these, your leaders regard all
things only on the side of their vices and faults, and view
those vices and faults under every colour of exaggeration.
It is undoubtedly true, though it may seem paradoxical; but
in general, those who are habitually employed in finding and
displaying faults, are unqualified for the work of reforma-
tion: because their minds are not only unfurnished with
patterns of the fair and good, but by habit they come to
take no delight in the contemplation of those things. By
hating vices too much, they come to love men too little. It
is therefore not wonderful, that they should be indisposed
and unable to serve them. From hence arises the com-
plexional disposition of some of your guides to pull every-
thing in pieces. At this malicious game they display the
whole of their quadrimanous activity. As to the rest, the

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 319

paradoxes of eloquent writers, brought forth purely as a
sport of fancy, to try their talents, to rouse attention and
excite surprise, are taken up by these gentlemen, not in the
spirit of the original authors, as means of cultivating their
taste and improving their style. These paradoxes become
with them serious grounds of action, upon which they pro-
ceed in regulating the most important concerns of the state.
Cicero ludicrously describes Cato as endeavoring to act, in
the commonwealth, upon the school paradoxes, which exer-
cised the wits of the junior students in the Stoic philosophy.
If this was true of Cato, these gentlemen copy after him
in the manner of some persons who lived about his time —
'pede nudo Catonem. Mr. Hume told me that he had from
Rousseau himself the secret of his principles of composition.
That acute though eccentric observer had perceived, that to
strike and interest the public, the marvellous must be pro-
duced; that the marvellous of the heathen mythology had
long since lost its effect ; that giants, magicians, fairies, and
heroes of romance which succeeded, had exhausted the por-
tion of credulity which belonged to their age; that now
nothing was left to the writer but that species of the marvel-
lous which might still be produced, and with as great an
effect as ever, though in another way; that is, the marvel-
lous in life, in manners, in characters, and in extraordinary
situations, giving rise to new and unlooked-for strokes in
politics and morals. I believe, that were Rousseau alive,
and in one of his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at the
practical phrensy of his scholars, who in their paradoxes
are servile imitators, and even in their incredulity discover
an implicit faith.

Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular
way, ought to give us ground to presume ability. But the
physician of the state, who, not satisfied with the cure of
distempers, undertakes to regenerate constitutions, ought to
show uncommon powers. Some very unusual appearances
of wisdom ought to display themselves on the face of the
designs of those, who appeal to no practice, and who copy
after no model. Has any such been manifested? I shall
take a view (it shall for the subject be a very short one) of
what the Assembly has done, with regard, first, to the con-

320 EDMUND BURKE

stitution of the legislature; in the next place, to that of the
executive power; then to that of the judicature; afterwards
to the model of the army; and conclude with the system of
finance; to see whether we can discover in any part of their
schemes the portentous ability, which may justify these
bold undertakers in the superiority which they assume over
mankind.

It is in the model of the sovereign and presiding part of
this new republic, that we should expect their grand display.
Here they were to prove their title to their proud demands.
For the plan itself at large, and for the reasons on which it
is grounded, I refer to the journals of the Assembly of the
29th of September, 1789, and to the subsequent proceedings
which have made any alterations in the plan. So far as in
a matter somewhat confused I can see light, the system re-
mains substantially as it has been originally framed. My
few remarks will be such as regard its spirit, its tendency,
and its fitness for framing a popular commonwealth, which
they profess theirs to be, suited to the ends for which any
commonwealth, and particularly such a commonwealth, is
made. At the same time, I mean to consider its consistency
with itself and its own principles.

Old establishments are tried by their effects. If the peo-
ple are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume
the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good
is derived. In old establishments various correctives have
been found for their aberrations from theory. Indeed they
are the results of various necessities and expediences. They
are not often constructed after any theory; theories are
rather drawn from them. In them we often see the end
best obtained, where the means seem not perfectly recon-
cilable to what we may fancy was the original scheme. The
means taught by experience may be better suited to political
ends than those contrived in the original project. They
again react upon the primitive constitution, and sometimes
improve the design itself, from which they seem to have
departed. I think all this might be curiously exemplified in
the British Constitution. At worst, the errors and devia-
tions of every kind in reckoning are found and computed,
and the ship proceeds in her course. This is the case of old

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 321

establishments; but in a new and merely theoretic system,
it is expected that every contrivance shall appear, on the face
of it, to answer its ends; especially where the projectors
are no way embarrassed with an endeavor to accommodate
the new building to an old one, either in the walls or on the
foundations.

The French builders, clearing away as mere rubbish what-
ever they found, and, like their ornamental gardeners, form-
ing everything into an exact level, propose to rest the whole
local and general legislature on three bases of three different
kinds ; one geometrical, one arithmetical, and the third finan-
cial; the first of which they call the basis of territory;
the second, the basis of population; and the third, the basis
of contribution. For the accomplishment of the first of
these purposes, they divide the area of their country into
eighty-three pieces, regularly square, of eighteen leagues
by eighteen. These large divisions are called Departments.
These they portion, proceeding by square measurement, into
seventeen hundred and twenty districts, called Communes.
These again they subdivide, still proceeding by square meas-
urement, into smaller districts called Cantons, making in
all 6400.

At first view this geometrical basis of theirs, presents not
much to admire or to blame. It calls for no great legisla-
tive talents. Nothing more than an accurate land surveyor,
with his chain, sight, and theodolite, is requisite for such a
plan as this. In the old divisions of the country, various
accidents at various times, and the ebb and flow of various
properties and jurisdictions, settled their bounds. These
bounds were not made upon any fixed system undoubtedly.
They were subject to some inconveniences: but they were
inconveniences for which use had found remedies, and habit
had supplied accommodation and patience. In this new pave-
ment of square within square, and this organization, and
semi-organization, made on the system of Empedocles and
Buffon, and not upon any politic principle, it is impossible
that innumerable local inconveniences, to which men are not
habituated, must not arise. But these I pass over, because
it requires an accurate knowledge of the country, which I do
not possess, to specify them.

HC K — VOL. XXIV

322 EDMUND BURKE

When these state surveyors came to take a view of their
work of measurement they soon found, that in politics the
most fallacious of all things was geometrical demonstration.
They had then recourse to another basis (or rather buttress)
to support the building, which tottered on that false founda-
tion. It was evident, that the goodness of the soil, the
number of the people, their wealth, and the largeness of
their contribution, made such infinite variations between
square and square, as to render mensuration a ridiculous
standard of power in the commonwealth, and equality in
geometry the most unequal of all measures in the distribution
of men. However, they could not give it up. But divid-
ing their political and civil representation into three parts,
they allotted one of those parts to the square measurement,
without a single fact or calculation to ascertain whether
this territorial proportion of representation was fairly as-
signed, and ought upon any principle really to be a third.
Having however given to geometry this portion (of a third
for her dower) out of compliment, I suppose, to that sub-
lime science, they left the other two to be scuffled for be-
tween the other parts, population and contribution.

When they came to provide for population, they were not
able to proceed quite so smoothly as they had done in the
field of their geometry. Here their arithmetic came to bear
upon their juridical metaphysics. Had they stuck to their
metaphysic principles, the arithmetical process would be
simple indeed. Men, with them, are strictly equal, and are
entitled to equal rights in their own government. Each
head, on this system, would have its vote, and every man
would vote directly for the person who was to represent him
in the legislature. " But soft — by regular degrees, not yet."
This metaphysic principle, to which law, custom, usage,
policy, reason, were to yield, is to yield itself to their pleas-
ure. There must be many degrees, and some stages, before
the representative can come in contact with his constituent.
Indeed, as we shall soon see, these two persons are to have
no sort of communion with each other. First, the voters in
the Canton, who compose what they call primary assemblies,
are to have a qualification. What! a qualification on the
indefeasible rights of men? Yes; but it shall be a very

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 323

small qualification. Our injustice shall be very little oppres-
sive; only the local valuation of three days' labour paid to
the public. Why, this is not much, I readily admit, for any-
thing but the utter subversion of your equalising principle.
As a qualification it might as well be let alone; for it
answers no one purpose for which qualifications are estab-
lished; and, on your ideas, it excludes from a vote the
man of all others whose natural equality stands the most in
need of protection and defence: I mean the man who has
nothing else but his natural equality to guard him. You
order him to buy the right, which you before told him nature
had given to him gratuitously at his birth, and of which no
authority on earth could lawfully deprive him. With regard
to the person who cannot come up to your market, a tyran-
nous aristocracy, as against him, is established at the very
outset, by you who pretend to be its sworn foe.

The gradation proceeds. These primary assemblies of the
Canton elect deputies to the Commune; one for every two
hundred qualified inhabitants. Here is the first medium put
between the primary elector and the representative legislator ;
and here a new turnpike is fixed for taxing the rights of men
with a second qualification : for none can be elected into the
Commune who does not pay the amount of ten days' labour.
Nor have we yet done. There is still to be another grada-
tion. 1 These Communes, chosen by the Canton, choose to the
Department; and the deputies of the Department choose
their deputies to the National Assembly. Here is a third
barrier of a senseless qualification. Every deputy to the
National Assembly must pay, in direct contribution, to the
value of a mark of silver. Of all these qualifying barriers
we must think alike; that they are impotent to secure inde-
pendence ; strong only to destroy the rights of men.

In all this process, which in its fundamental elements af-
fects to consider only population upon a principle of natural
right, there is a manifest attention to property; which, how-

1 The Assembly, in executing the plan of their committee, made some
alterations. They have struck out one stage in these gradations; this re-
moves a part of the objection; but the main objection, namely, that in their
scheme the first constituent voter has no connexion with the representative
legislator, remains in all its force. There are other alterations, some pos-
sibly for the better, some certainly for the worse; but to the author the
merit or demerit of these smaller alterations appears to be of no momer.t,
where the scheme itself is fundamentally vicious and absurd.

324 EDMUND BURKE

ever just and reasonable on other schemes, is on theirs per-
fectly unsupportable.

When they come to their third basis, that of Contribution,
we find that they have more completely lost sight of their
rights of men. This last basis rests entirely on property. A
principle totally different from the equality of men, and
utterly irreconcilable to it, is thereby admitted ; but no sooner
is this principle admitted, than (as usual) it is subverted;
and it is not subverted (as we shall presently see) to approxi-
mate the inequality of riches to the level of nature. The
additional share in the third portion of representation (a por-
tion reserved exclusively for the higher contribution) is made
to regard the district only, and not the individuals in it who
pay. It is easy to perceive, by the course of their reasonings,
how much they were embarrassed by their contradictory
ideas of the rights of men and the privileges of riches. The
committee of constitution do as good as admit that they are
wholly irreconcilable. " The relation with regard to the
contributions, is without doubt null (say they) when the
question is on the balance of the political rights as between
individual and individual; without which personal equality
would be destroyed, and an aristocracy of the rich would be
established. But this inconvenience entirely disappears when
the proportional relation of the contribution is only con-
sidered in the great masses, and is solely between province
and province; it serves in that case only to form a just re-
ciprocal proportion between the cities, without affecting the
personal rights of the citizens."

Here the principle of contribution, as taken between man
and man, is reprobated as null, and destructive to equality
and as pernicious too; because it leads to the establishment
of an aristocracy of the rich. However, it must not be aban-
doned. And the way of getting rid of the difficulty is to
establish the inequality as between department and depart-
ment, leaving all the individuals in each department upon an
exact par. Observe, that this parity between individuals
had been before destroyed, when the qualifications within
the departments were settled; nor does it seem a matter of
great importance whether the equality of men be injured by
masses or individually. An individual is not of the same

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 325

importance in a mass represented by a few, as in a mass rep-
resented by many. It would be too much to tell a man
jealous of his equality, that the elector has the same fran-
chise who votes for three members as he who votes for ten.
Now take it in the other point of view, and let us sup-
pose their principle of representation according to contribu-
tion, that is, according to riches, to be well imagined, and to
be a necessary basis for their republic. In this their third
basis they assume, that riches ought to be respected, and
that justice and policy require that they should entitle men,
in some mode or other, to a larger share in the administra-
tion of public affairs ; it is now to be seen how the Assembly
provides for the pre-eminence, or even for the security, of
the rich, by conferring, in virtue of their opulence, that
larger measure of power to their district which is denied to
them personally. I readily admit (indeed I should lay it
down as a fundamental principle) that in a republican govern-
ment, which has a democratic basis, the rich do require an
additional security above what is necessary to them in
monarchies. They are subject to envy, and through envy to
oppression. On the present scheme it is impossible to
divine what advantage they derive from the aristocratic pref-
erence upon which the unequal representation of the masses
is founded. The rich cannot feel it, either as a support to
dignity, or as security to fortune : for the aristocratic mass
is generated from purely democratic principles ; and the
preference given to it in the general representation has no
sort of reference to, or connexion with, the persons, upon
account of whose property this superiority of the mass is
established. If the contrivers of this scheme meant any
sort of favour to the rich, in consequence' of their contribu-
tion, they ought to have conferred the privilege either on
the individual rich, or on some class formed of rich persons
(as historians represent Servius Tullius to have done in the
early constitution of Rome) ; because the contest between
the rich and the poor is not a struggle between corporation
and corporation, but a contest between men and men; a
competition not between districts, but between descriptions.
It would answer its purpose better if the scheme were in-
verted; that the votes of the masses were rendered equal;

326 EDMUND BURKE

and that the votes within each mass were proportioned to
property.

Let us suppose one man in a district (it is an easy sup-
position) to contribute as much as an hundred of his neigh-
bours. Against these he has but one vote. If there were
but one representative for the mass, his poor neighbours
would outvote him by an hundred to one for that single rep-
resentative. Bad enough. But amends are to be made
him. How? The district, in virtue of his wealth, is to
choose, say ten members instead of one : that is to say, by
paying a very large contribution he has the happiness of
being outvoted, an hundred to one, by the poor, for ten rep-
resentatives, instead of being outvoted exactly in the same
proportion for a single member. In truth, instead of bene-
fiting by this superior quantity of representation, the rich
man is subjected to an additional hardship. The increase of
representation within his province sets up nine persons more,
and as many more than nine as there may be democratic
candidates, to cabal and intrigue, and to flatter the people
at his expense and to his oppression. An interest is by
this means held out to multitudes of the inferior sort, in
obtaining a salary of eighteen livres a day, (to them a vast
object,) besides the pleasure of a residence in Paris, and
their share in the government of the kingdom. The more
the objects of ambition are multiplied and become democratic,
just in that proportion the rich are endangered.

Thus it must fare between the poor and the rich in the
province deemed aristocratic, which in its internal relation
is the very reverse of that character. In its external rela-
tion, that is, its relation to the other provinces, I cannot see
how the unequal representation, which is given to masses on
account of wealth, becomes the means of preserving the
equipoise and the tranquillity of the commonwealth. For if
it be one of the objects to secure the weak from being
crushed by the strong, (as in all society undoubtedly it is,)
how are the smaller and poorer of these masses to be saved
from the tyranny of the more wealthy? Is it by adding to
the wealthy further and more systematical means of oppress-
ing them? When we come to a balance of representation
between corporate bodies, provincial interests, emulations,

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 327

and jealousies are full as likely to arise among them as
among individuals ; and their divisions are likely to produce a
much hotter spirit of dissension, and something leading much
more nearly to a war.

I see that these aristocratic masses are made upon what is
called the principle of direct contribution. Nothing can be a
more unequal standard than this. The indirect contribution,
that which arises from duties on consumption, is in truth a
better standard, and follows and discovers wealth more natur-
ally than this of direct contribution. It is difficult indeed to
fix a standard of local preference on account of the one, or of
the other, or of both, because some provinces may pay the
more of either or of both, on account o£ causes not intrinsic,
but originating from those very districts over whom they
have obtained a preference in consequence of their ostensible
contribution. If the masses were independent, sovereign
bodies, who were to provide for a federative treasury by dis-
tinct contingents, and that the revenue had not (as it has)
many impositions running through the whole, which affect
men individually, and not corporately, and which, by their
nature, confound all territorial limits, something might be
said for the basis of contribution as founded on masses. But
of all things, this representation, to be measured by contribu-
tion, is the most difficult to settle upon principles of equity in
a country, which considers its districts as members of a
whole. For a great city, such as Bourdeaux, or Paris, ap-
pears to pay a vast body of duties, almost out of all assignable
proportion to other places, and its mass is considered accord-
ingly. But are these cities the true contributors in that pro-
portion? No. The consumers of the commodities imported
into Bourdeaux, who are scattered through all France, pay
the import duties of Bourdeaux. The produce of the vintage
in Guienne and Languedoc give to that city the means of its
contribution growing out of an export commerce. The land-
holders who spend their estates in Paris, and are thereby
the creators of that city, contribute for Paris from the pro-
vinces out of which their revenues arise. Very nearly the
same arguments will apply to the representative share given
on account of direct contributions: because the direct con-
tribution must be assessed on wealth real or presumed; and

328 EDMUND BURKE

that local wealth will itself arise from causes not local,
and which therefore in equity ought not to produce a local
preference.

It is very remarkable, that in this fundamental regulation,
which settles the representation of the mass upon the direct
contribution, they have not yet settled how that direct contri-
bution shall be laid, and how apportioned. Perhaps there is
some latent policy towards the continuance of the present
Assembly in this strange procedure. However, until they
do this, they can have no certain constitution. It must de-
pend at last upon the system of taxation, and must vary with
every variation in that system. As they have contrived
matters, their taxation does not so much depend on their
constitution, as their constitution on their taxation. This
must introduce great confusion among the masses; as the
variable qualification for votes within the district must, if
ever real contested elections take place, cause infinite inter-
nal controversies.

To compare together the three bases, not on their political
reason, but on the ideas on which the Assembly works, and
to try its consistency with itself, we cannot avoid observing,
that the principle which the committee call the basis of
population, does not begin to operate from the same point
with the two other principles called the bases of territory
and of contribution, which are bofh of an aristocratic nature.
The consequence is, that, where all three begin to operate
together, there is the most absurd inequality produced by
the operation of the former on the two latter principles.
Every canton contains four square leagues, and is estimated
to contain, on the average, 4000 inhabitants, or 680 voters
in the primary assemblies, which vary in numbers with the
population of the canton, and send one deputy to the com-
mune for every 200 voters. Nine cantons make a commune.

Now let us take a canton containing a sea-port town of
trade, or a great manufacturing town. Let us suppose the
population of this canton to be 12,700 inhabitants, or 2193
voters, forming three primary assemblies, and sending ten
deputies to the commune.

Oppose to this one canton two others of the remaining
eight in the same commune. These we may suppose to have

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 329

their fair population of 4000 inhabitants and 680 voters
each, or 8000 inhabitants and 1360 voters, both together.
These will form only two primary assemblies, and send only
six deputies to the commune.

When the assembly of the commune comes to vote on the
basis of territory, which principle is first admitted to operate
in that assembly, the single canton, which has half the terri-
tory of the other two, will have ten voices to six in the elec-
tion of three deputies to the assembly of the department,
chosen on the express ground of a representation of terri-
tory. This inequality, striking as it is, will be yet highly
aggravated, if we suppose, as we fairly may, the several
other cantons of the commune to fall proportionably short
of the average population, as much as the principal canton
exceeds it.

Now as to the basis of contribution, which also is a prin-
ciple admitted first to operate in the assembly of the com-
mune. Let us again take one canton, such as is stated above.
If the whole of the direct contributions paid by a great
trading or manufacturing town be divided equally among the
inhabitants, each individual will be found to pay much more
than an individual living in the country according to the
same average. The whole paid by the inhabitants of the
former will be more than the whole paid by the inhabitants
of the latter — we may fairly assume one-third more. Then
the 12,700 inhabitants, or 2193 voters of the canton, will
pay as much as 19,050 inhabitants, or 3289 voters of the
other cantons, which are nearly the estimated proportion of
inhabitants and voters of five other cantons. Now the 2193
voters will, as I before said, send only ten deputies to the
assembly; the 3289 voters will send sixteen. Thus, for an
equal share in the contribution of the whole commune, there
will be a difference of sixteen voices to ten in voting for
deputies to be chosen on the principle of representing the
general contribution of the whole commune.

By the same mode of computation we shall find 15,875
inhabitants, or 2741 voters of the other cantons, who pay
one-sixth less to the contribution of the whole commune,
will have three voices more than the 12,700 inhabitants, or
2193 voters of the one canton.

330

EDMUND BURKE

Such is the fantastical and unjust inequality between mass
and mass, in this curious repartition of the rights of repre-
sentation arising out of territory and contribution. The
qualifications which these confer are in truth negative quali-
fications, that give a right in an inverse proportion to the
possession of them.

In this whole contrivance of the three bases, consider it
in any light you please, I do not see a variety of objects re-
conciled in one consistent whole, but several contradictory
principles reluctantly and irreconcilably brought and held
together by your philosophers, like wild beasts shut up
in a cage, to claw and bite each other to their mutual
destruction.

I am afraid I have gone too far into their way of consider-
ing the formation of a constitution. They have much, but
bad, metaphysics; much, but bad, geometry; much, but
false, proportionate arithmetic; but if it were all as exact as
metaphysics, geometry, and arithmetic ought to be, and if
their schemes were perfectly consistent in all their parts, it
would make only a more fair and sightly vision. It is re-
markable, that, in a great arrangement of mankind, not one
reference whatsoever is to be found to anything moral or
anything politic ;. nothing that relates to the concerns, the
actions, the passions, the interests of men. Homincm non
sapinnt.

You see I only consider this constitution as electoral, and
leading by steps to the National Assembly. I do not enter
into the internal government of the departments, and their
genealogy through the communes and cantons. These local
governments are, in the original plan, to be as nearly as pos-
sible composed in the same manner and on the same prin-
ciples with the elective assemblies. They are each of them
bodies perfectly compact and rounded in themselves.

You cannot but perceive in this scheme, that it has a
direct and immediate tendency to sever France into a variety
of republics, and to render them totally independent of each
other without any direct constitutional means of coherence,
connexion, or subordination, except what may be derived
from their acquiescence in the determinations of the general
congress of the ambassadors from each independent republic.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 331

Such in reality is the National Assembly, and such govern-
ments I admit do exist in the world, though in forms in-
finitely more suitable to the local and habitual circumstances
of their people. But such associations, rather than bodies
politic, have generally been the effect of necessity, not choice;
and I believe the present French power is the very first
body of citizens, who, having obtained full authority to do
with their country what they pleased, have chosen to dissever
it in this barbarous manner.

It is impossible not to observe, that, in the spirit of this
geometrical distribution, and arithmetical arrangement, these
pretended citizens treat France exactly like a country of
conquest. Acting as conquerors, they have imitated the
policy of the harshest of that harsh race. The policy of such
barbarous victors, who contemn a subdued people, and insult
their feelings, has ever been, as much as in them lay, to
destroy all vestiges of the ancient country, in religion, in
polity, in laws, and in manners ; to confound all territorial
limits ; to produce a general poverty ; to put up their prop-
erties to auction ; to crush their princes, nobles, and pontiffs ;
to lay low everything which had lifted its head above the
level, or which could serve to combine or rally, in their dis-
tresses, the disbanded people, under the standard of old
opinion. They have made France free in the manner in
which those sincere friends to the rights of mankind, the
Romans, freed Greece, Macedon, and other nations. They
destroyed the bonds of their union, under colour of providing
for the independence of each of their cities.

When the members who compose these new bodies of
cantons, communes, and departments, arrangements pur-
posely produced through the medium of confusion, begin to
act, they will find themselves in a great measure strangers
to one another. The electors and elected throughout, es-
pecially in the rural cantons, will be frequently without any
civil habitudes or connexions, or any of that natural disci-
pline which is the soul of a true republic. Magistrates and
collectors of revenue are now no longer acquainted with
their districts, bishops with their dioceses, or curates with
their parishes. These new colonies of the rights of men
bear a strong resemblance to that sort of military colonies

332 EDMUND BURKE

which Tacitus has observed upon in the declining policy of
Rome. In better and wiser days (whatever course they took
with foreign nations) they were careful to make the elements
of methodical subordination and settlement to be coeval ; and
even to lay the foundations of civil discipline in the military. 1
But, when all the good arts had fallen into ruin, they pro-
ceeded, as your Assembly does, upon the equality of men,
and with as little judgment, and as little care for those things
which make a republic tolerable or durable. But in this, as
well as almost every instance, your new commonwealth is
born, and bred, and fed, in those corruptions which mark
degenerated and worn-out republics. Your child comes
into the world with the symptoms of death ; the fades Hip-
pocratica forms the character of its physiognomy, and the
prognostic of its fate.

The legislators who framed the ancient republics knew
that their business was too arduous to be accomplished with
no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an under-
graduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an excise-
man. They had to do with men, and they were obliged to
study human nature. They had to do with citizens, and
they were obliged to study the effects of those habits which
are communicated by the circumstances of civil life. They
were sensible that the operation of this second nature on the
first produced a new combination; and thence arose many
diversities amongst men, according to their birth, their edu-
cation, their professions, the periods of their lives, their
residence in towns or in the country, their several ways of
acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the quality
of the property itself, all which rendered them as it were so
many different species of animals. From hence they thought
themselves obliged to dispose their citizens into such classes,
and to place them in such situations in the state, as their
peculiar habits might qualify them to fill, and to allot to
them such appropriated privileges as might secure to them

1 Non, ut olim, universae legiones deducebantur cum tribunis, et cen-
turionibus, et sui cuj usque ordinis militiius, ut consensu et caritate rem-
publicam afficerent; sed ignoti inter se, diversis manipulis, sine rectore,
sine affectibus mutuis, quasi ex alio genere mortalium, repente in unum
collecti, numerus magis quam colonia. Tac. Annal. 1. 14, sect. 27. All
this will be still more applicable to the unconnected, rotatory, biennial
national assemblies, in this absurd and senseless constitution.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 333

what their specific occasions required, and which might fur-
nish to each description such force as might protect it in the
conflict caused by the diversity of interests, that must exist,
and must contend, in all complex society : for the legislator
would have been ashamed, that the coarse husbandman
should well know how to assort and to use his sheep, horses,
and oxen, and should have enough of common sense, not to
abstract and equalize them all into animals, without pro-
viding for each kind an appropriate food, care, and employ-
ment; whilst he, the economist, disposer, and shepherd of
his own kindred, subliming himself into an airy metaphy-
sician, was resolved to know nothing of his flocks but as men
in general. It is for this reason that Montesquieu observed
very justly, that in their classification of the citizens, the
great legislators of antiquity made the greatest display of
their powers, and even soared above themselves. It is here
that your modern legislators have gone deep into the nega-
tive series, and sunk even below their own nothing. As the
first sort of legislators attended to the different kinds of citi-
zens, and combined them into one commonwealth, the others,
the metaphysical and alchemistical legislators, have taken the
direct contrary course. They have attempted to confound
all sorts of citizens, as well as they could, into one homo-
geneous mass; and then they divided this their amalgama
into a number of incoherent republics. They reduce men to
loose counters, merely for the sake of simple telling, and not
to figures whose power is to arise from their place in the
table. The elements of their own metaphysics might have
taught them better lessons. The troll of their categorical
table might have informed them that there was something
else in the intellectual world besides substance and quantity.
They might learn from the catechism of metaphysics that
there were eight heads more, 1 in every complex deliberation,
which they have never thought of; though these, of all the
ten, are the subjects on which the skill of man can operate
anything at all.

So far from this able disposition of some of the old repub-
lican legislators, which follows with a solicitous accuracy the
moral conditions and propensities of men, they have levelled
1 Qualitas, Relatio, Actio, Passio, Ubi, Quando, Situs, Habitus.

334 EDMUND BURKE

and crushed together all the orders which they found, even
under the coarse unartificial arrangement of the monarchy,
in which mode of government the classing of the citizens is
not of so much importance as in a republic. It is true, how-
ever, that every such classification, if properly ordered, is
good in all forms of government; and composes a strong
barrier against the excesses of despotism, as well as it is the
necessary means of giving effect and permanence to a repub-
lic. For want of something of this kind, if the present proj-
ect of a republic should fail, all securities to a moderated
freedom fail along with it; all the indirect restraints which
mitigate despotism are removed; insomuch that if monarchy
should ever again obtain an entire ascendency in France,
under this or under any other dynasty, it will probably be,
if not voluntarily tempered, at setting out, by the wise and
virtuous counsels of the prince, the most completely arbi-
trary power that has ever appeared on earth. This is to
play a most desperate game.

The confusion which attends on all such proceedings, they
even declare to be one of their objects, and they hope to
secure their constitution by a terror of a return of those evils
which attended their making it. ' By this," say they, " its
destruction will become difficult to authority, which cannot
break it up without the entire disorganization of the whole
state." They presume, that if this authority should ever
come to the same degree of power that they have acquired,
it would make a more moderate and chastised use of it, and
would piously tremble entirely to disorganize the state in
the savage manner that they have done. They expect, from
the virtues of returning despotism, the security which is to
be enjoyed by the offspring of their popular vices.

I wish, Sir, that you and my readers would give an atten-
tive perusal to the work of M. de Calonne, on this subject.
It is indeed not only an eloquent, but an able and instructive,
performance. I confine myself to what he says relative to
the constitution of the new state, and to the condition of the
revenue. As to the disputes of this minister with his rivals,
I do not wish to pronounce upon them. As little do I
mean to hazard any opinion concerning his ways and means,
financial or political, for taking his country out of its present

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 335

disgraceful and deplorable situation of servitude, anarchy,
bankruptcy, and beggary. I cannot speculate quite so san-
guinely as he does : but he is a Frenchman, and has a closer
duty relative to those objects, and better means of judging
of them, than I can have. I wish that the formal avowal
which he refers to, made by one of the principal leaders in
the Assembly, concerning the tendency of their scheme to
bring France not only from a monarchy to a republic, but
from a republic to a mere confederacy, may be very particu-
larly attended to. It adds new force to my observations :
and indeed M. de Calonne's work supplies my deficiencies
by many new and striking arguments on most of the sub-
jects of this letter. 1

It is this resolution, to break their country into separate
republics, which has driven them into the greatest number
of their difficulties and contradictions. If it were not for
this, all the questions of exact equality, and these balances,
never to be settled, of individual rights, population, and con-
tribution, would be wholly useless. The representation,
though derived from parts, would be a duty which equally
regarded the whole. Each deputy to the Assembly would
be the representative of France, and of all its descriptions,
of the many and of the few, of the rich and of the poor, of
the great districts and of the small. All these districts would
themselves be subordinate to some standing authority, exist-
ing independently of them, an authority in which their rep-
resentation, and everything that belongs to it, originated,
and to which it was pointed. This standing, unalterable,
fundamental government would make, and it is the only
thing which could make, that territory truly and properly a
whole. With us, when we elect popular representatives, we
send them to a council, in which each man individually is a
subject, and submitted to a government complete in all its
ordinary functions. With you the elective Assembly is the
sovereign, and the sole sovereign ; all the members are there-
fore integral parts of this sole sovereignty. But with us it
is totally different. With us the representative, separated
from the other parts, can have no action and no existence.
The government is the point of reference of the several mem-

1 See l'Etat de la France, p. 363.

336 EDMUND BURKE

bers and districts of our representation. This is the centre
of our unity. This government of reference is a trustee for
the whole, and not for the parts. So is the other branch of
our public council, I mean the House of Lords. With us
the king and the lords are several and joint securities for the
equality of each district, each province, each city. When
did you hear in Great Britain of any province suffering from
the inequality of its representation; what district from
having no representation at all? Not only our monarchy
and our peerage secure the equality on which our unity de-
pends, but it is the spirit of the House of Commons itself.
The very inequality of representation, which is so foolishly
complained of, is perhaps the very thing which prevents us
from thinking or acting as members for districts. Cornwall
elects as many members as all Scotland. But is Cornwall
better taken care of than Scotland? Few trouble their heads
about any of your bases, out of some giddy clubs. Most of
those who wish for any change, upon any plausible grounds,
desire it on different ideas.

Your new constitution is the very reverse of ours in its
principle ; and I am astonished how any persons could dream
of holding out anything done in it, as an example for Great
Britain. With you there is little, or rather no, connexion
between the last representative and the first constituent.
The member who goes to the National Assembly is not
chosen by the people, nor accountable to them. There are
three elections before he is chosen: two sets of magistracy
intervene between him and the primary assembly, so as to
render him, as I have said, an ambassador of a state, and not
the representative of the people within a state. By this the
whole spirit of the election is changed; nor can any correc-
tive, which your constitution-mongers have devised, render
him anything else than what he is. The very attempt to do
it would inevitably introduce a confusion, if possible, more
horrid than the present. There is no way to make a con-
nexion between the original constituent and the representa-
tive, but by the circuitous means which may lead the candi-
date to apply in the first instance to the primary electors, in
order that by their authoritative instructions (and something
more perhaps) these primary electors may force the two sue-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 337

ceeding bodies of electors to make a choice agreeable to their
wishes. But this would plainly subvert the whole scheme.
It would be to plunge them back into that tumult and con-
fusion of popular election, which, by their interposed grada-
tion of elections, they mean to avoid, and at length to risk
the whole fortune of the state with those who have the least
knowledge of it, and the least interest in it. This is a per-
petual dilemma, into which they are thrown by the vicious,
weak, and contradictory principles they have chosen. Unless
the people break up and level this gradation, it is plain
that they do not at all substantially elect to the Assembly;
indeed they elect as little in appearance as reality.

What is it we all seek for in an election? To answer its
real purposes, you must first possess the means of knowing
the fitness of your man ; and then you must retain some
hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence. For
what end are these primary electors complimented, or rather
mocked, with a choice? They can never know anything
of the qualities of him that is to serve them, nor has he any
obligation whatsoever to them. Of all the powers unfit to
be delegated by those who have any real means of judging,
that most peculiarly unfit is what relates to a personal choice.
In case of abuse, that body of primary electors never can
call the representative to an account for his conduct. He
is too far removed from them in the chain of representation.
If he acts improperly at the end of his two years' lease, it
does not concern him for two years more. By the new
French constitution the best and the wisest representatives
go equally with the worst into this Limbus Fatrnm. Their
bottoms are supposed foul, and they must go into dock to
be refitted. Every man who has served in an assembly is in-
eligible for two years after. Just as these magistrates begin
to learn their trade, like chimney-sweepers, they are dis-
qualified for exercising it. Superficial, new, petulant ac-
quisition, and interrupted, dronish, broken, ill recollection,
is to be the destined character of all your future governors.
Your constitution has too much of jealousy to have much of
sense in it. You consider the breach of trust in the repre-
sentative so principally, that you do not at all regard the
question of his fitness to execute it.

338 EDMUND BURKE

This purgatory interval is not unfavorable to a faithless
representative, who may be as good a canvasser as he was a
bad governor. In this time he may cabal himself into a
superiority over the wisest and most virtuous. As, in the
end, all the members of this elective constitution are equally
fugitive, and exist only for the election, they may be no
longer the same persons who had chosen him, to whom he is
to be responsible when he solicits for a renewal of his trust.
To call all the secondary electors of the Commune to account,
is ridiculous, impracticable, and unjust; they may themselves
have been deceived in their choice, as the third set of electors,
those of the Department, may be in theirs. In your elections
responsibility cannot exist.

Finding no sort of principle of coherence with each other
in the nature and constitution of the several new republics
of France, I considered what cement the legislators had pro-
vided for them from any extraneous materials. Their con-
federations, their spectacles, their civic feasts, and their en-
thusiasm, I take no notice of; they are nothing but mere
tricks; but tracing their policy through their actions, I think
I can distinguish the arrangements by wnich they propose to
hold these republics together. The first, is the confiscation,
with the compulsory paper currency annexed to it; the
second, is the supreme power of the city of Paris; the third,
is the general army of the state. Of this last I shall reserve
what I have to say, until I come to consider the army as a
head by itself.

As to the operation of the first (the confiscation and paper
currency) merely as a cement, I cannot deny that these, the
one depending on the other, may for some time compose
some sort of cement, if their madness and folly in the
management, and in the tempering of the parts together,
does not produce a repulsion in the very outset. But allow-
ing to the scheme some coherence and some duration, it ap-
pears to me, that if, after a while, the confiscation should not
be found sufficient to support the paper coinage, (as I am
morally certain it will not,) then, instead of cementing, it
will add infinitely to the dissociation, distraction, and con-
fusion of these confederate republics, both with relation to
each other, and to the several parts within themselves. But

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 339

if the confiscation should so far succeed as to sink the paper
currency, the cement is gone with the circulation. In the
mean time its binding force will be very uncertain, and it will
straiten or relax with every variation in the credit of the paper.

One thing only is certain in this scheme, which is an effect
seemingly collateral, but direct, I have no doubt, in the minds
of those who conduct this business, that is, its effect in pro-
ducing an Oligarchy in every one of the republics. A paper
circulation, not founded on any real money deposited or en-
gaged for, amounting already to four-and-forty millions of
English money, and this currency by force substituted in the
place of the coin of the kingdom, becoming thereby the sub-
stance of its revenue, as well as the medium of all its com-
mercial and civil intercourse, must put the whole of what
power, authority, and influence is left, in any form whatso-
ever it may assume, into the hands of the managers and con-
ductors of this circulation.

In England we feel the influence of the bank; though it
is only the centre of a voluntary dealing. He knows little
indeed of the influence of money upon mankind, who does
not see the force of the management of a monied concern,
which is so much more extensive, and in its nature so much
more depending on the managers, than any of ours. But
this is not merely a money concern. There is another mem-
ber in the system inseparably connected with this money
management. It consists in the means of drawing out at
discretion portions of the confiscated lands for sale; and
carrying on a process of continual transmutation of paper
into land, and land into paper. When we follow this proc-
ess in its effects, we may conceive something of the inten-
sity of the force with which this system must operate. By
this means the spirit of money- jobbing and speculation goes
into the mass of land itself, and incorporates with it. By
this kind of operation, that species of property becomes (as
it were) volatilized; it assumes an unnatural and monstrous
activity, and thereby throws into the hands of the several
managers, principal and subordinate, Parisian and provincial,
all the representative of money, and perhaps a full tenth
part of all the land in France, which has now acquired the
worst and most pernicious part of the evil of a paper circula-

340 EDMUND BURKE

tion, the greatest possible uncertainty in its value. They
have reversed the Latonian kindness to the landed property
of Delos. They have sent theirs to be blown about, like the
light fragments of a wreck, oras et littora circum.

The new dealers, being all habitually adventurers, and
without any fixed habits or local predilections, will purchase
to job out again, as the market of paper, or of money, or of
land, shall present an advantage. For though a holy bishop
thinks that agriculture will derive great advantages from the
" enlightened " usurers who are to purchase the church con-
fiscations, I, who am not a good, but an old farmer, with
great humility beg leave to tell his late lordship, that usury
is not a tutor of agriculture; and if the word "enlightened"
be understood according to the new dictionary, as it always
is in your new schools, I cannot conceive how a man's not
believing in God can teach him to cultivate the earth with
the least of any additional skill or encouragement. " Diis
immortalibus sero," said an old Roman, when he held one
handle of the plough, whilst Death held the other. Though
you were to join in the commission all the directors of the
two academies to the directors of the Caisse d'Escompte, one
old, experienced peasant is worth them all. I have got more
information upon a curious and interesting branch of hus-
bandry, in one short conversation with an old Carthusian
monk, than I have derived from all the Bank directors that
I have ever conversed with. However, there is no cause for
apprehension from the meddling of money-dealers with rural
economy. These gentlemen are too wise in their generation.
At first, perhaps, their tender and susceptible imaginations
may be captivated with the innocent and unprofitable delights
of a pastoral life; but in a little time they will find that
agriculture is a trade much more laborious, and much less
lucrative, than that which they had left. After making its
panegyric, they will turn their backs on it like their great
precursor and prototype. They may, like him, begin by
singing " Beatus Me " — but what will be the end ?

Hac ubi locutus f Generator Alphius,
Jam jam futurus rusticus
Omnem relegit idibus pecuniam ;
Qiuerit calendis ponere. .

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 341

They will cultivate the Caisse d'Eglise, under the sacred
auspices of this prelate, with much more profit than its vine-
yards and its corn-fields. They will employ their talents
according to their habits and their interests. They will not
follow the plough whilst they can direct treasuries, and
govern provinces.

Your legislators, in everything new, are the very first who
have founded a commonwealth upon gaming, and infused
this spirit into it as its vital breath. The great object in
these politics is to metamorphose France from a great king-
dom into one great play-table ; to turn its inhabitants into
a nation of gamesters ; to make speculation as extensive as
life; to mix it with all its concerns; and to divert the whole
of the hopes and fears of the people from their usual
channels into the impulses, passions, and superstitions of
those who live on chances. They loudly proclaim their opin-
ion, that this their present system of a republic cannot possi-
bly exist without this kind of gaming fund ; and that the very
thread of its life is spun out of the staple of these specula-
tions. The old gaming in funds was mischievous enough
undoubtedly ; but it was so only to individuals. Even when
it had its greatest extent, in the Mississippi and South Sea,
it affected but few, comparatively; where it extends further,
as in lotteries, the spirit has but a single object. But where
the law, which in most circumstances forbids, and in none
countenances, gaming, is itself debauched, so as to reverse
its nature and policy, and expressly to force the subject to
this destructive table, by bringing the spirit and symbols of
gaming into the minutest matters, and engaging everybody
in it, and in everything, a more dreadful epidemic distemper
of that kind is spread than yet has appeared in the world.
With you a man can neither earn nor buy his dinner without
a speculation. What he receives in the morning will not
have the same value at night. What he is compelled to
take as pay for an old debt will not be received as the same
when he comes to pay a debt contracted by himself ; nor will
it be the same when by prompt payment he would avoid
contracting any debt at all. Industry must wither away.
Economy must be driven from your country. Careful pro-
vision will have no existence. Who will labour without

342 EDMUND BURKE

knowing the amount of his pay ? Who will study to increase
what none can estimate? Who will accumulate, when he
does not know the value of what he saves? If you abstract
it from its uses in gaming, to accumulate your paper wealth,
would be not the providence of a man, but the distempered
instinct of a jackdaw.

The truly melancholy part of the policy of systematically
making a nation of gamesters is this, that though all are
forced to play, few can understand the game; and fewer
still are in a condition to avail themselves of the knowledge.
The many must be the dupes of the few who conduct the
machine of these speculations. What effect it must have on
the country people is visible. The townsman can calculate
from day to day; not so the inhabitant of the country.
When the peasant first brings his corn to market, the magis-
trate in the towns obliges him to take the assignat at par;
when he goes to the shop with his money, he finds it seven
per cent, the worse for crossing the way. This market he
will not readily resort to again. The towns-people will be
inflamed; they will force the country people to bring their
corn. Resistance will begin, and the murders of Paris and
St. Denis may be renewed through all France.

What signifies the empty compliment paid to the country,
by giving it, perhaps, more than its share in the theory
of your representation? Where have you placed the real
power over monied and landed circulation? Where have
you placed the means of raising and falling the value of
every man's freehold? Those, whose operations can take
from, or add ten per cent, to, the possessions of every man
in France, must be the masters of every man in France.
The whole of the power obtained by this revolution will
settle in the towns among the burghers, and the monied di-
rectors who lead them. The landed gentleman, the yeoman,
and the peasant, have, none of them, habits, or inclinations,
or experience, which can lead them to any share in this the
sole source of power and influence now left in France. The
very nature of a country life, the very nature of landed
property, in all the occupations, and all the pleasures they
afford, render combination and arrangement (the sole way
of procuring and exerting influence) in a manner impossi-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE :43

ble amongst country people. Combine them by all the art
you can, and all the industry, they are always dissolving into
individuality. Anything in the nature of incorporation is
almost impracticable amongst them. Hope, fear, alarm,
jealousy, the ephemerous tale that does its business and
dies in a day, all these things, which are the reins and spurs
by which leaders check or urge the minds of followers, are
not easily employed, or hardly at all, amongst scattered
people. They assemble, they arm, they act, with the ut-
most difficulty, and at the greatest charge. Their efforts, if
ever they can be commenced, cannot be sustained. They can-
not proceed systematically. If the country gentlemen at-
tempt an influence through the mere income of their prop-
erty, what is it to that of those who have ten times their
income to sell, and who can ruin their property by bringing
their plunder to meet it at market? If the landed man
wishes to mortgage, he falls the value of his land, and
raises the value of assignats. He augments the power of his
enemy by the very means he must take to contend with
him. The country gentleman therefore, the officer by sea and
land, the man of liberal views and habits, attached to no pro-
fession, will be as completely excluded from the govern-
ment of his country as if he were legislatively proscribed.
It is obvious, that in the towns, all things which conspire
against the country gentleman combine in favour of the
money manager and director. In towns combination is
natural. The habits of burghers, their occupations, their
diversion, their business, their idleness, continually bring
them into mutual contact. Their virtues and their vices
are sociable ; they are always in garrison ; and they come
embodied and half disciplined into the hands of those who
mean to form them for civil or military action.

All these considerations leave no doubt on my mind, that
if this monster of a constitution can continue, France will
be wholly governed by the agitators in corporations, by
societies in the towns formed of directors of assignats, and
trustees for the sale of church lands, attornies, agents,
money-jobbers, speculators, and adventurers, composing an
ignoble oligarchy, founded on the destruction of the crown,
the church, the nobility, and the people. Here end all the

344 EDMUND BURKE

deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of
men. In "the Serbonian bog" of this base oligarchy they
are all absorbed, sunk, and lost for ever.

Though human eyes cannot trace them, one would be
tempted to think some great offences in France must cry to
heaven, which has thought fit to punish it with a subjection
to a vile and inglorious domination, in which no comfort or
compensation is to be found in any even of those false
splendours, which, playing about other tyrannies, prevent
mankind from feeling themselves dishonoured even whilst
they are oppressed. I must confess I am touched with a
sorrow, mixed with some indignation, at the conduct of a
few men, once of great rank, and still of great character,
who, deluded with specious names, have engaged in a busi-
ness too deep for the line of their understanding to fathom ;
who have lent their fair reputation, and the authority of
their high-sounding names, to the designs of men with
whom they could not be acquainted; and have thereby made
their very virtues operate to the ruin of their country.

So far as to the first cementing principle.

The second material of cement for their new republic is
the superiority of the city of Paris: and this I admit is
strongly connected with the other cementing principle of
paper circulation and confiscation. It is in this part of the
project we must look for the cause of the destruction of all
the old bounds of provinces and jurisdictions, ecclesiastical
and secular, and the dissolution of all ancient combinations
of things, as well as the formation of so many small uncon-
nected republics. The power of the city of Paris is evi-
dently one great spring of all their politics. It is through
the power of Paris, now become the centre and focus of
jobbing, that the leaders of this faction direct, or rather
command, the whole legislative and the whole executive
government. Everything therefore must be done which can
confirm the authority of that city over the other republics.
Paris is compact ; she has an enormous strength, wholly
disproportioned to the force of any of the square republics;
and this strength is collected and condensed within a narrow
compass. Paris has a natural and easy connexion of its
parts, which will not be affected by any scheme of a geom-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 345

etrical constitution, nor does it much signify whether its
proportion of representation be more or less, since it has
the whole draft of fishes in its drag-net. The other divi-
sions of the kingdom being hackled and torn to pieces, and
separated from all their habitual means, and even principles
of union, cannot, for some time at least, confederate against
her. Nothing was to be left in all the subordinate members,
but weakness, disconnexion, and confusion. To confirm this
part of the plan, the Assembly has lately come to a reso-
lution, that no two of their republics shall have the same
commander-in-chief.

To a person who takes a view of the whole, the strength
of Paris, thus formed, will appear a system of general weak-
ness. It is boasted that the geometrical policy has been
adopted, that all local ideas should be sunk, and that the
people should no longer be Gascons, Picards, Bretons, Nor-
mans; but Frenchmen, with one country, one heart, and one
Assembly. But instead of being all Frenchmen, the greater
likelihood is, that the inhabitants of that region will shortly
have no country. No man ever was attached by a sense of
pride, partiality, or real affection, to a description of square
measurement. He never will glory in belonging to the
Chequer No. 71, or to any other badge-ticket. We begin
our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a
zealous citizen. We pass on to our neighbourhoods, and
our habitual provincial connexions. These are inns and rest-
ing-places. Such divisions of our country as have been
formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were
so many little images of the great country in which the
heart found something which it could fill. The love to the
whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality.
Perhaps it is a sort of elemental training to those higher and
more large regards, by which alone men come to be affected,
as with their own concern, in the prosperity of a kingdom
so extensive as that of France. In that general territory it-
self, as in the old name of provinces, the citizens are inter-
ested from old prejudices and unreasoned habits, and not on
account of the geometric properties of its figure. The
power and pre-eminence of Paris does certainly press down
and hold these republics together as long as it lasts. But,

346 EDMUND BURKE

for the reasons I have already given yon, I think it cannot
last very long.

Passing from the civil creating and the civil cementing
principles of this constitution, to the National Assembly,
which is to appear and act as sovereign, we see a body in its
constitution with every possible power, and rto possible ex-
ternal control. We see a body without fundamental laws,
without established maxims, without respected rules of pro-
ceeding, which nothing can keep firm to any system what-
soever. Their idea of their powers is always taken at the
utmost stretch of legislative competency, and their examples
for common cases from the exceptions of the most urgent
necessity. The future is to be in most respects like the
present Assembly; but, by the mode of the new elections
and the tendency of the new circulations, it will be purged
of the small degree of internal control existing in a minority
chosen originally from various interests, and preserving
something of their spirit. If possible, the next Assembly
must be worse than the present. The present, by destroying
and altering everything, will leave to their successors ap-
parently nothing popular to do. They will be roused by
emulation and example to enterprises the boldest and the
most absurd. To suppose such an Assembly sitting in perfect
quietude is ridiculous.

Your all-sufficient legislators, in theif hurry to do every-
thing at once, have forgot one thing that seems essential,
and which I believe never has been before, in the theory or
the practice, omitted by any projector of a republic. They
have forgot to constitute a senate, or something of that
nature and character. Never, before this time, was heard
of a body politic composed of one legislative and active as-
sembly, and its executive officers, without such a council ;
without something to which foreign states might connect
themselves ; something to which, in the ordinary detail of
government, the people could look up; something which
might give a bias, and steadiness, and preserve something
like consistency in the proceedings of state. Such a body
kings generally have as a council. A monarchy may exist
without it; but it seems to be in the very essence of a re-
publican government. It holds a sort of middle place be-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 347

tween the supreme power exercised by the people, or im-
mediately delegated from them, and the mere executive.
Of this there are no traces in your constitution ; and, in
providing nothing of this kind, your Solons and Numas
have, as much as in anything else, discovered a sovereign
incapacity.

Let us now turn our eyes to what they have done towards
the formation of an executive power. For this they have
chosen a degraded king. This their first executive officer is
to be a machine, without any sort of deliberative discretion
in any one act of his function. At best he is but a channel
to convey to the National Assembly such matter as it may
import that body to know. If he had been made the ex-
clusive channel, the power would not have been without its
importance ; though infinitely perilous to those who would
choose to exercise it. But public intelligence and statement
of facts may pass to the Assembly with equal authenticity,
through any other conveyance. As to the means, therefore,
of giving a direction to measures by the statement of an
authorized reporter, this office of intelligence is as nothing.
To consider the French scheme of an executive officer,
in its two natural divisions of civil and political. — In the
first it must be observed, that, according to the new consti-
tution, the higher parts of judicature, in either of its lines,
are not in the king. The king of France is not the fountain
of justice. The judges, neither the original nor the ap-
pellate, are of his nomination. He neither proposes the
candidates, nor has a negative on the choice. He is not
even the public prosecutor. He serves only as a notary to
authenticate the choice made of the judges in the several
districts. By his officers he is to execute their sentence.
When we look into the true nature of his authority, he ap-
pears to be nothing more than a chief of bumbailifTs, ser-
geants at mace, catch-poles, jailers, and hangmen. It is
] impossible to place anything called royalty in a more degrad-
I ing point of view. A thousand times better had it been for
the dignity of this unhappy prince, that he had nothing at
all to do with the administration of justice, deprived as he is
of all that is venerable, and all that is consolatory, in that
function, without power of originating any process; without

348 EDMUND BURKE

a power of suspension, mitigation, or pardon. Everything in
justice that is vile and odious is thrown upon him. It was
not for nothing that the Assembly has been at such pains to
remove the stigma from certain offices, when they are re-
solved to place the persons who had lately been their king
in a situation but one degree above the executioner, and in
an office nearly of the same quality. It is not in nature,
that, situated as the king of the French now is, he can re-
spect himself, or can be respected by others.

View this new executive officer on the side of his political
capacity, as he acts under the orders of the National As-
sembly. To execute laws is a royal office ; to execute orders
is not to be a king. However, a political executive mag-
istracy, though merely such, is a great trust. It is a trust
indeed that has much depending upon its faithful and dili-
gent performance, both in the person presiding in it and in
all its subordinates. Means of performing this duty ought
to be given by regulation; and dispositions toward it ought
to be infused by the circumstances attendant on the trust.
It ought to be environed with dignity, authority, and con-
sideration, and it ought to lead to glory. The office of
execution is an office of exertion. It is not from impotence
we are to expect the tasks of power. What sort of a person
is a king to command executory service, who has no means
whatsoever to reward it? Not in a permanent office; not
in a grant of land; no, not in a pension of fifty pounds a
year; not in the vainest and most trivial title. In France
the king is no more the fountain of honour than he is the
fountain of justice. All rewards, all distinctions, are in
other hands. Those who serve the king can be actuated by
no natural motive but fear; by a fear of everything except
their master. His functions of internal coercion are as
odious as those which he exercises in the department of
justice. If relief is to be given to any municipality, the
Assembly gives it. If troops are to be sent to reduce them
to obedience to the Assembly, the king is to execute the
order; and upon every occasion he is to be spattered over
with the blood of his people. He has no negative ; yet his
name and authority is used to enforce every harsh decree.
Nay, he must concur in the butchery of those who shall at-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 349

tempt to free him from his imprisonment, or show the slight-
est attachment to his person or to his ancient authority.

Executive magistracy ought to be constituted in such a
manner, that those who compose it should be disposed to love
and to venerate those whom they are bound to obey. A
purposed neglect, or, what is worse, a literal but perverse
and malignant obedience, must be the ruin of the wisest
counsels. In vain will the law attempt to anticipate or to
follow such studied neglects and fraudulent attentions. To
make them act zealously is not in the competence of law.
Kings, even such as are truly kings, may and ought to bear
the freedom of subjects that are obnoxious to them. They
may too, without derogating from themselves, bear even the
authority of such persons, if it promotes their service.
Louis the Thirteenth mortally hated the Cardinal de Rich-
elieu ; but his support of that minister against his rivals was
the source of all the glory of his reign, and the solid founda-
tion of his throne itself. Louis the Fourteenth, when come
to the throne, did not love the Cardinal Mazarin ; but for his
interests he preserved him in power. When old, he detested
Louvois ; but for years, whilst he faithfully served his great-
ness, he endured his person. When George the Second took
Mr. Pitt, who certainly was not agreeable to him, into his
councils, he did nothing which could humble a wise sov-
ereign. But these ministers, who were chosen by affairs,
not by affections, acted in the name of, and in trust for,
kings ; and not as their avowed, constitutional, and ostensible
masters. I think it impossible that any king, when he has
recovered his first terrors, can cordially infuse vivacity and
vigour into measures which he knows to be dictated by
those, who, he must be persuaded, are in the highest degree
ill affected to his person. Will any ministers, who serve
such a king (or whatever he may be called) with but a
decent appearance of respect, cordially obey the orders of
those whom but the other day in his name they had com-
mitted to the Bastile? will they obey the orders of those
whom, whilst they were exercising despotic justice upon
them, they conceived they were treating with lenity; and
from whom, in a prison, they thought they had provided an
asylum? If you expect such obedience, amongst your other

350 EDMUND BURKE

innovations and regenerations, you ought to make a revolu-
tion in nature, and provide a new constitution for the human
mind. Otherwise, your supreme government cannot har-
monize with its executory system. There are cases in which
we cannot take up with names and abstractions. You may
call half a dozen leading individuals, whom we have reason
to fear and hate, the nation. It makes no other difference,
than to make us fear and hate them the more. If it had
been thought justifiable and expedient to make such a revo-
lution by such means, and through such persons, as you
have made yours, it would have been more wise to have
completed the business of the fifth and sixth of October.
The new executive officer would then owe his situation to
those who are his creators as well as his masters ; and he
might be bound in interest, in the society of crime, and (if
in crimes there could be virtues) in gratitude, to serve those
who had promoted him to a place of great lucre and great
sensual indulgence ; and of something more : for more he
must have received from those who certainly would not have
limited an aggrandized creature, as they have done a sub-
mitting antagonist.

A king circumstanced as the present, if he is totally stupe-
fied by his misfortunes, so as to think it not the necessity,
but the premium and privilege of life, to eat and sleep, with-
out any regard to glory, can never be fit for the office. If
he feels as men commonly feel, he must be sensible, that an
office so circumstanced is one in which he can obtain no
fame or reputation. He has no generous interest that can
excite him to action. At best, his conduct will be passive
and defensive. To inferior people such an office might be
matter of honour. But to be raised to it, and to descend to
it, are different things, and suggest different sentiments.
Does he really name the ministers? They will have a sym-
pathy with him. Are they forced upon him"? The whole
business between them and the nominal king will be mutual
counteraction. In all other countries, the office of ministers
of state is of the highest dignity. In France it is full of
peril, and incapable of glory. Rivals, however, they will have
in their nothingness, whilst shallow ambition exists in the
world, or the desire of a miserable salary is an incentive

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 351

to short-sighted avarice. Those competitors of the ministers
are enabled by your constitution to attack them in their vital
parts, whilst they have not the means of repelling their
charges in any other than the degrading character of cul-
prits. The ministers of state in France are the only persons
in that country who are incapable of a share in the national
councils. What ministers ! What councils ! What a nation !
— But they are responsible. It is a poor service that is to be
had from responsibility. The elevation of mind to be de-
rived from fear will never make a nation glorious. Re-
sponsibility prevents crimes. It makes all attempts against
the laws dangerous. But for a principle of active and
zealous service, none but idiots could think of it. Is the
conduct of a war to be trusted to a man who may abhor its
principle ; who, in every step he may take to render it suc-
cessful, confirms the power of those by whom he is
oppressed? Will foreign states seriously treat with him
who has no prerogative of peace or war ; no, not so much as
in a single vote by himself or his ministers, or by any one
whom he can possibly influence? A state of contempt is
not a state for a prince : better get rid of him at once.

I know it will be said that these humours in the court and
executive government will continue only through this gen-
eration ; and that the king has been brought to declare the
dauphin shall be educated in a conformity to his situation.
If he is made to conform to his situation, he will have no
education at all. His training must be worse even than that
of an arbitrary monarch. If he reads — whether he reads or
not, some good or evil genius will tell him his ancestors were
kings. Thenceforward his object must be to assert himself
and to avenge his parents. This you will say is not his duty.
That may be ; but it is nature ; and whilst you pique nature
against you, you do unwisely to trust to duty. In this futile
scheme of polity, the state nurses in its bosom, for the pres-
ent, a source of weakness, perplexity, counteraction, ineffi-
ciency, and decay; and it prepares the means of its final
ruin. In short, I see nothing in the executive force (I
cannot call it authority) that has even an appearance of
vigour, or that has the smallest degree of just correspond-
ence or symmetry, or amicable relation with the supreme

352 EDMUND BURKE

power, either as it now exists, or as it is planned for the
future government.

You have settled, by an economy as perverted as the
policy, two 1 establishments of government; one real, one
fictitious. Both maintained at a vast expense; but the fic-
titious at, I think, the greatest. Such a machine as the latter
is not worth the grease of its wheels. The expense is
exorbitant; and neither the show nor the use deserve the
tenth part of the charge. Oh ! but I don't do justice to the
talents of the legislators : I don't allow, as I ought to do, for
necessity. Their scheme of executive force was not their
choice. This pageant must be kept. The people would not
consent to part with it. Right ; I understand you. You do,
in spite of your grand theories, to which you would have
heaven and earth to bend, you do know how to conform
yourselves to the nature and circumstances of things. But
when you were obliged to conform thus far to circumstances,
you ought to have carried your submission farther, and to
have made, what you were obliged to take, a proper instru-
ment, and useful to its end. That was in your power. For
instance, among many others, it was in your power to leave
to your king the right of peace and war. What ! to leave to
the executive magistrate the most dangerous of all preroga-
tives ? I know none more dangerous ; nor any one more
necessary to be so trusted. I do not say that this preroga-
tive ought to be trusted to your king, unless he enjoyed
other auxiliary trusts along with it, which he does not now
hold. But, if he did possess them, hazardous as they are
undoubtedly, advantages would arise from such a constitu-
tion, more than compensating the risk. There is no other
way of keeping the several potentates of Europe from in-
triguing distinctly and personally with the members of your
Assembly, from intermeddling in all your concerns, and
fomenting, in the heart of your country, the most pernicious
of all factions ; factions in the interest and under the direction
of foreign powers. From that worst of evils, thank God,
we are still free. Your skill, if you had any, would be well
employed to find out indirect correctives and controls upon
this perilous trust. If you did not like those which in Eng-

1 In reality three, to reckon the provincial republican establishments.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 353

land we have chosen, your leaders might have exerted their
abilities in contriving better. If it were necessary to exem-
plify the consequences of such an executive government as
yours, in the management of great affairs, I should refer
you to the late reports of M. de Montmorin to the National
Assembly, and all the other proceedings relative to the dif-
ferences between Great Britain and Spain. It would be
treating your understanding with disrespect to point them
out to you.

I hear that the persons who are called ministers have
signified an intention of resigning their places. I am rather
astonished that they have not resigned long since. For the
universe I would not have stood in the situation in which
they have been for this last twelvemonth. They wished well,
I take it for granted, to the Revolution. Let this fact be as
it may, they could not, placed as they were upon an eminence,
though an eminence of humiliation, but be the first to see
collectively, and to feel each in his own department, the evils
which have been produced by that revolution. In every step
which they took, or forbore to take, they must have felt the
degraded situation of their country, and their utter inca-
pacity of serving it. They are in a species of subordinate
servitude, in which no men before them were ever seen.
Without confidence from their sovereign, on whom they were
forced, or from the Assembly who forced them upon him,
all the noble functions of their office are executed by com-
mittees of the Assembly, without any regard whatsoever to
their personal or their official authority. They are to exe-
cute, without power; they are to be responsible, without
discretion ; they are to deliberate, without choice. In their
puzzled situation, under two sovereigns, over neither of
whom they have any influence, they must act in such a man-
ner as (in effect, whatever they may intend) sometimes to
betray the one, sometimes the other, and always to betray
themselves. Such has been their situation ; such must be the
situation of those who succeed them. I have much respect,
and many good wishes, for M. Necker. I am obliged to him
for attentions. I thought when his e*nemies had driven him
from Versailles, that his exile was a subject of most serious
congratulation — sed multce urbes et publica vota vicerunt.

HC L — VOL. XXIV

354 EDMUND BURKE

He is now sitting on the ruins of the finances, and of the
monarchy of France.

A great deal more might be observed on the strange
constitution of the executory part of the new government;
but fatigue must give bounds to the discussion of subjects,
which in themselves have hardly any limits.

As little genius and talent am I able to perceive in the
plan of judicature formed by the National Assembly. Ac-
cording to their invariable course, the framers of your
constitution have begun with the utter abolition of the par-
liaments. These venerable bodies, like the rest of the old
government, stood in need of reform, even though there
should be no change made in the monarchy. They required
several more alterations to adapt them to the system of a
free constitution. But they had particulars in their con-
stitution, and those not a few, which deserved approbation
from the wise. They possessed one fundamental excellence ;
they were independent. The most doubtful circumstance
attendant on their office, that of its being vendible, con-
tributed however to this independency of character. They
held for life. Indeed they may be said to have held by in-
heritance. Appointed by the monarch, they were considered
as nearly out of his power. The most determined exertions
of that authority against them only showed their radical
independence. They composed permanent bodies politic,
constituted to resist arbitrary innovation; and from that
corporate constitution, and f rom^ most of their forms, they
were well calculated to afford both certainty and stability
to the laws. They had been a safe asylum to secure these
laws, in all the revolutions of humour and opinion. They
had saved that sacred deposit of the country during the
reigns of arbitrary princes, and the struggles of arbitrary
factions. They kept alive the memory and record of the
constitution. They were the great security to private prop-
erty; which might be said (when personal liberty had no
existence) to be, in fact, as well guarded in France as in
any other country. Whatever is supreme in a state, ought
to have, as much as possible, its judicial authority so con-
stituted as not only not to depend upon it, but in some sort
to balance it. It ought to give a security to its justice

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 355

against its power. It ought to make its judicature, as it
were, something exterior to the state.

These parliaments had furnished, not the best certainly,
but some considerable corrective to the excesses and vices
of the monarchy. Such an independent judicature was ten
times more necessary when a democracy became the abso-
lute power of the country. In that constitution, elective,
temporary, local judges, such as you have contrived, exer-
cising their dependent functions in a narrow society, must
be the worst of all tribunals. In them it will be vain to look
for any appearance of justice towards strangers, towards
the obnoxious rich, towards the minority of routed parties,
towards all those who in the election have supported unsuc-
cessful candidates. It will be impossible to keep the new
tribunals clear of the worst spirit of faction. All con-
trivances by ballot we know experimentally to be vain and
childish to prevent a discovery of inclinations. Where they
may the best answer the purposes of concealment, they
answer to produce suspicion, and this is a still more mis-
chievous cause of partiality.

If the parliaments had been preserved, instead of being
dissolved at so ruinous a change to the nation, they might
have served in this new commonwealth, perhaps not pre-
cisely the same, (I do not mean an exact parallel,) but
nearly the same, purposes as the court and senate of Areopa-
gus did in Athens; that is, as one of the balances and cor-
rectives to the evils of a light and unjust democracy. Every
one knows that this tribunal was the great stay of that state ;
every one knows with what care it was upheld, and with
what a religious awe it was consecrated. The parliaments
were not wholly free from faction, I admit ; but this evil was
exterior and accidental, and not so much the vice of their
constitution itself, as it must be in your new contrivance of
sexennial elective judicatories. Several English commend
the abolition of the old tribunals, as supposing that they
determined everything by bribery and corruption. But they
have stood the test of monarchic and republican scrutiny.
The court was well disposed to prove corruption on those
bodies when they were dissolved in 1771- — Those who have
again dissolved them would have done the same if they

356 EDMUND BURKE

could — but both inquisitions having failed, I conclude, that
gross pecuniary corruption must have been rather rare
amongst them.

It would have been prudent, along with the parliaments,
to preserve their ancient power of registering, and of re-
monstrating at least, upon all the decrees of the National
Assembly, as they did upon those which passed in the time
of the monarchy. It would be a means of squaring the oc-
casional decrees of a democracy to some principles of gen-
eral jurisprudence. The vice of the ancient democracies,
and one cause of their ruin, was, that they ruled, as you do,
by occasional decrees, psephismata. This practice soon
broke in upon the tenour and consistency of the laws; it
abated the respect of the people towards them; and totally
destroyed them in the end.

Your vesting the power of remonstrance, which, in the
time of the monarchy, existed in the parliament of Paris, in
your principal executive officer, whom, in spite of common
sense, you persevere in calling king, is the height of ab-
surdity. You ought never to suffer remonstrance from him
who is to execute. This is to understand neither council
nor execution ; neither authority nor obedience. The person
whom you call king, ought not to have this power, or he
ought to have more.

Your present arrangement is strictly judicial. Instead of
imitating your monarchy, and seating your judges on a bench
of independence, your object is to reduce them to the most
blind obedience. As you have changed all things, you have
invented new principles of order. You first appoint judges,
who, I suppose, are to determine according to law, and then
you let them know, that at some time or other, you in-
tend to give them some law by which they are to determine.
Any studies which they have made (if any they have made)
are to be useless to them. But to supply these studies,
they are to be sworn to obey all the rules, orders, and in-
structions which from time to time they are to receive from
the National Assembly. These if they submit to, they leave
no ground of law to the subject. They become complete
and most dangerous instruments in the hands of the govern-
ing power, which, in the midst of a cause, or on the prospect

ON THE REVOLUTION IN. FRANCE 357

of it, may wholly change the rule of decision. If these
orders of the National Assembly come to be contrary to the
will of the people, who locally choose those judges, such con-
fusion must happen as is terrible to think of. For the judges
owe their places to the local authority ; and the commands
they are sworn to obey come from those who have no share
in their appointment. In the mean time they have the ex-
ample of the court of Chatelet to encourage and guide them
in the exercise of their functions. That court is to try
criminals sent to it by the National Assembly, or brought
before it by other courses of delation. They sit under a
guard to save their own lives. They know not by what
law they judge, nor under what authority they act, nor by
what tenure they hold. It is thought that they are some-
times obliged to condemn at peril of their lives. This is not
perhaps certain, nor can it be ascertained; but when they
acquit, we know they have seen the persons whom they dis-
charge, with perfect impunity to the actors, hanged at the
door of their court.

The Assembly indeed promises that they will form a body
of law, which shall be short, simple, clear, and so forth.
That is, by their short laws, they will leave much to the dis-
cretion of the judge; whilst they have exploded the authority
of all the learning which could make judicial discretion (a
thing perilous at best) deserving the appellation of a sound
discretion.

It is curious to observe, that the administrative bodies are
carefully exempted from the jurisdiction of these new tribu-
nals. That is, those persons are exempted from the power
of the laws, who ought to be the most entirely submitted to
them. Those who execute public pecuniary trusts, ought of
all men to be the most strictly held to their duty. One
would have thought that it must have been among your
earliest cares, if you did not mean that those administrative
bodies should be real, sovereign, independent states, to form
an awful tribunal, like your late parliaments, or like our
king's bench, where all corporate officers might obtain pro-
tection in the legal exercise of their functions, and would find
coercion if they trespassed against their legal duty. But the
cause of the exemption is plain. These administrative bodies

358 -EDMUND BURKE

are the great instruments of the present leaders in their
progress through democracy to oligarchy. They must there-
fore be put above the law. It will be said, that the legal
tribunals which you have made are unfit to coerce them.
They are undoubtedly. They are unfit for any rational
purpose. It will be said too, that the administrative bodies
will be accountable to the General Assembly. This I fear is
talking without much consideration of the nature of that
Assembly, or of these corporations. However, to be subject
to the pleasure of that Assembly, is not to be subject to law
either for protection or for constraint.

This establishment of judges as yet wants something to
its completion. It is to be crowned by a new tribunal. This
is to be a grand state judicature ; and it is to judge of crimes
committed against the nation, that is, against the power of
the Assembly. It seems as if they had something in their
view of the nature of the high court of justice erected in
England during the time of the great usurpation. As they
have not yet finished this part of the scheme, it is impossible
to form a right judgment upon it. However, if great care
is not taken to form it in a spirit very different from that
which has guided them in their proceedings relative to state
offences, this tribunal, subservient to their inquisition, the
committee of research, will extinguish the last sparks of lib-
erty in France, and settle the most dreadful and arbitrary
tyranny ever known in any nation. If they wish to give to
this tribunal any appearance of liberty and justice, they must
not evoke from or send to it the causes relative to their own
members, at their pleasure. They must also remove the
seat of that tribunal out of the republic of Paris. 1

Has more wisdom been displayed in the constitution of
your army than what is discoverable in your plan of judica-
ture? The able arrangement of this part is the more diffi-
cult, and requires the greatest skill and attention, not only as
the great concern in itself, but as it is the third cementing
principle in the new body of republics, which you call the
French nation. Truly it is not easy to divine what that
army may become at last. You have voted a very large one,

1 For further elucidations upon the subject of all these judicatures, and
of the committee of research, see M. de Calonne's work.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 35$

and on good appointments, at least fully equal to your appar-
ent means of payment. But what is the principle of its
discipline? or whom is it to obey? You have got the wolf
by the ears, and I wish you joy of the happy position in
which you have chosen to place yourselves, and in which you
are well circumstanced for a free deliberation, relatively to
that army, or to anything else.

The minister and secretary of state for the war department
is M. de la Tour du Pin. This gentleman, like his colleagues
in administration, is a most zealous assertor of the Revolu-
tion, and a sanguine admirer of the new constitution, which
originated in that event. His statement of facts, relative to
the military of France, is important, not only from his official
and personal authority, but because it displays very clearly
the actual condition of the army in France, and because it
throws light on the principles upon which the Assembly pro-
ceeds, in the administration of this critical object. It
may enable us to form some judgment, how far it may be
expedient in this country to imitate the martial policy of
France.

M. de la Tour du Pin, on the fourth of last June, comes
to give an account of the state of his department, as it ex-
ists under the auspices of the National Assembly. No man
knows it so well; no man can express it better. Address-
ing himself to the National Assembly, he says, " His Majesty
has this day sent me to apprize you of the multiplied disor-
ders of which every day he receives the most distressing in-
telligence. The army (le corps militaire) threatens to fall
into the most turbulent anarchy. Entire regiments have
dared to violate at once the respect due to the laws, to the
king, to the order established by your decrees, and to the
oaths which they have taken with the most awful solemnity.
Compelled by my duty to give you information of these ex-
cesses, my heart bleeds when I consider who they are that
have committed them. Those, against whom it is not in my
power to withhold the most grievous complaints, are a part
of that very soldiery which to this day have been so full of
honour and loyalty, and with whom, for fifty years, I have
lived the comrade and the friend.

"What incomprehensible spirit of delirium and delusion

360 EDMUND BURKE

has all at once led them astray? Whilst you are indefatig-
able in establishing uniformity in the empire, and moulding
the whole into one coherent and consistent body; whilst the
French are taught by you at once the respect which the
laws owe to the rights of man, and that which the citizens
owe to the laws, the administration of the army presents
nothing but disturbance and confusion. I see in more than
one corps the bonds of discipline relaxed or broken ; the
most unheard-of pretensions avowed directly and without
any disguise ; the ordinances without force ; the chiefs with-
out authority; the military chest and the colours carried
off; the authority of the king himself [visum teneatisf]
proudly defied; the officers despised, degraded, threatened,
driven away, and some of them prisoners in the midst of
their corps, dragging on a precarious life in the bosom of
disgust and humiliation. To fill up the measure of all these
horrors, the commandants of places have had their throats
cut, under the eyes, and almost in the arms, of their own
soldiers.

" These evils are great ; but they are not the worst conse-
quences which may be produced by such military insurrec-
tions. Sooner or later they may menace the nation itself.
The nature of things requires that the army should never act
but as an instrument. The moment that, erecting itself into
a deliberative body, it shall act according to its own resolu-
tions, the government, be it what it may, will immediately de-
generate into a military democracy ; a species of political
monster, which has always ended by devouring those who
have produced it.

"After all this, who must not be alarmed at the irregular
consultations, and turbulent committees, formed in some
regiments by the common soldiers and non-commissioned
officers, without the knowledge, or even in contempt of the
authority, of their superiors ; although the presence and
concurrence of those superiors could give no authority to
such monstrous democratic assemblies [cornices]."

It is not necessary to add much to this finished picture :
finished as far as its canvas admits ; but as I apprehend, not
taking in the whole of the nature and complexity of the dis-
orders of this military democracy, which, the minister at war

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 361

truly and wisely observes, wherever it exists, must be the
true constitution of the state, by whatever formal appel-
lation it may pass. For, though he informs the Assembly
that the more considerable part of the army have not cast
off their obedience, but are still attached to their duty, yet
those travellers, who have seen the corps whose conduct is
the best, rather observe in them the absence of mutiny, than
the existence of discipline.

I cannot help pausing here for a moment, to reflect upon
the expressions of surprise which this minister has let fall,
relative to the excesses he relates. To him the departure of
the troops from their ancient principles of loyalty and hon-
our seems quite inconceivable. Surely those to whom he
addresses himself know the causes of it but too well. They
know the doctrines which they have preached, the decrees
which they have passed, the practices which they have
countenanced. The soldiers remember the 6th of October.
They recollect the French guards. They have not forgotten
the taking of the king's castles in Paris and Marseilles.
That the governors in both places were murdered with im-
punity, is a fact that has not passed out of their minds.
They do not abandon the principles laid down so ostenta-
tiously and laboriously of the quality of men. They can-
not shut their eyes to the degradation of the whole noblesse
of France, and the suppression of the very idea of a gentle-
man. The total abolition of titles and distinctions is not
lost upon them. But M. de la Tour du Pin is astonished
at their disloyalty, when the doctors of the Assembly have
taught them at the same time the respect due to laws.
It is easy to judge which of the two sorts of lessons men
with arms in their hands are likely to learn. As to the
authority of the king, we may collect from the minister
himself (if any argument on that head were not quite super-
fluous) that it is not of more consideration with these troops,
than it is with everybody else. " The king," says he, " has
over and over again repeated his orders to put a stop to
these excesses : but, in so terrible a crisis, your [the Assem-
bly's] concurrence is become indispensably necessary to pre-
vent the evils which menace the state. You unite to the
force of the legislative power, that of opinion still more im-

362 EDMUND BURKE

portant." To be sure the army can have no opinion of the
power or authority of the king. Perhaps the soldier has by
this time learned, that the Assembly itself does not enjoy a
much greater degree of liberty than that royal figure.

It is now to be seen what has been proposed in this exi-
gency, one of the greatest that can happen in a state. The
minister requests the Assembly to array itself in all its
terrors, and to call forth all its majesty. He desires that
the grave and severe principles announced by them may give
vigour to the king's proclamation. After this we should
have looked for courts civil and martial; breaking of some
corps, decimating of others, and all the terrible means which
necessity has employed in such cases to arrest the progress
of the most terrible of all evils ; particularly, one might ex-
pect, that a serious inquiry would be made into the murder
of commandants in the view of their soldiers. Not one
word of all this, or of anything like it. After they had been
told that the soldiery trampled upon the decrees of the As-
sembly promulgated by the king, the Assembly pass new
decrees; and they authorize the king to make new proclama-
tions. After the secretary at war had stated that the regi-
ments had paid no regard to oaths pretes avec la plus impos-
ante solemnite — they propose — what? More oaths. They
renew decrees and proclamations as they experience their
insufficiency, and they multiply oaths in proportion as they
weaken, in the minds of men, the sanctions of religion. I
hope that handy abridgments of the excellent sermons of
Voltaire, d'Alembert, Diderot, and Helvetius, on the Immor-
tality of the Soul, on a particular superintending Providence,
and on a Future State of Rewards and Punishments, are sent
down to the soldiers along with their civic oaths. Of this I
have no doubt; as I understand that a certain description
of reading makes no inconsiderable part of their military ex-
ercises, and that they are full as well supplied with the
ammunition of pamphlets as of cartridges.

To prevent the mischiefs arising from conspiracies, irregu-
lar consultations, seditious committees, and monstrous dem-
ocratic assemblies [" comitia, cornices "] of the soldiers,
and all the disorders arising from idleness, luxury, dissipa-
tion, and insubordination, I believe the most astonishing

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 363

means have been used that ever occurred to nen, even in all
the inventions of this prolific age. It is no less than this : —
The king has promulgated in circular letters to all the regi-
ments his direct authority and encouragement, that the
several corps should join themselves with the clubs and con-
federations in the several municipalities, and mix with them
in their feasts and civic entertainments ! This jolly dis-
cipline, it seems, is to soften the ferocity of their minds ;
to reconcile them to their bottle companions of other de-
scriptions; and to merge particular conspiracies in more
general associations. 1 That this remedy would be pleasing
to the soldiers, as they are described by M. de la Tour du Pin,
I can readily believe ; and that, however mutinous otherwise,
they will dutifully submit themselves to these royal procla-
mations. But I should question whether all this civic swear-
ing, clubbing, and feasting, would dispose them, more than
at present they are disposed, to an obedience to their officers:
or teach them better to submit to the austere rules of mili-
tary discipline. It will make them admirable citizens after
the French mode, but not quite so good soldiers after any
mode. A doubt might well arise, whether the conversations
at these good tables would fit them a great deal the better for
the character of mere instruments, which this veteran officer
and statesman justly observes the nature of things always re-
quires an army to be.

Concerning the likelihood of this improvement in discipline,
by the free conversation of the soldiers with municipal fes-
tive societies, which is thus officially encouraged by royal
authority and sanction, we may judge by the state of the
municipalities themselves, furnished to us by the war minis-
ter in this very speech. He conceives good hopes of the suc-
cess of his endeavours towards restoring order for the
present from the good disposition of certain regiments; but
he finds something cloudy with regard to the future. As to
preventing the return of confusion, " for this, the adminis-

1 Comme sa majeste y a reconnu, ion une systeme d'associations par-
ticulieres, mais une reunion de volontes de tous les Francois pour la
liberte et la prosperite communes, ainsi pour la maintien de l'ordre pu-
blique; il a pense qu'il convenoit que chaque regiment prit part a ces fetes
civiques pour multiplier les rapports et referrer les liens d'union entre les
citoyens et les troupes. — Lest I should not be credited, I insert the words,
authorizing the troops to feast with the popular confederacies.

364 EDMUND BURKE

tration (says he) cannot be answerable to you, as long as
they see the municipalities arrogate to themselves an author-
ity over the troops, which your institutions have reserved
wholly to the monarch. You have fixed the limits of the
military authority and the municipal authority. You have
bounded the action, which you have permitted to the latter
over the former, to the right of requisition ; but never did
the letter or the spirit of your decrees authorize the com-
mons in these municipalities to break the officers, to try
them, to give orders to the soldiers, to drive them from the
posts committed to their guard, to stop them in their marches
ordered by the king, or, in a word, to enslave the troops to
the caprice of each of the cities, or even market town,
through which they are to pass."

Such is the character and disposition of the municipal
society which is to reclaim the soldiery, to bring them back
to the true principles of military subordination, and to ren-
der them machines in the hands of the supreme power of
the country ! Such are the distempers of the French troops !
Such is their cure ! As the army is, so is the navy. The
municipalities supersede the orders of the Assembly, and the
seamen in their turn supersede the orders of the municipal-
ities. From my heart I pity the condition of a respectable
servant of the public, like this war minister, obliged in his
old age to pledge the Assembly in their civic cups, and to
enter with a hoary head into all the fantastic vagaries of
these juvenile politicians. Such schemes are not like propo-
sitions coming from a man of fifty years' wear and tear
amongst mankind. They seem rather such as ought to be
expected from those grand compounders in politics, who
shorten the road to their degrees in the state ; and have a
certain inward fanatical assurance and illumination upon all
subjects; upon the credit of which one of their doctors has
thought fit, with great applause, and greater success, to cau-
tion the Assembly not to attend to old men, or to any per-
sons who valued themselves upon their experience. I sup-
pose all the ministers of state must qualify, and take this
test; wholly abjuring the errors and heresies of experience
and observation. Every man has his own relish. But I
think if I could not attain to the wisdom, I would at least

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE ' 365

preserve something of the stiff and peremptory dignity of
age. These gentlemen deal in regeneration : but at any price
I should hardly yield my rigid fibres to be regenerated by
them; nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall in their
new accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the ele-
mental sounds of their barbarous metaphysics. 1 Si isti mihi
largiantur ut repueriscam, et in eorum cunis vagiam, valde
recusem !

The imbecility of any part of the puerile and pedantic
system, which they call a constitution, cannot be laid open
without discovering the utter insufficiency and mischief of
every other part with which it comes in contact, or that
bears any the remotest relation to it. You cannot propose
a remedy for the incompetence of the crown, without dis-
playing the debility of the Assembly. You cannot deliberate
on the confusion of the army of the state, without disclos-
ing the worse disorders of the armed municipalities. The
military lays open the civil, and the civil betrays the mili-
tary, anarchy. I wish everybody carefully to peruse the
eloquent speech (such it is) of Mons. de la Tour du Pin. He
attributes the salvation of the municipalities to the good be-
haviour of some of the troops. These troops are to preserve
the well-disposed part of those municipalities, which is con-
fessed to be the weakest, from the pillage of the worst dis-
posed, which is the strongest. But the municipalities affect
a sovereignty, and will command those troops which are
necessary for their protection. Indeed they must command
them or court them. The municipalities, by the necessity of
their situation, and by the republican powers they have ob-
tained, must, with relation to the military, be the masters, or
the servants, or the confederates, or each successively; or
they must make a jumble of all together, according to cir-
cumstances. What government is there to coerce the army
but the municipality, or the municipality but the army? To
preserve concord where authority is extinguished, at the
hazard of all consequences, the Assembly attempts to cure
the distempers by the distempers themselves; and they hope
to preserve themselves from a purely military democracy,
by giving it a debauched interest in the municipal.

1 This war minister has since quitted the school, and resigned his office.

366 EDMUND BURKE

If the soldiers once come to mix for any time in the munic-
ipal clubs, cabals, and confederacies, an elective attraction
will draw them to the lowest and most desperate part. With
them will be their habits, affections, and sympathies. The
military conspiracies, which are to be remedied by civic con-
federacies; the rebellious municipalities, which are to be
rendered obedient by furnishing them with the means of
seducing the very armies of the state that are to keep them
in order; all these chimeras of a monstrous and portentous
policy must aggravate the confusion from which they have
arisen. There must be blood. The want of common judg-
ment manifested in the construction of all their descriptions
of forces, and in all their kinds of civil and judicial authori-
ties, will make it flow. Disorders may be quieted in one
time and in one part. They will break out in others; be-
cause the evil is radical and intrinsic. All these schemes of
mixing mutinous soldiers with seditious citizens must weaken
still more and more the military connexion of soldiers with
their officers, as well as add military and mutinous audacity
to turbulent artificers and peasants. To secure a real army,
the officer should be first and last in the eye of the soldier;
first and last in his attention, observance, and esteem.
Officers it seems there are to be, whose chief qualification
must be temper and patience. They are to manage their
troops by electioneering arts. They must bear themselves
as candidates, not as commanders. But as by such means
power may be occasionally in their hands, the authority by
which they are to be nominated becomes of high importance.

What you may do finally does not appear; nor is it of
much moment, whilst the strange and contradictory relation
between your army and all the parts of your republic, as
well as the puzzled relation of those parts to each other and
to the whole, remain as they are. You seem to have given
the provisional nomination of the officers, in the first in-
stance, to the king, with a reserve of approbation by the
National Assembly. Men who have an interest to pursue
are extremely sagacious in discovering the true seat of
power. They must soon perceive that those, who can nega-
tive indefinitely, in reality appoint. The officers must there-
fore look to their intrigues in that Assembly, as the sole

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 367

certain road to promotion. Still, however, by your new con-
stitution they must begin their solicitation at court. This
double negotiation for military rank seems to me a contriv-
ance as well adapted, as if it were studied for no other end,
to promote faction in the Assembly itself, relative to this
vast military patronage; and then to poison the corps of
officers with factions of a nature still more dangerous to the
safety of government, upon any bottom on which it can be
placed, and destructive in the end to the efficiency of the
army itself. Those officers, who lose the promotions in-
tended for them by the crown, must become of a faction
opposite to that of the Assembly which has rejected their
claims, and must nourish discontents in the heart of the
army against the ruling powers. Those officers, on the other
hand, who, by carrying their point through an interest in the
Assembly, feel themselves to be at best only second in the
good-will of the crown, though first in that of the Assembly,
must slight an authority which would not advance and could
not retard their promotion. If to avoid these evils you will
have no other rule for command or promotion than seniority,
you will have an army of formality ; at the same time it will
become more independent, and more of a military republic.
Not they, but the king is the machine. A king is not to be
deposed by halves. If he is not everything in the command
of an army, he is nothing. What is the effect of a power
placed nominally at the head of the army, who to that army
is no object of gratitude, or of fear? Such a cipher is not
fit for the administration of an object, of all things the most
delicate, the supreme command of military men. They must
be constrained (and their inclinations lead them to what
their necessities require) by a real, vigorous, effective, de-
cided, personal authority. The authority of the Assembly
itself suffers by passing through such a debilitating channel
as they have chosen. The army will not long look to an
assembly acting through the organ of false show, and
palpable imposition. They will not seriously yield obedience
to a prisoner. They will either despise a pageant, or they
will pity a captive king. This relation of your army to the
crown will, if I am not greatly mistaken, become a serious
dilemma in your politics.

368 EDMUND BURKE

It is besides to be considered, whether an assembly like
yours, even supposing that it was in possession of another
sort of organ through which its orders were to pass, is fit
for promoting the obedience and discipline of an army. It
is known, that armies have hitherto yielded a very precarious
and uncertain obedience to any senate, or popular authority ;
and they will least of all yield it to an assembly which is only
to have a continuance of two years. The officers must
totally lose the characteristic disposition of military men, if
they see with perfect submission and due admiration, the
dominion of pleaders ; especially when they find that they
have a new court to pay to an endless succession of those
pleaders; whose military policy, and the genius of whose
command, (if they should have any,) must be as uncertain
as their duration is transient. In the weakness of one kind
of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an
army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction,
until some popular general, who understands the art of con-
ciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of
command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself.
Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no
other way of securing military obedience in this state of
things. But the moment in which that event shall happen,
the person who really commands the army is your master ;
the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your
Assembly, the master of your whole republic.

How came the Assembly by their present power over the
army? Chiefly, to be sure, by debauching the soldiers from
their officers. They have begun by a most terrible operation.
They have touched the central point, about which the par-
ticles that compose armies are at repose. They have de-
stroyed the principle of obedience in the great, essential,
critical link between the officer and the soldier, just where
the chain of military subordination commences and on
which the whole of that system depends. The soldier is told
he is a citizen, and has the rights of man and citizen. The
right of a man, he is told, is to be his own governor, and to
be ruled only by those to whom he delegates that self-gov-
ernment. It is very natural he should think that he ought
most of all to have his choice where he is to yield the great-

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 369

est degree of obedience. He will therefore, in all probability,
systematically do, what he does at present occasionally ; that
is, he will exercise at least a negative in the choice of his
officers. At present the officers are known at best to be only
permissive, and on their good behaviour. In fact, there have
been many instances in which they have been cashiered by
their corps. Here is a second negative on the choice of the
king; a negative as effectual at least as the other of the
Assembly. The soldiers know already that it has been a
question, not ill received in the National Assembly, whether
they ought not to have the direct choice of their officers, or
some proportion of them? When such matters are in de-
liberation it is no extravagant supposition that they will in-
cline to the opinion most favourable to their pretensions.
They will not bear to be deemed the army of an imprisoned
king, whilst another army in the same country, with whom
too they are to feast and confederate, is to be considered as
the free army of a free constitution. They will cast their
eyes on the other and more permanent army ; I mean the
municipal. That corps, they well know, does actually elect
its own officers. They may not be able to discern the
grounds of distinction on which they are not to elect a
Marquis de la Fayette (or what is his new name?) of their
own. If this election of a commander-in-chief be a part of
the rights of men, why not of theirs? They see elective
justices of peace, elective judges, elective curates, elective
bishops, elective municipalities, and elective commanders of
the Parisian army. — Why should they alone be excluded?
Are the brave troops of France the only men in that nation
who are not the fit judges of military merit, and of the
qualifications necessary for a commander-in-chief? Are
they paid by the state, and do they therefore lose the rights
of men? They are a part of that nation themselves, and
contribute to that pay. And is not the king, is not the Na-
tional Assembly, and are not all who elect the National As-
sembly likewise paid? Instead of seeing all these forfeit
their rights by their receiving a salary, they perceive that in
all these cases a salary is given for the exercise of those
rights. All your resolutions, all your proceedings, all your
debates, all the works of your doctors in religion and poli-

370 EDMUND BURKE

tics, have industriously been put into their hands; and you
expect that they will apply to their own case just as much
of your doctrines and examples as suits your pleasure.

Everything depends upon the army in such a government
as yours; for you have industriously destroyed all the
opinions, and prejudices, and, as far as in you lay, all the
instincts which support government. Therefore the moment
any difference arises between your National Assembly and
any part of the nation, you must have recourse to force.
Nothing else is left to you; or rather you have left nothing
else to yourselves. You see, by the report of your war
minister, that the distribution of the army is in a great
measure made with a view of internal coercion. 1 You must
rule by an army; and you have infused into that army by
which you rule, as well as into the whole body of the nation,
principles which after a time must disable you in the use you
resolve to make of it. The king is to call out troops to act
against his people, when the world has been told, and the as-
sertion is still ringing in our ears, that troops ought not to
fire on citizens. The colonies assert to themselves an inde-
pendent constitution and a free trade. They must be con-
strained by troops. In what chapter of your code of the
rights of men are they able to read, that it is a part of the
rights of men to have their commerce monopolized and re-
strained for the benefit of others? As the colonists rise on
you, the negroes rise on them. Troops again — Massacre,
torture, hanging ! These are your rights of men ! These are
the fruits of metaphysic declarations wantonly made, and
shamefully retracted ! It was but the other day, that the
farmers of land in one of your provinces refused to pay
some sort of rents to the lord of the soil. In consequence
of this, you decree, that the country people shall pay all
rents and dues, except those which as grievances you have
abolished; and if they refuse, then you order the king to
march troops against them. You lay down metaphysic prop-
ositions which infer universal consequences, and then you
attempt to limit logic by despotism. The leaders of the
present system tell them of their rights, as men, to take
fortresses, to murder guards, to seize on kings without

1 Courier Frangois, 30th July, 1790. Assemblee Nationale, Numero 210.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 371

the least appearance of authority even from the Assembly,
whilst, as the sovereign legislative body, that Assembly was
sitting in the name of the nation — and yet these leaders
presume to order out the troops which have acted in these
very disorders, to coerce those who shall judge on the prin-
ciples, and follow the examples, which have been guaranteed
by their own approbation.

The leaders teach the people to abhor and reject all feo-
dality as the barbarism of tyranny, and they tell them after-
wards how much of that barbarous tyranny they are to bear
with patience. As they are prodigal of light with regard to
grievances, so the people find them sparing in the extreme
with regard to redress. They know that not only certain
quit-rents and personal duties, which you have permitted
them to redeem, (but have furnished no money for the re-
demption,) are as nothing to those burthens for which you
have made no provision at all. They know, that almost the
whole system of landed property in its origin is feudal; that
it is the distribution of the possessions of the original pro-
prietors, made by a barbarous conqueror to his barbarous In-
struments; and that the most grievous effects of the con-
quest are the land rents of every kind, as without question
they are.

The peasants, in all probability, are the descendants of
these ancient proprietors, Romans or Gauls. But if they
fail, in any degree, in the titles which they make on the
principles of antiquaries and lawyers, they retreat into the
citadel of the rights of men. There they find that men are
equal ; and the earth, the kind and equal mother of all, ought
not to be monopolized to foster the pride and luxury of any
men, who by nature are no better than themselves, and who,
if they do not labour for their bread, are worse. They find,
that by the laws of nature the occupant and subduer of the
soil is the true proprietor; that there is no prescription
against nature; and that the agreements (where any there
are) which have been made with the landlords, during the
time of slavery, are only the effect of duresse and force ; and
that when the people re-entered into the rights of men, those
agreements were made as void, as everything else which had
been settled under the prevalence of the old feudal and aris-

372

EDMUND BURKE

tocratic tyranny. They will tell you that they see no differ-
ence between an idler with a hat and a national cockade, and
an idler in a cowl, or in a rochet. If you ground the title to
rents on succession and prescription, they tell you from the
speech of M. Camus, published by the National Assembly for
their information, that things ill begun cannot avail them-
selves of prescription; that the title of these lords was
vicious in its origin ; and that force is at least as bad as
fraud. As to the title by succession, they will tell you, that
the succession of those who have cultivated the soil is the
true pedigree of property, and not rotten parchments and
silly substitutions; that the lords have enjoyed their usurpa-
tion too long; and that if they allow to these lay monks any
charitable pension, they ought to be thankful to the bounty
of the true proprietor, who is so generous towards a false
claimant to his goods.

When the peasants give you back that coin of sophistic
reason, on which you have set your image and superscrip-
tion, you cry it down as base money, and tell them you will
pay for the future with French guards, and dragoons, and
hussars. You hold up, to chastise them, the second-hand
authority of a king, who is only the instrument of destroy-
ing, without any power of protecting either the people or
his own person. Through him it seems you will make your-
selves obeyed. They answer, You have taught us that there
are no gentlemen; and which of your principles teach us to
bow to kings whom we have not elected? We know with-
out your teaching, that lands were given for the support of
feudal dignities, feudal titles, and feudal offices. When you
took down the cause as a grievance, why should the more
grievous effect remain? As there are now no hereditary
honours, and no distinguished families, why are we taxed to
maintain what you tell us ought not to exist? You have
sent down our old aristocratic landlords in no other charac-
ter, and with no other title, but that of exactors under your
authority. Have you endeavoured to make these your rent-
gatherers respectable to us? No. You have sent them to us
with their arms reversed, their shields broken, their im-
presses defaced; and so displumed, degraded, and metamor-
phosed, such unfeathered two-legged things, that we no

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 373

longer know them. They are strangers to us. They do not
even go by the names of our ancient lords. Physically they
may be the same men ; though we are not quite sure of that,
on your new philosophic doctrines of personal identity. In
all other respects they are totally changed. We do not see
why we have not as good a right to refuse them their rents
as you have to abrogate all their honours, titles, and distinc-
tions. This we have never commissioned you to do ; and it
is one instance, among many indeed, of your assumption
of undelegated power. We see the burghers of Paris,
through their clubs, their mobs, and their national guards,
directing you at their pleasure, and giving that as law to
you, which, under your authority is transmitted as law to us.
Through you these burghers dispose of the lives and
fortunes of us all. Why should not you attend as much to
the desires of the laborious husbandman with regard to our
rent, by which we are affected in the most serious manner,
as you do to the demands of these insolent burghers, relative
to distinctions and titles of honour, by which neither they
nor we are affected at all? But we find you pay more regard
to their fancies than to our necessities. Is it among the
rights of man to pay tribute to his equals? Before this
measure of yours, we might have thought we were not
perfectly equal. We might have entertained some old, habit-
ual, unmeaning prepossession in favour of those landlords ;
but we cannot conceive with what other view than that of
destroying all respect to them, you could have made the law
that degrades them. You have forbidden us to treat them
with any of the old formalities of respect, and now you
send troops to sabre and to bayonet us into a submission to
fear and force, which you did not suffer us to yield to the
mild authority of opinion.

The ground of some of these arguments is horrid and ridi-
culous to all rational ears ; but to the politicians of meta-
physics who have opened schools for sophistry, and made
establishments for 'anarchy, it is solid and conclusive. It is
obvious, that on a mere consideration of the right, the leaders
in the Assembly would not in the least have scrupled to
abrogate the rents along with the titles and family ensigns.
It would be only to follow up the principle of their reason-

374

EDMUND BURKE

ings, and to complete the analogy of their conduct. But they
had newly possessed themselves of a great body of landed
property by confiscation. They had this commodity at
market; and the market would have been wholly destroyed,
if they were to permit the husbandmen to riot in the specu-
lations with which they so freely intoxicated themselves.
The only security which property enjoys in any one of its
descriptions, is from the interests of their rapacity with re-
gard to some other. They have left nothing but their own
arbitrary pleasure, to determine what property is to be pro-
tected and what subverted.

Neither have they left any principle by which any of their
municipalities can be bound to obedience; or even conscien-
tiously obliged not to separate from the whole to become
independent, or to connect itself with some other state. The
people of Lyons, it seems, have refused lately to pay taxes.
Why should they not? What lawful authority is there left
to exact them? The king imposed some of them. The old
states, methodized by orders, settled the more ancient. They
may say to the Assembly, Who are you, that are not our
kings, nor the states we have elected, nor sit on the princi-
ples on which we have elected you? And who are we, that
when we see the gabelles, which you have ordered to be paid,
wholly shaken off, when we see the act of disobedience after-
wards ratified by yourselves, who are we, that we are not to
judge what taxes we ought or ought not to pay, and who are
not to avail ourselves of the same powers, the validity of
which you have approved in others ? To this the answer is, W'e
will send troops. The last reason of kings is always the
first with your A.ssembly. This military aid may serve for
a time, whilst the impression of the increase of pay remains,
and the vanity of being umpires in all disputes is flattered.
But this weapon will snap short, unfaithful to the hand that
employs it. The Assembly keep a school, where, system-
atically, and with unremitting perseverance, they teach
principles, and form regulations, destructive to all spirit of
subordination, civil and military — and then they expect that
they shall hold in obedience an anarchic people by an an-
archic army.

The municipal army which, according to the new policy,

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 375

is to balance this national army, if considered in itself only,
is of a constitution much more simple, and in every respect
less exceptionable. It is a mere democratic body, uncon-
nected with the crown or the kingdom; armed, and trained,
and officered at the pleasure of the districts to which the
corps severally belong; and the personal service of the indi-
viduals, who compose, or the fine in lieu of personal service,
are directed by the same authority. 1 Nothing is more uni-
form. If, however, considered in any relation to the crown,
to the National Assembly, to the public tribunals, or to the
other army, or considered in a view to any coherence or con-
nexion between its parts, it seems a monster, and can hardly
fail to terminate its perplexed movements in some great
national calamity. It is a worse preservative of a general
constitution, than the systasis of Crete, or the confederation
of Poland, or any other ill-devised corrective which has yet
been imagined, in the necessities produced by an ill-con-
structed system of government.

Having concluded my few remarks on the constitution of
the supreme power, the executive, the judicature, the mili-
tary, and on the reciprocal relation of all these establish-
ments, I shall say something of the ability showed by your
legislators with regard to the revenue.

In their proceedings relative to this object, if possible,
still fewer traces appear of political judgment or financial
resource. When the states met, it seemed to be the great
object to improve the system of revenue, to enlarge its col-
lection, to cleanse it of oppression and vexation, and to es-
tablish it on the most solid footing. Great were the expec-
tations entertained on that head throughout Europe. It was
by this grand arrangement that France was to stand or fall;
and this became, in my opinion, very properly, the test by
which the skill and patriotism of those who ruled in that
Assembly would be tried. The revenue of the state is the
state. In effect all depends upon it, whether for support or
for reformation. The dignity of every occupation wholly

1 I see by M. Necker's account, that the national guards of Paris have
received, over and above the money levied within their own city, about
£145,000 sterling out of the public treasure. Whether this be an actual
payment for the nine months of their existence, or an estimate of their
yearly charge, I do not clearly perceive. It is of no great importance, as
certainly they may take whatever they please.

376 EDMUND BURKE

depends upon the quantity and the kind of virtue that may
be exerted in it. As all great qualities of the mind which
operate in public, and are not merely suffering and passive,
require force for their display, I had almost said for their
unequivocal existence, the revenue, which is the spring of all
power, becomes in its administration the sphere of every
active virtue. Public virtue, being of a nature magnificent
and splendid, instituted for great things, and conversant
about great concerns, requires abundant scope and room and
cannot spread and grow under confinement, and in circum-
stances straitened, narrow, and sordid. Through the reve-
nue alone the body politic can act in its true genius and
character, and therefore it will display just as much of its
collective virtue, and as much of that virtue which may char-
acterize those who move it, and are, as it were, its life and
guiding principle, as it is possessed of a just revenue. For
from hence not only magnanimity, and liberality, and benefi-
cence, and fortitude, and providence, and the tutelary pro-
tection of all good arts, derive their food, and the growth of
their organs, but continence, and self-denial, and labour, and
vigilance, and frugality, and whatever else there is in which
the mind shows itself above the appetite, are nowhere more
in their proper element than in the provision and distribution
of the public wealth. It is therefore not without reason
that the science of speculative and practical finance, which
must take to its aid so many auxiliary branches of knowl-
edge, stands high in the estimation not only of the ordinary
sort, but of the wisest and best men ; and as this science has
grown with the progress of its object, the prosperity and im-
provement of nations has generally increased with the in-
crease of their revenues ; and they will both continue to
grow and flourish, as long as the balance between what is
left to strengthen the efforts of individuals, and what is col-
lected for the common efforts of the state, bear to each
other a due reciprocal proportion, and are kept in a close
correspondence and communication. And perhaps it may be
owing to the greatness of revenues, and to the urgency of
state necessities, that old abuses in the constitution of
finances are discovered, and their true nature and rational
theory comes to be more perfectly understood; insomuch,

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 37?

that a smaller revenue might have been more distressing in
one period than a far greater is found to be in another; the
proportionate wealth even remaining the same. In this
state of things, the French Assembly found something in
their revenues to preserve, to secure, and wisely to adminis-
ter, as well as to abrogate and alter. Though their proud
assumption might justify the severest tests, yet in trying
their abilities on their financial proceedings, I would only
consider what is the plain, obvious duty of a common finance
minister, and try them upon that, and not upon models of
ideal perfection.

The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample
revenue; to impose it with judgment and equality; to em-
ploy it economically ; and, when necessity obliges b J *m to
make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that instance,
and for ever, by the clearness and candour of his proceed-
ings, the exactness of his calculations, and the solidity of his
funds. On these heads we may take a short and distinct
view of the merits and abilities of those in the National As-
sembly, who have taken to themselves the management of
this arduous concern. Far from any increase of revenue in
their hands, I find, by a report of M. Vernier, from the com-
mittee of finances, of the second of August last, that the
amount of the national revenue, as compared with its prod-
uce before the Revolution, was diminished by the sum of
two hundred millions, or eight millions sterling of the annual
income, considerably more than one-third of the whole.

If this be the result of great ability, never surely was
ability displayed in a more distinguished manner, or with so
powerful an effect. No common folly, no vulgar incapacity,
no ordinary official negligence, even no official crime, no cor-
ruption, no peculation, hardly any direct hostility which we
have seen in the modern world, could in so short a time have
made so complete an overthrow of the finances, and with
them, of the strength of a great kingdom. — Cedb qui vestram
rempublicam tantam amisistis tarn citof

The sophisters and declaimers, as soon as the Assembly
met, began with decrying the ancient constitution of the
revenue in many of its most essential branches, such as the
public monopoly of salt. They charged it, as truly as un-

378 EDMUND BURKE

wisely, with being ill-contrived, oppressive, and partial
This representation they were not satisfied to make use of in
speeches preliminary to some plan of reform ; they declared
it in a solemn resolution or public sentence, as it were judi-
cially, passed upon it; and this they dispersed throughout
the nation. At the time they passed the decree, with the
same gravity they ordered the ^ame absurd, oppressive, and
partial tax to be paid, until they could find a revenue to re-
place it. The consequence was inevitable. The provinces
which had been always exempted from this salt monopoly,
some of whom were charged with other contributions, per-
haps equivalent, were totally disinclined to bear any part of
the burthen, which by an equal distribution was to redeem
the others. As to the Assembly, occupied as it was with the
declaration and violation of the rights of men, and with
their arrangements for general confusion, it had neither
leisure nor capacity to contrive, nor authority to enforce,
any plan of any kind relative to the replacing the tax or
equalizing it, or compensating the provinces, or for con-
ducting their minds to any scheme of accommodation with
other districts which were to be relieved.

The people of the salt provinces, impatient under taxes,
damned by the authority which had directed their payment,
very soon found their patience exhausted. They thought
themselves as skilful in demolishing as the Assembly could
be. They relieved themselves by throwing of£ the whole
burthen. Animated by this example, each district, or part
of a district, judging of its own grievance by its own feel-
ing, and of its remedy by its own opinion, did as it pleased
with other taxes.

We are next to see how they have conducted themselves
in contriving equal impositions, proportioned to the means
of the citizens, and the least likely to lean heavy on the
active capital employed in the generation of that private
wealth, from whence the public fortune must be derived.
By suffering the several districts, and several of the indi-
viduals in each district, to judge of what part of the old
revenue they might withhold, instead of better principles of
equality, a new inequality was introduced of the most op-
pressive kind. Payments were regulated by dispositions.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 379

The parts of the kingdom which were the most submissive,
the most orderly, or the most affectionate to the common-
wealth, bore the whole burthen of the state. Nothing turns
out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.
To fill up all the deficiencies in the old impositions, and the
new deficiencies of every kind which were to be expected,
what remained to a state without authority? The National
Assembly called for a voluntary benevolence; for a fourth
part of the income of all the citizens, to be estimated on the
honour of those who were to pay. They obtained something
more than could be rationally calculated, but what was far
indeed from answerable to their real necessities, and much
less to their fond expectations. Rational people could have
hoped for little from this their tax in the disguise of a
benevolence; a tax weak, ineffective, and unequal; a tax by
which luxury, avarice, and selfishness were screened, and
the load thrown upon productive capital, upon integrity,
generosity, and public spirit — a tax of regulation upon virtue.
At length the mask is thrown off, and they are now trying
means (with little success) of exacting their benevolence by
force.

This benevolence, the ricketty offspring of weakness, was
to be supported by another resource, the twin brother of the
same prolific imbecility. The patriotic donations were to
make good the failure of the patriotic contribution. John
Doe was to become security for Richard Roe. By this
scheme they took things of much price from the giver, com-
paratively of small value to the receiver ; they ruined several
trades; they pillaged the crown of its ornaments, the
churches of their plate, and the people of their personal
decorations. The invention of these juvenile pretenders to
liberty was in reality nothing more than a servile imitation
of one of the poorest resources of doting despotism. They
took an old huge full-bottomed periwig out of the wardrobe
of the antiquated frippery of Louis the Fourteenth, to cover
the premature baldness of the National Assembly. They
produced this old-fashioned formal folly, though it had been
so abundantly exposed in the Memoirs of the Duke de St.
Simon, if to reasonable men it had wanted any arguments to
display its mischief and insufficiency. A device of the same

380 EDMUND BURKE

kind was tried in my memory by Louis the Fifteenth, but it
answered at no time. However, the necessities of ruinous
wars were some excuse for desperate projects. The deliber-
ations of calamity are rarely wise. But here was a season
for disposition and providence. It was in a time of pro-
found peace, then enjoyed for five years, and promising a
much longer continuance, that they had recourse to this
desperate trifling. They were sure to lose more reputa-
tion by sporting, in their serious situation, with these toys
and playthings of finance, which have filled half their
journals, than could possibly be compensated by the poor
temporary supply which they afforded. It seemed as if those
who adopted such projects were wholly ignorant of their
circumstances, or wholly unequal to their necessities. What-
ever virtue may be in these devices, it is obvious that neither
the patriotic gifts, nor the patriotic contribution, can ever
be resorted to again. The resources of public folly are soon
exhausted. The whole indeed of their scheme of revenue
is to make, by any artifice, an appearance of a full reservoir
for the hour, whilst at the same time they cut off the springs
and living fountains of perennial supply. The account not
long since furnished by M. Necker was meant, without ques-
tion, to be favourable. He gives a flattering view of the
means of getting through the year; but he expresses, as it
is natural he should, some apprehension for that which was
to succeed. On this last prognostic, instead of entering into
the grounds of this apprehension, in order, by a proper
foresight, to prevent the prognosticated evil, M. Necker
receives a sort of friendly reprimand from the president
of the Assembly.

As to their other schemes of taxation, it is impossible to
say anything of them with certainty; because they have not
yet had their operation : but nobody is so sanguine as to
imagine they will fill up any perceptible part of the wide
gaping breach which their incapacity has made in their rev-
enues. At present the state of their treasury sinks every
day more and more in cash, and swells more and more in
fictitious representation. When so little within or without
is now found but paper, the representative not of opulence
but of want, the creature not of credit but of power, they

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 381

imagine that our flourishing state in England is owing to
that bank-paper, and not the bank-paper to the flourishing
condition of our commerce, to the solidity of our credit, and
to the total exclusion of all idea of power from any part of
the transaction. They forget that, in England, not one shil-
ling of paper-money of any description is received but of
choice ; that the whole has had its origin in cash actually
deposited; and that it is convertible at pleasure, in an in-
stant, and without the smallest loss, into cash again. Our
paper is of value in commerce, because in law it is of none.
It is powerful on 'Change, because in Westminster Hall it
is impotent. In payment of a debt of twenty shillings, a
creditor may refuse all the paper of the bank of England.
Nor is there amongst us a single public security, of any
quality or nature whatsoever, that is enforced by authority.
In fact it might be easily shown, that our paper wealth, in-
stead of lessening the real coin, has a tendency to increase
it; instead of being a substitute for money, it only facili-
tates its entry, its exit, and its circulation; that it is the
symbol of prosperity, and not the badge of distress. Never
was a scarcity of cash, and an exuberance of paper, a sub-
ject of complaint in this nation.

Well ! but a lessening of prodigal expenses, and the econ-
omy which has been introduced by the virtuous and sapient
Assembly, make amends for the losses sustained in the re-
ceipt of revenue. In this at least they have fulfilled the
duty of a financier. — Have those, who say so, looked at the
expenses of the National Assembly itself? of the munici-
palities? of the city of Paris? of the increased pay of the
two armies? of the new police? of the new judicatures?
Have they even carefully compared the present pension list
with the former? These politicians have been cruel, not
economical. Comparing the expense of the former prodigal
government and its relation to the then revenues with the
expenses of this new system as opposed to the state of its
new treasury, I believe the present will be found beyond all
comparison more chargeable. 1

1 The reader will observe, that I have but lightly touched (my plan
demanded nothing more) on the condition of the French finances, as con-
nected with the demands upon them. If I had intended to do otherwise,
the materials in my hands for such a task are not altogether p^fect. On

382 EDMUND BURKE

It remains only to consider the proofs of financial ability,
furnished by the present French managers when they are to
raise supplies on credit. Here I am a little at a stand; for
credit, properly speaking, they have none. The credit of
the ancient government was not indeed the best; but they
could always, on some terms, command money, not only at
home, but from most of the countries of Europe where a
surplus capital was accumulated ; and the credit of that gov-
ernment was improving daily. The establishment of a system
of liberty would of course be supposed to give it new
strength : and so it would actually have done, if a system of
liberty had been established. What offers has their govern-
ment of pretended liberty had from Holland, from Ham-
burgh, from Switzerland, from Genoa, from England, for a
dealing in their paper? Why should these nations of com-
merce and economy enter into any pecuniary dealings with
a people, who attempt to reverse the very nature of things;
amongst whom they see the debtor prescribing at the point
of the bayonet, the medium of his solvency to the creditor;
discharging one of his engagements with another; turning
his very penury into his resource; and paying his interest
with his rags?

Their fanatical confidence in the omnipotence of church
plunder has induced these philosophers to overlook all care
of the public estate, just as the dream of the philosopher's
stone induces dupes, under the more plausible delusion of
the hermetic art, to neglect all rational means of improving
their fortunes. With these philosophic financiers, this uni-
versal medicine made of church mummy is to cure all the
evils of the state. These gentlemen perhaps do not believe
a great deal in the miracles of piety ; but it cannot be ques-
tioned, that they have an undoubting faith in the prodigies
of sacrilege. Is there a debt which presses them? — Issue

this subject I refer the reader to M. de Calonne's work; and the tre-
mendous display that he has made of the havoc and devastation in the public
estate, and in all the affairs of France, caused by the presumptuous good
intentions of ignorance and incapacity. Such effects those causes will
always produce. Looking over that account with a pretty strict eye, and,
with perhaps too much rigour, deducting everything which may be placed
to the account of a financier out of place, who might be supposed by his
enemies desirous of making the most of his cause, I believe it will be
found, that a more salutary lesson of caution against the daring spirit of
innovators, than what has been supplied at the expense of France, never
was at any time furnished to mankind.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 383

assignats. Are compensations to be made, or a maintenance
decreed to those whom they have robbed of their freehold
in their office, or expelled from their profession? — As-
signats. Is a fleet to be fitted out? — Assignats. If sixteen
millions sterling of these assignats, forced on the people,
leave the wants of the state as urgent as ever — issue, says
one, thirty millions sterling of assignats — says another, issue
fourscore millions more of assignats. The only difference
among their financial factions is on the greater or the lesser
quantity of assignats to be imposed on the public sufferance.
They are all professors of assignats. Even those, whose
natural good sense and knowledge of commerce, not ob-
literated by philosophy, furnish decisive arguments against
this delusion, conclude their arguments, by proposing the
emission of assignats. I suppose they must talk of as-
signats, as no other language would be understood. All
experience of their inefficiency does not in the least dis-
courage them. Are the old assignats depreciated at market?
— What is the remedy? Issue new assignats. — Mais si
maladia, opiniatria, non villi se garire, quid illi facere?
assignare — postea assignare; ensuita assignare. The word
is a trifle altered. The Latin of your present doctors may be
better than that of your old comedy; their wisdom and the
variety of their resources are the same. They have not
more notes in their song than the cuckoo ; though, far from
the softness of that harbinger of summer and plenty, their
voice is as harsh and as ominous as that of the raven.

Who but the most desperate adventurers in philosophy
and finance could at all have thought of destroying the set-
tled revenue of the state, the sole security for the public
credit, in the hope of rebuilding it with the materials of con-
fiscated property? If, however, an excessive zeal for the
state should have led a pious and venerable prelate (by an-
ticipation a father of the church *) to pillage his own order,
and, for the good of the church and people, to take upon
himself the place of grand financier of confiscation, and
comptroller-general of sacrilege, he and his coadjutors were
in my opinion, bound to show, by their subsequent conduct,
that they knew something of the office they assumed. When

1 La Bruyfere of Bossuet.

384 EDMUND BURKE

they had resolved to appropriate to the Fisc, a certain por-
tion of the landed property of their conquered country, it
was their business to render their bank a real fund of credit,
as far as such a bank was capable of becoming so.

To establish a current circulating credit upon any Land-
bank, under any circumstances whatsoever, has hitherto
proved difficult at the very least. The attempt has com-
monly ended in bankruptcy. But when the Assembly were
led, through a contempt of moral, to a defiance of econom-
ical, principles, it might at least have been expected, that
nothing would be omitted on their part to lessen this diffi-
culty, to prevent any aggravation of this bankruptcy. It
might be expected, that to render your Land-bank tolerable,
every means would be adopted that could display openness
and candour in the statement of the security; everything
which could aid the recovery of the demand. To take things
in their most favourable point of view, your condition was
that of a man of a large landed estate, which he wished to
dispose of for the discharge of a debt, and the supply of
certain services. Not being able instantly to sell, you wished
to mortgage. What would a man of fair intentions, and a
commonly clear understanding, do in such circumstances?
Ought he not first to ascertain the gross value of the estate ;
the charges of its management and disposition ; the encum-
brances perpetual and temporary of all kinds that affect it;
then, striking a net surplus, to calculate the just value of
the security? When that surplus (the only security to the
creditor) had been clearly ascertained, and properly vested
in the hands of trustees; then he would indicate the parcels
to be sold, and the time and conditions of sale ; after this,
he would admit the public creditor, if he chose it, to sub-
scribe his stock into this new fund; or he might receive
proposals for an assignat from those who would advance
money to purchase this species of security.

This would be to proceed like men of business, methodi-
cally and rationally ; and on the only principles of public
and private credit that have an existence. The dealer
would then know exactly what he purchased; and the only
doubt which could hang upon his mind would be, the dread
of the resumption of the spoil, which one day might be

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 385

made (perhaps with an addition of punishment) from the
sacrilegious gripe of those execrable wretches who could
become purchasers at the auction of their innocent fellow-
citizens.

An open and exact statement of the clear value of the
property, and of the time, the circumstances, and the place
of sale, were all necessary, to efface as much as possible the
stigma that has hitherto been branded on every kind of Land-
bank. It became necessary on another principle, that is, on
account of a pledge of faith previously given on that subject,
that their future fidelity in a slippery concern might be
established by their adherence to their first engagement.
When they had finally determined on a state resource from
church booty, they came, on the 14th of April, 1790, to a
solemn resolution on the subject; and pledged themselves
to their country, "that in the statement of the public charges
for each year, there should be brought to account a sum
sufficient for defraying the expenses of the R. C. A. re-
ligion, the support of the ministers at the altars, the relief
of the poor, the pensions to the ecclesiastics, secular as well
as regular, of the one and of the other sex, in order that
the estates and goods which are at the disposal of the nation
may be disengaged of all charges, and employed by the repre-
sentatives, or the legislative body, to the great and most
pressing exigencies of the state." They further engaged, on
the same day, that the sum necessary for the year 1791
should be forthwith determined.

In this resolution they admit it their duty to show dis-
tinctly the expense of the above objects, which, by other
resolutions, they had before engaged should be first in the
order of provision. They admit that they ought to show the
estate clear and disengaged of all charges, and that they
should show it immediately. Have they done this immedi-
ately, or at any time? Have they ever furnished a rent-roll
of the immovable estates, or given in an inventory of the
movable effects, which they confiscate to their assignats?
In what manner they can fulfill their engagements of hold-
ing out to public service, "an estate disengaged of all
charges," without authenticating the value of the estate, or
the quantum of the charges, I leave it to their English ad-
hc m — vol. xxiv

386 EDMUND BURKE

mirers to explain. Instantly upon this assurance, and pre-
viously to any one step towards making it good, they issue,
on the credit of so handsome a declaration, sixteen millions
sterling of their paper. This was manly. Who, after this
masterly stroke, can doubt of their abilities in finance? —
But then, before any other emission of these financial indul-
gences, they took care at least to make good their original
promise ! — If such estimate, either of the value of the estate
or the amount of the encumbrances, has been made, it has
escaped me. I never heard of it.

At length they have spoken out, and they have made a
full discovery of their abominable fraud, in holding out the
church lands as a security for any debts, or any service
whatsoever. They rob only to enable them to cheat; but in
a very short time they defeat the ends both of the robbery
and the fraud, by making out accounts for other purposes,
which blow up their whole apparatus of force and of de-
ception. I am obliged to M. de Calonne for his reference
to the document which proves this extraordinary fact; it
had by some means escaped me. Indeed it was not necessary
to make out my assertion as to the breach of faith on the
declaration of the 14th of April, 1790. By a report of their
committee it now appears, that the charge of keeping up
the reduced ecclesiastical establishments, and other ex-
penses attendant on religion, and maintaining the religious
of both sexes, retained or pensioned, and the other concom-
itant expenses of the same nature, which they have brought
upon themselves by this convulsion in property, exceeds the
income of the estates acquired by it in the enormous sum
of two millions sterling annually; besides a debt of seven
millions and upwards. These are the calculating powers of
imposture ! This is the finance of philosophy ! This is the
result of all the delusions held out to engage a miserable
people in rebellion, murder, and sacrilege, and to make them
prompt and zealous instruments in the ruin of their country I
Never did a state, in any case, enrich itself by the confisca-
tions of the citizens. This new experiment has succeeded
like all the rest. Every honest mind, every true lover of
liberty and humanity, must rejoice to find that injustice is
not always good policy, nor rapine the high road to riches.

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 387

I subjoin with pleasure, in a note, the able and spirited ob-
servations of M. de Calonne on this subject. 1

In order to persuade the world of the bottomless resource
of ecclesiastical confiscation, the Assembly have proceeded
to other confiscations of estates in offices, which could not
be done with any common colour without being compensated
out of this grand confiscation of landed property. They
have thown upon this fund, which was to show a surplus
disengaged of all charges, a new charge; namely, the com-
pensation to the whole body of the disbanded judicature;
and of all suppressed offices and estates; a charge which I
cannot ascertain, but which unquestionably amounts to many
French millions. Another of the new charges in an annuity
of four hundred and eighty thousand pounds sterling, to be
paid (if they choose to keep faith) by daily payments, for
the interest of the first assignats. Have they ever given
themselves the trouble to state fairly the expense of the
management of the church lands in the hands of the munici-
palities, to whose care, skill, and diligence, and that of
their legion of unknown under-agents, they have chosen to
commit the charge of the forfeited estates, and the conse-
quence of which had been so ably pointed out by the bishop
of Nancy?

But it is unnecessary to dwell on these obvious heads of
encumbrance. Have they made out any clear state of the
grand encumbrance of all, I mean the whole of the general

1 " Ce n'est point a l'assemblee entiere que je m'adresse ici; je ne

fiarle qu'a ceux qm l'egarent, en lui cachant sous des gazes seduisantes
e but ou ils l'entrainent. C'est a eux que je dis: votre objet, vous n'en
disconviendrez pas, c'est d'oter tout espoir au clerge, et de consommer sa
ruine; c'est-la, en ne vous soupconnant d'aucune combinaison de cupidite,
d'aucun regard sur le jeu des effets publics, c'est-la ce qu'on doit croire
que vous avez en vue dans la terrible operation que vous proposez; c'est
ce qui doit en > etre le fruit. Mais le peuple que vous y interessez, quel
avantage peut-il. y trouver? En vous servant sans cesse de lui, que faites
vous pour lui? Rien, absolument rien; et, au contraire, vous faites ce
qui ne conduit qu'a l'accabler de nouvelles charges. Vous avez rejete, a
son prejudice, une offre de 400 millions, dont l'acceptation pouvoit deve-
nir un moyen de soulagement en sa faveur; et a cette ressource, aussi
profitable que legitime, vous avez substitue une injustice ruineuse, qui,
de votre propre aveu, charge le tresor public, et par consequent le peuple,
d'un surcroit de depense annuelle de 50 millions au moins, et d'un rem-
boursement de 150 millions.

" Malheureux peuple ! voila ce que vous vaut en dernier resultat l'ex*
propriation de PEglise, et la durete des decrets taxateurs du traitement des
ministres d'une religion bienfaisante; et desormais ils seront a yotre charge:
leurs charites soulageoient les pauvres; et vous allez etre imposes pour
subvenir a leur entretien! " — De I'Etat de la France, p. 81. See also p. 92,
and the following pages.

388 EDMUND BURKE

and municipal establishments of all sorts, and compared it
with the regular income by revenue? Every deficiency in
these becomes a charge on the confiscated estate, before
the creditor can plant his cabbages on an acre of church
property. There is no other prop than this confiscation to
keep the whole state from tumbling to the ground. In this
situation they have purposely covered all, that they ought
industriously to have cleared, with a thick fog; and then,
blindfold themselves, like bulls that shut their eyes when
they push, they drive, by the point of the bayonets, their
slaves, blindfolded indeed no worse than their lords, to
take their fictions for currencies^ and to swallow down paper
pills by thirty-four millions sterling at a dose. Then they
proudly lay in their claim to a future credit, on failure of
all their past engagements, and at a time when (if in such
a matter anything can be clear) it is clear that the surplus
estates will never answer even the first of their mortgages,
I mean that of the four hundred millions (or sixteen millions
sterling) of assignats. In all this procedure I can discern
neither the solid sense of plain dealing, nor the subtle dex-
terity of ingenious fraud. The objections within the As-
sembly to pulling up the flood-gates for this inundation of
fraud are unanswered; but they are thoroughly refuted by
an hundred thousand financiers in the street. These are the
numbers by which the metaphysic arithmeticians compute.
These are the grand calculations on which a philosophical
public credit is founded in France. They cannot raise sup-
plies; but they can raise mobs. Let them rejoice in the
applauses of the club at Dundee, for their wisdom and patri-
otism in having thus applied the plunder of the citizens to
the service of the state. I hear of no address upon this sub-
ject from the directors of the bank of England; though their
approbation would be of a little more weight in the scale of
credit than that of the club at Dundee. But, to do justice
to the club, I believe the gentlemen who compose it to be
wiser than they appear; that they will be less liberal of their
money than of their addresses ; and that they would not give
a dog's-ear of their most rumpled and ragged Scotch paper
for twenty of your fairest assignats.
Early in this year the Assembly issued paper to the

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 389

amount of sixteen millions sterling: what must have been
the state into which the Assembly has brought your affairs,
that the relief afforded by so vast a supply has been hardly
perceptible? This paper also felt an almost immediate de-
preciation of five per cent., which in a little time came to
about seven. The effect of these assignats on the receipt of
the revenue is remarkable. M. Necker found that the collec-
tors of the revenue, who received in coin, paid the treasury
in assignats. The collectors made seven per cent, by thus
receiving in money, and accounting in depreciated paper. It
was not very difficult to foresee, that this must be inevitable.
It was, however, not the less embarrassing. M. Necker was
obliged (I believe, for a considerable part, in the market
of London) to buy gold and silver for the mint, which
amounted to about twelve thousand pounds above the value
of the commodity gained. That minister was of opinion,
that, whatever their secret nutritive virtue might be, the
state could not live upon assignats alone ; that some real
silver was necessary, particularly for the satisfaction of those
who, having iron in their hands, were not likely to distin-
guish themselves for patience, when they should perceive
that, whilst an increase of pay was held out to them in real
money, it was again to be fraudulently drawn back by de-
preciated paper. The minister, in this very natural distress,
applied to the Assembly, that they should order the col-
lectors to pay in specie what in specie they had received.
It could not escape him, that if the treasury paid three per
cent, for the use of a currency, which should be returned
seven per cent, worse than the minister issued it, such a
dealing could not very greatly tend to enrich the public.
The Assembly took no notice of his recommendation. They
were in this dilemma — If they continued to receive the as-
signats, cash must become an alien to their treasury : if the
treasury should refuse those paper amulets, or should dis-
countenance them in any degree, they must destroy the credit
of their sole resource. They seem then to have made
their option ; and to have given some sort of credit to their
paper by taking it themselves ; at the same time in their
speeches they made a sort of swaggering declaration, some-
thing, I rather think, above legislative competence; that is.

390 EDMUND BURKE

that there is no difference in value between metallic money
and their assignats. This was a good, stout, proof article of
faith, pronounced under an anathema, by the venerable
fathers of this philosophic synod. Credat who will — cer-
tainly not Judcuus Apella.

A noble indignation rises in the minds of your popular
leaders, on hearing the magic lantern in their show of
finance compared to the fraudulent exhibitions of Mr. Law.
They cannot bear to hear the sands of his Mississippi com-
pared with the rock of the church, on which they build their
system. Pray let them suppress this glorious spirit, until they
show to the world what piece of solid ground there is for
their assignats, which they have not pre-occupied by other
charges. They do injustice to that great, mother fraud, to
compare it with their degenerate imitation. It is not true
that Law built solely on a speculation concerning the Mis-
sissippi. He added the East India trade; he added the
African trade ; he added the farms of all the farmed revenue
of France. All these together unquestionably could not
support the structure which the public enthusiasm, not he,
chose to build upon these bases. But these were, however,
in comparison, generous delusions. They supposed, and they
aimed at, an increase of the commerce of France. They
opened to it the whole range of the two hemispheres. They
did not think of feeding France from its own substance. A
grand imagination found in this flight of commerce some-
thing to captivate. It was wherewithal to dazzle the eye of
an eagle. It was not made to entice the smell of a mole,
nuzzling and burying himself in his mother earth, as yours
is. Men were not then quite shrunk from their natural di-
mensions by a degrading and sordid philosophy, and fitted
for low and vulgar deceptions. Above all, remember, that,
in imposing on the imagination, the then managers of the
system made a compliment to the freedom of men. In their
fraud there was no mixture of force. This was reserved to
our time, to quench the little glimmerings of reason which
might break in upon the solid darkness of this enlightened
age.

On recollection, I have said nothing of a scheme of finance
which may be urged in favor of the abilities of these gentle-

ON THE REVOLUTION TN FRANCE 391

men, and which has been introduced with great pomp, though
not yet finally adopted, in the National Assembly. It comes
with something solid in aid of the credit of the paper cir-
culation ; and much has been said of its utility and its ele-
gance. I mean the project for coining into money the bells
of the suppressed churches. This is their alchemy. There
are some follies which baffle argument; which go beyond
ridicule; and which excite no feeling in us but disgust; and
therefore I say no more upon it.

It is as little worth remarking any further upon all their
drawing and re-drawing, on their circulation for putting off
the evil day, on the play between the treasury and the Caisse
d'Escompte, and on all these old, exploded contrivances of
mercantile fraud, now exalted into policy of state. The rev-
enue will not be trifled with. The prattling about the rights
of men will not be accepted in payment for a biscuit or a
pound of gunpowder. Here then the metaphysicians descend
from their airy speculations, and faithfully follow examples.
What examples? The examples of bankrupts. But defeated,
baffled, disgraced, when their breath, their strength, their
inventions, their fancies desert them, their confidence still
maintains its ground.' In the manifest failure of their
abilities, they take credit for their benevolence. When the
revenue disappears in their hands, they have the presump-
tion, in some of their late proceedings, to value themselves
on the relief given to the people. They did not relieve the
people. If they entertained such intentions, why did they
order the obnoxious taxes to be paid? The people relieved
themselves in spite of the Assembly.

But waiving all discussion on the parties who may claim
the merit of this fallacious relief, has there been, in effect, any
relief to the people in any form? Mr. Bailly, one of the
grand agents of paper circulation, lets you into the nature of
this relief. His speech to the National Assembly contained
a high and laboured panegyric on the inhabitants of Paris,
for the constancy and unbroken resolution with which they
have borne their distress and misery. A fine picture of pub-
lic felicity ! What ! great courage and unconquerable firm-
ness of mind to endure benefits, and sustain redress? One
would think from the speech of this learned lord mayor, that

392 EDMUND BURKE

the Parisians, for this twelvemonth past, had been suffering
the straits of some dreadful blockade ; that Henry the Fourth
had been stopping up the avenues to their supply, and Sully
thundering with his ordnance at the gates of Paris; when
in reality they are besieged by no other enemies than their
own madness and folly, their own credulity and perverseness.
But Mr. Bailly will sooner thaw the eternal ice of his Atlan-
tic regions, than restore the central heat to Paris, whilst it
remains " smitten with the cold, dry, petrific mace " of a
false and unfeeling philosophy. Some time after this speech,
that is, on the thirteenth of last August, the same magis-
trate, giving an account of his government at the bar of the
same Assembly, expresses himself as follows : " In the month
of July, 1789," [the period of everlasting commemoration,]
"the finances of the city of Paris were yet in good order;
the expenditure was counterbalanced by the receipt, and she
had at that time a million" [forty thousand pounds sterling]
" in bank. The expenses which she has been constrained to
incur, subsequent to the Revolution, amount to 2,500,000
livres. From these expenses, and the great falling off in the
product of the free gifts, not only a momentary, but a total,
want of money has taken place." This is the Paris, upon
whose nourishment, in the course of the last year, such im-
mense sums, drawn from the vitals of all France, have been
expended. As long as Paris stands in the place of ancient
Rome, so long she will be maintained by the subject provinces.
It is an evil inevitably attendant on the dominion of sovereign
democratic republics. As it happened in Rome, it may sur-
vive that republican domination which gave rise to it. In
that case despotism itself must submit to the vices of popu-
larity. Rome, under her emperors, united the evils of both
systems ; and this unnatural combination was one great cause
of her ruin.

To tell the people that they are relieved by the dilapida-
tion of their public estate, is a cruel and insolent imposition.
Statesmen, before they valued themselves on the relief given
to the people by the destruction of their revenue, ought first
to have carefully attended to the solution of this problem : —
Whether it be more advantageous to the people to pay con-
siderably, and to gain in proportion; or to gain little or

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 393

nothing, and to be disburthened of all contribution? My
mind is made up to decide in favour of the first proposition.
Experience is with me, and, I believe, the best opinions also.
To keep a balance between the power of acquisition on the
part of the subject, and the demands he is to answer on the
part of the state, is the fundamental part of the skill of a
true politician. The means of acquisition are prior in time
and in arrangement. Good order is the foundation of all
good things. To be enabled to acquire, the people, without
being servile, must be tractable and obedient. The magistrate
must have his reverence, the laws their authority. The body
of the people must not find the principles of natural sub-
ordination by art rooted out of their minds. They must re-
spect that property of which they cannot partake. They
must labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and
when they find, as they commonly do, the success dispropor-
tioned to the endeavour, they must be taught their consola-
tion in the final proportions of eternal justice. Of this con-
solation whoever deprives them, deadens their industry, and
strikes at the root of all acquisition as of all conservation.
He that does this is the cruel oppressor, the merciless enemy
of the poor and wretched; at the same time that by his
wicked speculations he exposes the fruits of successful in-
dustry, and the accumulations of fortune, to the plunder of
the negligent, the disappointed, and the unprosperous.

Too many of the financiers by profession are apt to see
nothing in revenue but banks, and circulations, and annuities
on lives, and tontines, and perpetual rents, and all the small
wares of the shop. In a settled order of the state, these
things are not to be slighted, nor is the skill in them to be
held of trivial estimation. They are good, but then only
good, when they assume the effects of that settled order, and
are built upon it. But when men think that these beggarly
contrivances may supply a resource for the evils which result
from breaking up the foundations of public order, and from
causing or suffering the principles of property to be sub-
verted, they will, in the ruin of their country, leave a mel-
ancholy and lasting monument of the effect of preposterous
politics, and presumptuous, short-sighted, narrow-minded
wisdom.

394 EDMUND BURKE

The effects of the incapacity shown by the popular leaders
in all the great members of the commonwealth are to be
covered with the " all-atoning name " of liberty. In some
people I see great liberty indeed; in many, if not in the
most, an oppressive, degrading servitude. But what is liberty
without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of
all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without
tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty
is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on
account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.
Grand, swelling sentiments of liberty I am sure I do not
despise. They warm the heart; they enlarge and liberalize
our minds; they animate our courage in a time of conflict.
Old as I am, I read the fine raptures of Lucan and Corneille
with pleasure. Neither do I wholly condemn the little arts
and devices of popularity. They facilitate the carrying of
many points of moment; they keep the people together;
they refresh the mind in its exertions; and they diffuse
occasional gaiety over the severe brow of moral freedom.
Every politician ought to sacrifice to the graces; and to join
compliance with reason. But in such an undertaking as
that in France, all these subsidiary sentiments and artifices
are of little avail. To make a government requires no great
prudence. Settle the seat of power; teach obedience: and
the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is
not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein.
But to form a free government ; that is, to temper together
these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one con-
sistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sa-
gacious, powerful, and combining mind. This I do not
find in those who take the lead in the National Assembly.
Perhaps they are not so miserably deficient as they appear.
I rather believe it. It would put them below the common
level of human understanding. But when the leaders choose
to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their
talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service.
They will become flatterers instead of legislators ; the instru-
ments, not the guides, of the people. If any of them should
happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and
defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 395

outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more
splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity
to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue
of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors;
until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him
to temper, and moderate, on some occasions, the popular
leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines,
and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any
sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.

But am I so unreasonable as to see nothing at all that
deserves commendation in the indefatigable labours of this
Assembly? I do not deny that, among an infinite number of
acts of violence and folly, some good may have been done.
They who destroy everything certainly will remove some
grievance. They who make everything new, have a chance
that they may establish something beneficial. To give them
credit for what they have done in virtue of the authority
they have usurped, or which can excuse them in the crimes by
which that authority has been acquired, it must appear, that
the same things could not have been accomplished without
producing such a revolution. Most assuredly they might;
because almost every one of the regulations made by them,
which is not very equivocal, was either in the cession of the
king, voluntarily made at the meeting of the states, or in the
concurrent instructions to the orders. Some usages have
been abolished on just grounds; but they were such, that if
they had stood as they were to all eternity, they would little
detract from the happiness and prosperity of any state. The
improvements of the National Assembly are superficial, their
errors fundamental.

Whatever they are, I wish my countrymen rather to rec-
ommend to our neighbours the example of the British
constitution, than to take models from them for the improve-
ment of our own. In the former they have got an invaluable
treasure. They are not, I think, without some causes of
apprehension and complaint ; but these they do not owe to
their constitution, but to their own conduct. I think our
happy situation owing to our constitution ; but owing to the
whole of it, and not to any part singly ; owing in a great
measure to what we have left standing in our several reviews

396 EDMUND BURKE

and reformations, as well as to what we have altered or su-
peradded. Our people will find employment enough for a
truly patriotic, free, and independent spirit, in guarding what
they possess from violation. I would not exclude alteration
neither ; but even when I changed, it should be to preserve.
I should be led to my remedy by a great grievance. In what
I did, I should follow the example of our ancestors. I would
make the reparation as nearly as possible in the style of the
building. A politic caution, a guarded circumspection, a
moral rather than a complexional timidity, were among the
ruling principles of our forefathers in their most decided
conduct. Not being illuminated with the light of which the
gentlemen of France tell us they have got so abundant a
share, they acted under a strong impression of the ignorance
and fallibility of mankind. He that had made them thus
fallible, rewarded them for having in their conduct attended
to their nature. Let us imitate their caution, if we wish to
deserve their fortune, or to retain their bequests. Let us
add, if we please, but let us preserve what they have left ; and
standing on the firm ground of the British constitution, let
us be satisfied to admire, rather than attempt to follow in
their desperate flights, the aeronauts of France.

I have told you candidly my sentiments. I think they are
not likely to alter yours. I do know that they ought.
You are young; you cannot guide, but must follow the
fortune of your country. But hereafter they may be of
some use to you, in some future form which your common-
wealth may take. In the present it can hardly remain; but
before its final settlement it may be obliged to pass, as one
of our poets says, " through great varieties of untried being,"
and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and
blood.

I have little to recommend my opinions but long observa-
tion and much impartiality. They come from one who has
been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness ; and who in
his last acts does not wish to belie the tenour of his life.
They come from one, almost the whole of whose public ex-
ertion has been a struggle for the liberty of others ; from
one in whose breast no anger durable or vehement has ever
been kindled, but by what he considered as tyranny ; and who

ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 397

snatches from his share in the endeavours which are used by
good men to discredit opulent oppression, the hours he has
employed on your affairs ; and who in so doing persuades
himself he has not departed from his usual office: they
come from one who desires honours, distinctions, and emol-
uments, but little; and who expects them not at all; who
has no contempt for fame, and no fear of obloquy; who
shuns contention, though he will hazard an opinion : from
one who wishes to preserve consistency, but who would pre-
serve consistency by varying his means to secure the unity
of his end ; and, when the equipoise of the vessel in which
he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side,
is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that
which may preserve its equipoise.

A LETTER

FROM

THE RIGHT HON. EDMUND BURKE
TO A NOBLE LORD

ON THE ATTACKS MADE UPON HIM AND HIS PENSION, IN THE

HOUSE OF LORDS, BY THE DUKE OF BEDFORD AND THE

EARL OF LAUDERDALE, EARLY IN THE PRESENT

SESSION OF PARLIAMENT

1796

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

When Burke retired from Parliament at the close of his
labors in the trial of Warren Hastings, it was proposed to raise
him to the peerage as Lord Beaconsfield; but before the matter
came to a point, Burke's son Richard, in whom all his hopes and
affections were centered, died and left his father desolate. A
hereditary honor was no longer in question, and it was arranged,
since Burke was now, as always, in financial difficulties , that he
should get £1,200 a year from the Civil List so long as his wife
lived, and that the King should propose to Parliament a more
liberal recognition of his services. But Pitt, probably in order
to avoid unseemly opposition from Burke's enemies, arranged a
grant of £2.500 a year directly from the Crown, so that Burke,
though glad to get the money, was disappointed in its not being
a more broadly national reward.

Pitt's caution seems to have been justified, for in the next
year, when party feeling was running high, the Duke of Bedford
and Lord Lauderdale seised upon the granting of the pension as
a weapon with which to attack the administration. Burke at
once saw, in the fact that the assault came from the head of the
house of Bedford, an opportunity for the most telling repartee,
and this opportunity he availed himself of with tremendous
effect. As politics, it gives us Burke's own view of his record as
an administrator ; as literature, the piece is probably unsurpassed
in the language for lofty and scornful invective.

400

A LETTER

FROM

THE RIGHT HON. EDMUND BURKE

TO A NOBLE LORD

[1796]
My Lord,

I COULD hardly flatter myself with the hope, that so
very early in the season I should have to acknowledge
obligations to the Duke of Bedford, and to the Earl of
Lauderdale. These noble persons have lost no time in
conferring upon me that sort of honour, which it is alone
within their competence, and which it is certainly most con-
genial to their nature, and to their manners, to bestow.

To be ill spoken of, in whatever language they speak, by
the zealots of the new sect in philosophy and politics, of
which these noble persons think so charitably, and of which
others think so justly, to me, is no matter of uneasiness or
surprise. To have incurred the displeasure of the Duke of
Orleans or the Duke of Bedford, to fall under the censure of
citizen Brissot or of his friend the Earl of Lauderdale, I
ought to consider as proofs, not the least satisfactory, that I
have produced some part to the effect I proposed by my en-
deavours. I have laboured hard to earn, what the noble
lords are generous enough to pay. Personal offence I have
given them none. The part they take against me is from
zeal to the cause. It is well ! It is perfectly well ! I have
to do homage to their justice. I have to thank the Bedfords
and the Lauderdales for having so faithfully and so fully ac-
quitted towards me whatever arrear of debt was left undis-
charged by the Priestleys and the Paines.

Some, perhaps, may think them executors in their own
wrong: I at least have nothing to complain of. They have

401

402 EDMUND BURKE

gone beyond the demands of justice. They have been (a
little perhaps beyond their intention) favourable to me.
They have been the means of bringing out, by their invec-
tives, the handsome things which Lord Grenville has had
the goodness and condescension to say in my behalf. Retired
as I am from the world, and from all its affairs and all its
pleasures, I confess it does kindle, in my nearly extinguished
feelings, a very vivid satisfaction to be so attacked and so
commended. It is soothing to my wounded mind, to be com-
mended by an able, vigorous, and well-informed statesman,
and at the very moment when he stands forth with a manli-
ness and resolution, worthy of himself and of his cause, for
the preservation of the person and government of our sover-
eign, and therein for the security of the laws, the liberties,
the morals, and the lives of his people. To be in any fair
way connected with such things, is indeed a distinction.
No philosophy can make me above it; no melancholy can
depress me so low, as to make me wholly insensible to such
an honour.

Why will they not let me remain in obscurity and in-
action? Are they apprehensive, that if an atom of me
remains, the sect has something to fear? Must I be anni-
hilated, lest, like old John Zisca's, my skin might be made
into a drum, to animate Europe to eternal battle, against a
tyranny that threatens to overwhelm all Europe, and all the
human race?

My Lord, it is a subject of awful meditation. Before this
of France, the annals of all time have not furnished an in-
stance of a complete revolution. That Revolution seems to
have extended even to the constitution of the mind of man.
It has this of wonderful in it, that it resembles what Lord
Verulam says of the operations of nature. It was perfect,
not only in its elements and principles, but in all its mem-
bers and its organs from the very beginning. The moral
scheme of France furnishes the only pattern ever known,
which they who admire will instantly resemble. It is indeed
an inexhaustible repertory of one kind of examples. In my
wretched condition, though hardly to be classed with the
living, I am not safe from them. They have tigers to fall
upon animated strength. They have hyenas to prey upon

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 403

carcasses. The national menagerie is collected by the first
physiologists of the time; and it is defective in no descrip-
tion of savage nature. They pursue even such as me, into
the obscurest retreats, and haul them before their revolution-
ary tribunals. Neither sex, nor age, nor the sanctuary of
the tomb, is sacred to them. They have so determined a
hatred to all privileged orders, that they deny even to the
departed the sad immunities of the grave. They are not
wholly without an object. Their turpitude purveys to their
malice ; and they unplumb the dead for bullets to assassi-
nate the living. If all revolutionists were not proof against
all caution, I should recommend it to their consideration,
that no persons were ever known in history, either sacred or
profane, to vex the sepulchre, and, by their sorceries, to call
up the prophetic dead, with any other event, than the pre-
diction of their own disastrous fate. — " Leave me, oh leave
me to repose ! "

In one thing I can excuse the Duke of Bedford for his
attack upon me and my mortuary pension. He cannot readily
comprehend the transaction he condemns. What I have
obtained was the fruit of no bargain; the production, of
no intrigue ; the result of no compromise ; the effect of
no solicitation. The first suggestion of it never came from
me, mediately or immediately, to his Majesty or any of his
ministers. It was long known that the instant my engage-
ments would permit it, and before the heaviest of all calami-
ties had for ever condemned me to obscurity and sorrow, I
had resolved on a total retreat. I had executed that design.
I was entirely out of the way of serving or of hurting any
statesman, or any party, when the ministers so generously
and so nobly carried into effect the spontaneous bounty of
the crown. Both descriptions have acted as became them.
When I could no longer serve them, the ministers have con-
sidered my situation. When I could no longer hurt them,
the revolutionists have trampled on my infirmity. My grati-
tude, I trust, is equal to the manner in which the benefit
was conferred. It came to me indeed, at a time of life, and
in a state of mind and body, in which no circumstance of
fortune could afford me any real pleasure. But this was no
fault in the royal donor, or in his ministers, who were pleased,

404 EDMUND BURKE

in acknowledging the merits of an invalid servant of the
public, to assuage the sorrows of a desolate old man.

It would ill become me to boast of anything. It would as
ill become me, thus called upon, to depreciate the value of a
long life, spent with unexampled toil in the service of my
country. Since the total body of my services, on account of
the industry which was shown in them, and the fairness of
my intentions, have obtained the acceptance of my sovereign,
it would be absurd in me to range myself on the side of the
Duke of Bedford and the corresponding society, or, as far as
in me lies, to permit a dispute on the rate at which the
authority appointed by our constitution to estimate such
things has been pleased to set them.

Loose libels ought to be passed by in silence and con-
tempt. By me they have been so always. I knew that as
long as I remained in public, I should live down the calumnies
of malice, and the judgments of ignorance. If I happened
to be now and then in the wrong, (as who is not?) like all
other men, I must bear the consequence of my faults and
my mistakes. The libels of the present day are just of the
same stuff as the libels of the past. But they derive an im-
portance from the rank of the persons they come from, and
the gravity of the place where they were uttered. In some
way or other I ought to take some notice of them. To as-
sert myself thus traduced is not vanity or arrogance. It is
a demand of justice; it is a demonstration of gratitude. If
I am unworthy, the ministers are worse than prodigal. On
that hypothesis, I perfectly agree with the Duke of Bedford.

For whatever I have been (I am now no more) I put my-
self on my country. I ought to be allowed a reasonable free-
dom, because I stand upon my deliverance ; and no culprit
ought to plead in irons. Even in the utmost latitude of
defensive liberty, I wish to preserve all possible decorum.
Whatever it may be in the eyes of these noble persons
themselves, to me their situation calls for the most pro-
found respect. If I should happen to trespass a little, which
I trust I shall not, let it always be supposed, that a con-
fusion of characters may produce mistakes ; that, in the
masquerades of the grand carnival of our age, whimsical ad-
ventures happen; odd things are said and pass off. If I

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 405

should fail a single point in the high respect I owe to those
illustrious persons, I cannot be supposed to mean the Duk=
of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale of the House of
Peers, but the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale
of Palace- Yard ! — The Dukes and Earls of Brentford. There
they are on the pavement; there they seem to come nearer
to my humble level ; and, virtually at least, to have waived
their high privilege.

Making this protestation, I refuse all revolutionary tribu-
nals, where men have been put to death for no other reason,
than that they had obtained favours from the Crown. I
claim, not the letter, but the spirit, of the old English law,
that is, to be tried by my peers. I decline his Grace's juris-
diction as a judge. I challenge the Duke of Bedford as a
juror to pass upon the value of my services. Whatever his
natural parts may be, I cannot recognize, in his few and idle
years, the competence to judge of my long and laborious
life. If I can help it, he shall not be on the inquest of my
quantum meruit. Poor rich man! He can hardly know
anything of public industry in its exertions, or can estimate
its compensations when its work is done. I have no doubt of
his Grace's readiness in all the calculations of vulgar arith-
metic; but I shrewdly suspect, that he is little studied in
the theory of moral proportions ; and has never learned the
rule of three in the arithmetic of policy and state.

His Grace thinks I have obtained too much. I answer,
that my exertions, whatever they have been, were such as
no hopes of pecuniary reward could possibly excite; and
no pecuniary compensation can possibly reward them. Be-
tween money and such services, if done by abler men
than I am, there is no common principle of comparison ;
they are quantities incommensurable. Money is made for
the comfort and convenience of animal life. It cannot
be a reward for what mere animal life must indeed sus-
tain, but never can inspire. With submission to his
Grace, I have not had more than sufficient. As to any
noble use, I trust I know how to employ, as well as he, a
much greater fortune than he possesses. In a more confined
application, I certainly stand in need of every kind of relief
and easement much more than he does. When I say I have

406 EDMUND BURKE

not received more than I deserve, is this the language I hold
to Majesty? No! Far, very far, from it ! Before that pres-
ence, I claim no merit at all. Everything towards me is
favour, and bounty. One style to a gracious benefactor;
another to a proud and insulting foe.

His Grace is pleased to aggravate my guilt, by charging
my acceptance of his Majesty's grant as a departure from my
ideas, and the spirit of my conduct with regard to economy.
If it be, my ideas of economy were false and ill-founded.
But they are the Duke of Bedford's ideas of economy I have
contradicted, and not my own. If he means to allude to
certain bills brought in by me on a message from the throne
in 1782, I tell him that there is nothing in my conduct that
can contradict either the letter or the spirit of those acts.
Does he mean the pay-office act? I take it for granted he
does not. The act to which he alludes, is, I suppose, the
establishment act. I greatly doubt whether his Grace has
ever read the one or the other. The first of these systems
cost me, with every assistance which my then situation gave
me, pains incredible. I found an opinion common through
all the offices, and general in the public at large, that it
would prove impossible to reform and methodize the office of
paymaster-general. I undertook it, however; and I suc-
ceeded in my undertaking. Whether the military service, or
whether the general economy of our finances, have profited
by that act, I leave to those who are acquainted with the
army, and with the treasury, to judge.

An opinion full as general prevailed also at the same time,
that nothing could be done for the regulation of the civil-list
establishment. The very attempt to introduce method into
it, and any limitations to its services, was held absurd. I had
not seen the man, who so much as suggested one economical
principle, or an economical expedient, upon that subject.
Nothing but coarse amputation, or coarser taxation, were
then talked of, both of them without design, combination, or
the least shadow of principle. Blind and headlong zeal, or
factious fury, were the whole contribution brought by the
most noisy on that occasion, towards the satisfaction of the
public, or the relief of the Crown.

Let me tell my youthful censor, that the necessities of that

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 407

time required something very different from what others then
suggested, or what his Grace now conceives. Let me inform
him, that it was one of the most critical periods in our annals.

Astronomers have supposed, that if a certain comet, whose
path intercepted the ecliptic, had met the earth in some (I
forget what) sign, it would have whirled us along with it, in
its eccentric course, into God knows what regions of heat
and cold. Had the portentous comet of the rights of man,
(which " from its horrid hair shakes pestilence and war," and
"with fear of change perplexes monarchs,") had that comet
crossed upon us in that internal state of England, nothing
human could have prevented our being irresistibly hurried,
out of the highway of heaven, into all the vices, crimes, hor-
rors, and miseries of the French Revolution.

Happily, France was not then Jacobinised. Her hostility
was at a good distance. We had a limb cut off; but we pre-
served the body. We lost our colonies; but we kept our
constitution. There was, indeed, much intestine heat; there
was a dreadful fermentation. Wild and savage insurrection
quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the name
of reform. Such was the distemper of the public mind, that
there was no madman, in his maddest ideas, and maddest
projects, who might not count upon numbers to support his
principles and execute his designs.

Many of the changes, by a great misnomer called parlia-
mentary reforms, went, not in the intention of all the pro-
fessors and supporters of them, undoubtedly, but went in their
certain, and, in my opinion, not very remote effect, home to
the utter destruction of the constitution of this kingdom.
Had they taken place, not France, but England, would have
had the honour of leading up the death-dance of democratic
revolution. Other projects, exactly coincident in time with
those, struck at the very existence of the kingdom under any
constitution. There are who remember the blind fury of
some, and the lamentable helplessness of others; here, a tor-
pid confusion, from a panic fear of the danger; there, the
same inaction from a stupid insensibility to it; here, well-
wishers to the mischief; there, indifferent lookers-on. At
the same time, a sort of national convention, dubious in its
nature, and perilous in its example, nosed parliament in the

408 EDMUND BURKE

very seat of its authority ; sat with a sort of superintendence
over it; and little less than dictated to it, not only laws, but
the very form and essence of legislature itself. In Ireland
things ran in a still more eccentric course. Government
was unnerved, confounded, and in a manner suspended. Its
equipoise was totally gone. I do not mean to speak disre-
spectfully of Lord North. He was a man of admirable parts ;
of general knowledge; of a versatile understanding fitted for
every sort of business; of infinite wit and pleasantry; of a
delightful temper; and with a mind most perfectly disin-
terested. But it would be only to degrade myself by a weak
adulation, and not to honour the memory of a great man, to
deny that he wanted something of the vigilance and spirit of
command, that the time required. Indeed, a darkness, next
to the fog of this awful day, loured over the whole region.
For a little time the helm appeared abandoned —

Ipse diem noctemque negat discernere carlo,
Nee meminisse vice media Palinurus in unda.

At that time I was connected with men of high place in
the community. They loved liberty as much as the Duke of
Bedford can do : and they understood it at least as well.
Perhaps their politics, as usual, took a tincture from their
character, and they cultivated what they loved. The liberty
they pursued was a liberty inseparable from order, from
virtue, from morals, and from religion ; and was neither
hypocritically nor fanatically followed. They did not wish,
that liberty, in itself one of the first of blessings, should in
its perversion become the greatest curse which could fall
upon mankind. To preserve the constitution entire, and
practically equal to all the great ends of its formation, not
in one single part, but in all its parts, was to them the first
object. Popularity and power they regarded alike. These
were with them only different means of obtaining that ob-
ject; and had no preference over each other in their minds,
but as one or the other might afford a surer or a less certain
prospect of arriving at that end. It is some consolation to
me in the cheerless gloom, which darkens the evening of my
life, that with them I commenced my political career, and
never for a moment, in reality, nor in appearance, for any

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 409

length of time, was separated from their good wishes and
good opinion.

By what accident it matters not, nor upon what desert,
but just then, and in the midst of that hunt of obloquy,
which ever has pursued me with a full cry through life, I
had obtained a very considerable degree of public confidence.
I know well enough how equivocal a test this kind of popular
opinion forms of the merit that obtained it. I am no stranger
to the insecurity of its tenure. I do not boast of it. It is
mentioned to sliow, not how highly I prize the thing, but
my right to value the use I made of it. I endeavoured to
turn that short-lived advantage to myself into a permanent
benefit to my country. Far am I from detracting from the
merit of some gentlemen, out of office or in it, on that occa-
sion. No ! — It is not my way to refuse a full and heaped
measure of justice to the aids that I receive. I have, through
life, been willing to give everything to others; and to re-
serve nothing for myself, but the inward conscience, that I
had omitted no pains to discover, to animate, to discipline,
to direct the abilities of the country for its service, and to
place them in the best light to improve their age, or to adorn
it. This conscience I have. I have never suppressed any
man; never checked him for a moment in his course, by any
jealousy or by any policy. I was always ready, to the height
of my means, (and they were always infinitely below my de-
sires,) to forward those abilities which overpowered my own.
He is an ill-furnished undertaker, who has no machinery but
his own hands to work with. Poor in my own faculties, I
ever thought myself rich in theirs. In that period of diffi-
culty and danger, more especially, I consulted, and sincerely
co-operated with, men of all parties, who seemed disposed to
the same ends, or to any main part of them. Nothing to
prevent disorder was omitted: when it appeared, nothing to
subdue it was left uncounselled, nor unexecuted, as far as I
could prevail. At the time I speak of, and having a momen-
tary lead, so aided and so encouraged, and as a feeble instru-
ment in a mighty hand — I do not say I saved my country;
I am sure I did my country important service. There were
few, indeed, that did not at that time acknowledge it, and
that time was thirteen years ago. It was but one voice, that

410 EDMUND BURKE

no man in the kingdom better deserved an honourable pro-
vision should be made for him.

So much for my general conduct through the whole of the
portentous crisis from 1780 to 1782, and the general sense
then entertained of that conduct by my country. But my
character, as a reformer, in the particular instances which
the Duke of Bedford refers to, is so connected in principle
with my opinions on the hideous changes, which have since
barbarized France, and, spreading thence, threaten the politi-
cal and moral order of the whole world, that it seems to
demand something of a more detailed discussion.

My economical reforms were not, as his Grace may think,
the suppression of a paltry pension or employment, more or
less. Economy in my plans was, as it ought to be, secondary,
subordinate, instrumental. I acted on state principles. I
found a great distemper in the commonwealth ; and, accord-
ing to the nature of the evil and of the object, I treated it.
The malady was deep ; it was complicated, in the causes and
in the symptoms. Throughout it was full of contra-indicants.
On one hand government, daily growing more invidious from
an apparent increase of the means of strength, was every
day growing more contemptible by real weakness. Nor was
this dissolution confined to government commonly so called.
It extended to parliament; which was losing not a little in
its dignity and estimation, by an opinion of its not acting
on worthy motives. On the other hand, the desires of the
people (partly natural and partly infused into them by art)
appeared in so wild and inconsiderate a manner, with regard
to the economical object, (for I set aside for a moment the
dreadful tampering with the body of the constitution itself,)
that, if their petitions had literally been complied with, the
state would have been convulsed; and a gate would have
been opened, through which all property might be sacked
and ravaged. Nothing could have saved the public from
the mischiefs of the false reform but its absurdity; which
would soon have brought itself, and with it all real reform,
into discredit. This would have left a rankling wound in the
hearts of the people, who would know they had failed in the
accomplishment of their wishes, but who, like the rest of
mankind in all ages, would impute the blame to anything

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 411

rather than to their own proceedings. But there were then
persons in the world, who nourished complaint ; and would
have been thoroughly disappointed if the people were ever
satisfied. I was not of that humour. I wished that they
should be satisfied. It was my aim to give to the people the
substance of what I knew they desired, and what I thought
was right, whether they desired it or not, before it had been
modified for them into senseless petitions. I knew that
there is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with
ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will con-
stantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction between
change and reformation. The former alters the substance of
the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential
good, as well as of all the accidental evil, annexed to them.
Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of
the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not con-
tradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired,
cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is, not a
change in the substance, or in the primary modification,
of the object, but, a direct application of a remedy to the
grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all
is sure. It stops there ; and, if it fails, the substance which
underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where
it was.

All this, in effect, I think, but am not sure, I have said
elsewhere. It cannot at this time be too often repeated;
line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into
the currency of a proverb, to innovate is not to reform. The
French revolutionists complained of everything ; they refused
to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all
unchanged. The consequences are before us, — not in remote
history ; not in future prognostication : they are about us ;
they are upon us. They shake the public security; they
menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the growth of the
young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they
stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to
the country. Our business is interrupted; our repose is
troubled; our pleasures are saddened; our very studies are
poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse
than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadful in-

412 EDMUND BURKE

novation. The revolution harpies of France, sprung from
night and hell, or from that chaotic anarchy, which generates
equivocally " all monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-
like, adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch
them in the nest of every neighbouring state. These obscene
harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what divine at-
tributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of
prey, (both mothers and daughters,) flutter over our heads,
and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent,
unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their
filthy offal. 1

If his Grace can contemplate the result of this complete
innovation, or, as some friends of his will call it, reform, in
the whole body of its solidity and compounded mass, at which,
as Hamlet says, the face of heaven glows with horror and in-
dignation, and which, in truth, makes every reflecting mind,
and every feeling heart, perfectly thought-sick, without a
thorough abhorrence of everything they say, and everything
they do, I am amazed at the morbid strength or the natural
infirmity of his mind.

It was then not my love, but my hatred, to innovation,
that produced my plan of reform. Without troubling my-
self with the exactness of the logical diagram, I considered
them as things substantially opposite. It was to prevent
that evil, that I proposed the measures, which his Grace is
pleased, and I am not sorry he is pleased, to recall to my
recollection. I had (what I hope that noble duke will re-
member in all its operations) a state to preserve, as well as a
state to reform. I had a people to gratify, but not to in-
flame, or to mislead. I do not claim half the credit for what
I did, as for what I prevented from being done. In that
situation of the public mind, I did not undertake, as was

1 Tristius haud illis monstrum, nee saevior ulla
Pestis, et ira Deum Stygiis sese extulit undis.
Virginei volucrum vultus; faedissima ventris
Proluvies; unensque manus; et pallida semper
Ora fame-
Here the poet breaks the line, because he (and that he is Virgil) had not
verse or language to describe that monster even as he had conceived her.
Had he lived in our time, he would have been more overpowered with the
reality than he was with the imagination. Virgil only knew the horror of
the times before him. Had he lived to see the revolutionists and con-
stitutionalists of France, he would have had more horrid and disgusting
features of his harpies to describe, and more frequent failures in the
attempt to describe them.

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 413

then proposed, to new-model the House of Commons or the
House of Lords ; or to change the authority under which
any officer of the Crown acted, who was suffered at all to
exist. Crown, Lords, Commons, judicial system, system of
administration, existed as they had existed before; and in
the mode and manner in which they had always existed.
My measures were, what I then truly stated them to the
House to be, in their intent, healing and mediatorial. , A
complaint was made of too much influence in the House of
Commons; I reduced it in both Houses; and I gave my
reasons article by article for every reduction, and showed
why I thought it safe for the service of the state. I heaved
the lead every inch of way I made. A disposition to expense
was complained of; to that I opposed, not mere retrench-
ment, but a system of economy, which would make a random
expense, without plan or foresight, in future not easily
practicable. I proceeded upon principles of research to put
me in possession of my matter ; on principles of method to
regulate it ; and on principles in the human mind and in civil
affairs to secure and perpetuate the operation. I conceived
nothing arbitrarily ; nor proposed anything to be done by
the will and pleasure of others, or my own ; but by reason,
and by reason only. I have ever abhorred, since the first
dawn of my understanding to this its obscure twilight, all
the operations of opinion, fancy, inclination, and will, in the
affairs of government, where only a sovereign reason, para-
mount to all forms of legislation and administration, should
dictate. Government is made for the very purpose of oppo-
sing that reason to will and caprice, in the reformers or in the
reformed, in the governors or in the governed, in kings, in
senates, or in people.

On a careful review, therefore, and analysis, of all the
component parts of the civil list, and on weighing them
against each other, in order to make, as much as possible, all
of them a subject of estimate, (the foundation and corner-
stone of all regular provident economy,) it appeared to me
evident, that this was impracticable, whilst that part, called
the pension list, was totally discretionary in its amount.
For this reason, and for this only, I proposed to reduce it,
both in its gross quantity, and in its larger individual pro-

414 EDMUND BURKE

portions, to a certainty; lest, if it were left without a general
limit, it might eat up the civil-list service; if suffered to be
granted in portions too great for the fund, it might defeat
its own end; and, by unlimited allowances to some, it might
disable the Crown in means of providing for others. The
pension list was to be kept as a sacred fund; but it could
not be kept as a constant, open fund, sufficient for growing
demands, if some demands would wholly devour it. The
tenour of the act will show that it regarded the civil list only,
the reduction of which to some sort of estimate was my great
object.

No other of the Crown funds did I meddle with, because
they had not the same relations. This of the four and a
half per cents, does his Grace imagine had escaped me, or
had escaped all the men of business, who acted with me in
those regulations? I knew that such a fund existed, and
that pensions had been always granted on it, before his
Grace was born. This fund was full in my eye. It was full
in the eyes of those who worked with me. It was left on
principle. On principle I did what was then done; and on
principle what was left undone was omitted. I did not dare
to rob the nation of all funds to reward merit. If I pressed
this point too close, I acted contrary to the avowed princi-
ples on which I went. Gentlemen are very fond of quoting
me; but if any one thinks it worth his while to know the
rules that guided me in my plan of reform, he will read my
printed speech on that subject; at least what is contained
from page 230 to page 241 in the second volume of the col-
lection which a friend has given himself the trouble to make
of my publications. Be this as it may, these two bills,
(though achieved with the greatest labour, and management
of every sort, both within and without the House,) were
only a part, I but a small part, of a very large system,
comprehending all the objects I stated in opening my propo-
sition, and, indeed, many more, which I just hinted at in
my speech to the electors of Bristol, when I was put out of
that representation. All these, in some state or other of for-
wardness, I have long had by me.

But do I justify his Majesty's grace on these grounds? I
think them the least of my services ! The time gave them

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 415

an occasional value. What I have done in the way of politi-
cal economy was far from confined to this body of measures.
I did not come into parliament to con my lesson. I had
earned my pension before I set my foot in St. Stephen's
chapel. I was prepared and disciplined to this political war-
fare. The first session I sat in parliament, I found it
necessary to analyze the whole commercial, financial, con-
stitutional, and foreign interests of Great Britain and its
empire. A great deal was then done; and more, far more,
would have been done, if more had been permitted by events.
Then, in the vigour of my manhood, my constitution sunk
under my labour. Had I then died, (and I seemed to myself
very near death,) I had then earned for those who belonged
to me, more than the Duke of Bedford's ideas of service are
of power to estimate. But, in truth, these services I am
called to account for are not those on which I value myself
the most. If I were to call for a reward, (which I have
never done,) it should be for those in which for fourteen
years, without intermission, I showed the most industry, and
had the least success ; I mean in the affairs of India. They
are those on which I value myself the most; most for the
importance; most for the labour; most for the judgment;
most for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit. Others
may value them most for the intention. In that, surely, they
are not mistaken.

Does his Grace think, that they, who advised the Crown
to make my retreat easy, considered me only as an
economist? That, well understood, however, is a good deal.
If I had not deemed it of some value, I should not have made
political economy an object of my humble studies, from my
very early youth to near the end of my service in parlia-
ment, even before (at least to any knowledge of mine) it
had employed the thoughts of speculative men in other parts
of Europe. At that time it was still in its infancy in Eng-
land, where, in the last century, it had its origin. Great and
learned men thought my studies were not wholly thrown
away, and deigned to communicate with me now and then
on some particulars of their immortal works. Something
of these studies may appear incidentally in some of the
earliest things I published. The House has been witness to

416 EDMUND BURKE

their effect, and has profited of them more or less for above
eight and twenty years.

To their estimate I leave the matter. I was not, like his
Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into a
legislator ; " Nitor in adversnm " is the motto for a man like
me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one
of the arts, that recommend men to the favour and protec-
tion of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool.
As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts, by
imposing on the understandings, of the people. At every
step of my progress in life, (for in every step was I
traversed and opposed,) and at every turnpike I met, I was
obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove
my sole title to the honour of being useful to my country, by
a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws,
and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at
home. Otherwise no rank, no toleration, even for me. I
had no arts but manly arts. On them I have stood, and,
please God, in spite of the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of
Lauderdale, to the last gasp will I stand.

Had his Grace condescended to inquire concerning the
person, whom he has not thought it below him to reproach,
he might have found that, in the whole course of my life, I
have never, on any pretence of economy, or on any other
pretence, so much as in a single instance, stood between any
man and his reward of service, or his encouragement in use-
ful talent and pursuit, from the highest of those services and
pursuits to the lowest. On the contrary I have, on an hun-
dred occasions, exerted myself with singular zeal to forward
every man's even tolerable pretensions. I have more than
once had good-natured reprehensions from my friends for
carrying the matter to something bordering on abuse. This
line of conduct, whatever its merits might be, was partly
owing to natural disposition ; but I think full as much to
reason and principle. I looked on the consideration of pub-
lic service, or public ornament, to be real and very justice:
and I ever held a scanty and penurious justice to partake
of the nature of a wrong. I held it to be, in its conse-
quences, the worst economy in the world. In saving money,
I soon can count up all the good I do; but when, by a cold

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 417

penury, I blast the abilities of a nation, and stunt the growth
of its active energies, the ill I may do is beyond all calcula-
tion. Whether it be too much or too little, whatever I have
done has been general and systematic. I have never entered
into those trifling, vexatious, and oppressive details, that
have been falsely, and most ridiculously, laid to my charge.

Did I blame the pensions given to Mr. Barre and Mr.
Dunning between the proposition and execution of my plan?
No ! surely no ! Those pensions were within my principles.
I assert it, those gentlemen deserved their pensions, their
titles — all they had; and more had they had, I should have
been but pleased the more. They were men of talents; they
were men of service. I put the profession of the law out of
the question in one of them. It is a service that rewards
itself. But their public service, though, from their abilities
unquestionably of more value than mine, in its quantity and
its duration was not to be mentioned with it. But I never
could drive a hard bargain in my life, concerning any matter
whatever; and least of all do I know how to haggle and
huckster with merit. Pension for myself I obtained none;
nor did I solicit any. Yet I was loaded with hatred for
everything that was withheld, and with obloquy for
everything that was given. I was thus left to support the
grants of a name ever dear to me, and ever venerable to the
world, in favour of those, who were no friends of mine or
of his, against the rude attacks of those who were at that
time friends to the grantees, and their own zealous parti-
sans. I have never heard the Earl of Lauderdale complain of
these pensions. He finds nothing wrong till he comes to me.
This is impartiality, in the true, modern, revolutionary style.

Whatever I did at that time, so far as it regarded order
and economy, is stable and eternal; as all principles must be.
A particular order of things may be altered; order itself
cannot lose its value. As to other particulars, they are
variable by time and by circumstances. Laws of regulation
are not fundamental laws. The public exigencies are the
masters of all such laws. They rule the laws, and are not to
be ruled by them. They who exercise the legislative power
at the time must judge.

It may be new to his Grace, but I beg leave to tell him,
hc n— vol. xxiv

418 EDMUND BURKE

that mere parsimony is not economy. It is separable in
theory from it; and in fact it may, or it may not, be a part
of economy, according to circumstances. Expense, and
great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. If
parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that
virtue, there is however another and a higher economy.
Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving,
but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no
sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no
judgment. Mere instinct, and that not an instinct of the
noblest kind, may produce this false economy in perfection.
The other economy has larger views. It demands a dis-
criminating judgment, and a firm, sagacious mind. It shuts
one door to impudent importunity, only to open another, and
a wider, to unpresuming merit. If none but meritorious
service or real talent were to be rewarded, this nation has
not wanted, and this nation will not want, the means of re-
warding all the service it ever will receive, and encouraging
all the merit it ever will produce. No state, since the foun-
dation of society, has been impoverished by that species of
profusion. Had the economy of selection and proportion
been at all times observed, we should not now have had an
overgrown Duke of Bedford, to oppress the industry of
humble men, and to limit, by the standard of his own con-
ceptions, the justice, the bounty, or, if he pleases, the charity
of the Crown.

His Grace may think as meanly as he will of my deserts
in the far greater part of my conduct in life. It is free for
him to do so. There will always be some difference of
opinion in the value of political services. But there is one
merit of mine, which he, of all men living, ought to be the
last to call in question. I have supported with very great
zeal, and I am told with some degree of success, those opin-
ions, or if his Grace likes another expression better, those
old prejudices, which buoy up the ponderous mass of his
nobility, wealth, and titles. I have omitted no exertion to
prevent him and them from sinking to that level, to which
the meretricious French faction, his Grace at least coquets
with, omit no exertion to reduce both. I have done all I
could to discountenance their inquiries into the fortunes of

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 419

those, who hold large portions of wealth without any ap-
parent merit of their own. I have strained every nerve to
keep the Duke of Bedford in that situation, which alone
makes him my superior. Your Lordship has been a witness
of the use he makes of that pre-eminence.

But be it, that this is virtue ! Be it, that there is virtue in
this well-selected rigour; yet all virtues are not equally be-
coming to all men and at all times. There are erimes,
undoubtedly there are crimes, which in all seasons of our
existence, ought to put a generous antipathy in action;
crimes that provoke an indignant justice, and call forth a
warm and animated pursuit. But all things that concern,
what I may call, the preventive police of morality, all things
merely rigid, harsh, and censorial, the antiquated moralists,
at whose feet I was brought up, would not have thought
these the fittest matter to form the favourite virtues of
young men of rank. What might have been well enough,
and have been received with a veneration mixed with awe
and terror, from an old, severe, crabbed Cato, would have
wanted something of propriety in the young Scipios, the or-
nament of the Roman nobility, in the flower of their life. But
the times, the morals, the masters, the scholars, have all un-
dergone a thorough revolution. It is a vile illiberal school,
this new French academy of the sans culottes. There is
nothing in it that is fit for a gentleman to learn.

Whatever its vogue may be, I still flatter myself, that the
parents of the growing generation will be satisfied with what
is to be taught to their children in Westminster, in Eton, or
in Winchester: I still indulge the hope that no grown gen-
tleman or nobleman of our time will think of finishing at
Mr. Thelwall's lecture whatever may have been left incom-
plete at the old universities of his country. I would give to
Lord Grenville and Mr. Pitt for a motto, what was said of a
Roman censor or praetor (or what was he?) who, in virtue
of a Senatus consultum, shut up certain academies,

" Cludere ludum impudentice jussit."

Every honest father of a family in the kingdom will rejoice
at the breaking up for the holidays, and will pray that there
may be a very long vacation in all such schools.

420 EDMUND BURKE

The awful state of the time, and not myself, or my own
justification, is my true object in what I now write; or in
what I shall ever write or say. It little signifies to the
world what becomes of such things as me, or even as the
Duke of Bedford. What I say about either of us is nothing
more than a vehicle, as you, my Lord, will easily perceive,
to convey my sentiments on matters far more worthy of
your attention. It is when I stick to my apparent first sub-
ject that I ought to apologize, not when I depart from it. I
therefore must beg your Lordship's pardon for again re-
suming it after this very short digression ; assuring you that
I shall never altogether lose sight of such matter as persons
abler than I am may turn to some profit.

The Duke of Bedford conceives, that he is obliged to call
the attention of the House of Peers to his Majesty's grant
to me, which he considers as excessive, and out of all bounds.

I know not how it has happened, but it really seems, that,
whilst his Grace was meditating his well-considered censure
upon me, he fell into a sort of sleep. Homer nods; and the
Duke of Bedford may dream; and as dreams (even his
golden dreams) are apt to be ill-pieced and incongruously
put together, his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to
me, but took the subject-matter from the Crown grants to
his own family. This is " the stuff of which his dreams are
made." In that way of putting things together his Grace
is perfectly in the right. The grants to the house of Russell
were so enormous, as not only to outrage economy, but even
to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the leviathan
among all the creatures of the Crown. He tumbles about
his unwieldy bulk; he plays and irolics in the ocean of the
royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst "he lies floating
many a rood," he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his
whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he
spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me
all over with the spray,— everything of him and about him
is from the throne. Is it for him to question the dispensa-
tion of the royal favour?

I really am at a loss to draw any sort of parallel between
the public merits of his Grace, by which he justifies the
grants he holds, and these services of mine, on the favour-

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 421

able construction of which I have obtained what his Grace
so much disapproves. In private life, I have not at all the
honour of acquaintance with the noble Duke. But I ought
to presume, and it costs me nothing to do so, that he abund-
antly deserves the esteem and love of all who live with him.
But as to public service, why truly it would not be more
ridiculous for me to compare myself in rank, in fortune, in
splendid descent, in youth, strength, or figure, with the Duke
of Bedford, than to make a parallel between his services and
my attempts to be useful to my country. It would not be
gross adulation, but uncivil irony, to say, that he has any
public merit of his own to keep alive the idea of the services,
by which his vast landed pensions were obtained. My
merits, whatever they are, are original and personal ; his are
derivative. It is his ancestor, the original pensioner, that has
laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit, which makes his
Grace so very delicate and exceptious about the merit of all
other grantees of the Crown. Had he permitted me to re-
main in quiet, I should have said, 'tis his estate; that's
enough. It is his by law; what have I to do with it or its
history? He would naturally have said on his side, 'tis this
man's fortune. — He is as good now as my ancestor was two
hundred and fifty years ago. I am a young man with very
old pensions ; he is an old man with very young pensions, —
that's all.

Why will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly
to compare my little merit with that which obtained from the
Crown those prodigies of profuse donation, by which he
tramples on the mediocrity of humble and laborious indi-
viduals ? I would willingly leave him to the herald's college,
which the philosophy of the sans-culottes (prouder by far
than all the Garters, and Norroys, and Clarencieux, and
Rouge Dragons, that ever pranced in a procession of what
his friends call aristocrats and despots) will abolish with
contumely and scorn. These historians, recorders, and
blazoners of virtues and arms, differ wholly from that other
description of historians, who never assign any act of poli-
ticians to a good motive. These gentle historians, on the
contrary, dip their pens in nothing but the milk of human
kindness. They seek no further for merit than the preamble

422 EDMUND BURKE

of a patent, or the inscription on a tomb. With them every
man created a peer is first a hero ready made. They judge of
every man's capacity for office by the offices he has filled;
and the more offices the more ability. Every general officer
with them is a Marlborough; every statesman a Burleigh;
every judge a Murray or a Yorke. They who, alive, were
laughed at or pitied by all their acquaintance, make as good
a figure as the best of them in the pages of Guillim, Ed-
mondson, and Collins.

To these recorders, so full of good nature to the great and
prosperous, I would willingly leave the first Baron Russell,
and Earl of Bedford, and the merits of his grants. But the
aulnager, the weigher, the meter of grants, will not suffer us
to acquiesce in the judgment of the prince reigning at the
time when they were made. They are never good to those
who earn them. Well then; since the new grantees have
war made on them by the old, and that the word of the sov-
ereign is not to be taken, let us turn our eyes to history, in
which great men have always a pleasure in contemplating
the heroic origin of their house.

The first peer of the name, the first purchaser of the
grants, was a Mr. Russell, a person of an ancient gentle-
man's family raised by being a minion of Henry the Eighth.
As there generally is some resemblance of character to
create these relations, the favourite was in all likelihood
much such another as his master. The first of those im-
moderate grants was not taken from the ancient demesne
of the Crown, but from the recent confiscation of the ancient
nobility of the land. The lion having sucked the blood of
his prey, threw the offal carcass to the jackal in waiting.
Having tasted once the food of confiscation, the favourites
became fierce and ravenous. This worthy favourite's first
grant was from the lay nobility. The second, infinitely im-
proving on the enormity of the first, was from the plunder
of the church. In truth his Grace is somewhat excusable for
his dislike to a grant like mine, not only in its quantity, but
in its kind so different from his own.

Mine was from a mild and benevolent sovereign ; his from
Henry the Eighth.

Mine had not its fund in the murder of any innocent per-

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 423

son of illustrious rank, 1 or in the pillage of any body of
unoffending men. His grants were from the aggregate and
consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from
possessions voluntarily- surrendered by the lawful proprie-
tors, with the gibbet at their door.

The merit of the grantee whom he derives from was that
of being a prompt and greedy instrument of a levelling
tyrant, who oppressed all descriptions of his people, but who
fell with particular fury on everything that was great and
noble. Mine has been, in endeavouring to screen every man,
in every class, from oppression, and particularly in defend-
ing the high and eminent, who in the bad times of confiscat-
ing princes, confiscating chief governors, or confiscating
demagogues, are the most exposed to jealousy, avarice, and
envy.

The merit of the original grantee of his Grace's pensions
was in giving his hand to the work and partaking the spoil
with a prince, who plundered a part of the national church
of his time and country. Mine was in defending the whole
of the national church of my own time and my own country,
and the whole of the national churches of all countries, from
the principles and the examples which lead to ecclesiastical
pillage, thence to a contempt of all prescriptive titles, thence
to the pillage of all property, and thence to universal
desolation.

The merit of the origin of his Grace's fortune was in
being a favourite and chief adviser to a prince, who left no
liberty to their native country. My endeavour was to obtain
liberty for the municipal country in which I was born, and
for all descriptions and denominations in it. Mine was to
support with unrelaxing vigilance every right, every privi-
lege, every franchise, in this my adopted, my dearer, and
more comprehensive country ; and not only to preserve those
rights in this chief seat of empire, but in every nation, in
every land, in every climate, language, and religion, in the
vast domain that is still under the protection, and the larger
that was once under the protection, of the British Crown.

His founder's merits were, by arts in which he served his

1 See the history of the melancholy catastrophe of the Duke of Buck-
ingham. Temp. Hen. 8.

424 EDMUND BURKE

master and made his fortune, to bring poverty, wretched-
ness, and depopulation on his country. Mine were, under a
benevolent prince, in promoting the commerce, manufac-
tures, and agriculture of his kingdom; in which his Majesty
shows an eminent example, who even in his amusements is a
patriot, and in hours of leisure an improver of his native
soil.

His founder's merit was the merit of a gentleman raised
by the arts of a court, and the protection of a Wolsey, to
the eminence of a great and potent lord. His merit in that
eminence was, by instigating a tyrant to injustice, to pro-
voke a people to rebellion. My merit was, to awaken the
sober part of the country, that they might put themselves on
their guard against any one potent lord, or any greater
number of potent lords, or any combination of great leading
men of any sort, if ever they should attempt to proceed in
the same courses, but in the reverse order; that is, by insti-
gating a corrupted populace to rebellion, and, through that
rebellion, introducing a tyranny yet worse than the tyranny
which his Grace's ancestor supported, and of which he
profited in the manner we behold in the despotism of Henry
the Eighth.

The political merit of the first pensioner of his Grace's
house was that of being concerned as a counsellor of state in
advising, and in his person executing, the conditions of a
dishonourable peace with France; the surrendering the
fortress of Boulogne, then our out-guard on the continent.
By that surrender, Calais, the key of France, and the bridle
in the mouth of that power, was, not many years afterwards,
finally lost. My merit has been in resisting the power and
pride of France, under any form of its rule ; but in opposing
it with the greatest zeal and earnestness, when that rule ap-
peared in the worst form it could assume; the worst indeed
which the prime cause and principle of all evil could possi-
bly give it. It was my endeavour by every means to excite a
spirit in the House where I had the honour of a seat, for
carrying on, with early vigour and decision, the most clearly
just and necessary war, that this or any nation ever carried
on; in order to save my country from the iron yoke of its
power, and from the more dreadful contagion of its princi-

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 425

pies; to preserve, while they can be preserved, pure and
untainted, the ancient, inbred integrity, piety, good nature,
and good humour of the people of England, from the dread-
ful pestilence, which, beginning in France, threatens to lay
waste the whole moral, and in a great degree the whole
physical, world, having done both in the focus of its most
intense malignity.

The labours of his Grace's founder merited the curses, not
loud but deep, of the Commons of England, on whom he
and his master had effected a complete parliamentary reform,
by making them, in their slavery and humiliation, the true
and adequate representatives of a debased, degraded, and
undone people. My merits were, in having had an active,
though not always an ostentatious, share, in every one act,
without exception, of undisputed constitutional utility in my
time, and in having supported, on all occasions, the author-
ity, the efficiency, and the privileges of the Commons of
Great Britain. I ended my services by a recorded and fully
reasoned assertion on their own journals of their constitu-
tional rights, and a vindication of their constitutional con-
duct. I laboured in all things to merit their inward
approbation, and (along with the assistance of the largest,
the greatest, and best of my endeavours) I received their
free, unbiassed, public, and solemn thanks.

Thus stands the account of the comparative merits of the
Crown grants which compose the Duke of Bedford's fortune
as balanced against mine. In the name of common sense,
why should the Duke of Bedford think that none but of the
House of Russell are entitled to the favour of the Crown?
Why should he imagine that no king of England has been
capable of judging of merit but King Henry the Eighth?
Indeed, he will pardon me ; he is a little mistaken ; all vir-
tue did not end in the first Earl of Bedford. All discernment
did not lose its vision when his Creator closed his eyes. Let
him remit his rigour on the disproportion between merit and
reward in others, and they will make no inquiry into the
origin of his fortune. They will regard with much more
satisfaction as he will contemplate with infinitely more ad-
vantage, whatever in his pedigree has been dulcified by an
exposure to the influence of heaven in a long flow of genera-

426 EDMUND BURKE

tions, from the hard, acidulous, metallic tincture of the
spring. It is little to be doubted, that several of his fore-
fathers in that long series have degenerated into honour and
virtue. Let the Duke of Bedford (I am sure he will) reject
with scorn and horror the counsels of the lecturers, those
wicked panders to avarice and ambition, who would tempt
him, in the troubles of his country, to seek another enormous
fortune from the forfeitures of another nobility, and the
plunder of another church. Let him (and I trust that yet
he will) employ all the energy of his youth, and all the re-
sources of his wealth, to crush rebellious principles which
have no foundation in morals, and rebellious movements that
have no provocation in tyranny.

Then will be forgot the rebellions, which, by a doubtful
priority, in crime, his ancestor had provoked and extin-
guished. On such a conduct in the noble Duke, many of his
countrymen might, and with some excuse might, give way
to the enthusiasm of their gratitude, and, in the dashing style
of some of the old declaimers, cry out, that if the fates had
found no other way in which they could give a 1 Duke of
Bedford and his opulence as props to a tottering world, then
the butchery of the Duke of Buckingham might be tolerated;
it might be regarded even with complacency, whilst in the
heir of confiscation they saw the sympathizing comforter of
the martyrs, who suffered under the cruel confiscation of this
day; whilst they behold with admiration his zealous protec-
tion of the virtuous and loyal nobility of France, and his
manly support of his brethren, the yet standing nobility and
gentry of his native land. Then his Grace's merit would be
pure, and new, and sharp, as fresh from the mint of honour.
As he pleased he might reflect honour on fiis predecessors,
or throw it forward on those who were to succeed him. He
might be the propagator of the stock of honour, or the root
of it, as he thought proper.

Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succes-
sion, I should have been, according to my mediocrity, and
the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a
family. I should have left a son, who, in all the points in
which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in erudition,

1 At si non aliam venturo fata Neroni, &c.

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 427

in genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity, in
every liberal sentiment, and every liberal accomplishment,
would not have shown himself inferior to the Duke of Bed-
ford or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His
Grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his
attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine
than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency,
and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have
been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting res-
ervoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself
a salient, living spring of generous and manly action. Every
day he lived he would have re-purchased the bounty of the
Crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had re-
ceived. He was made a public creature; and had no enjoy-
ment whatever, but in the performance of some duty. At
this exigent moment, the loss of a finished man is not easily
supplied.

But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist,
and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has
ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous
weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone
over me ; and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late
hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my
honours, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the
earth ! There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly rec-
ognize the Divine justice, and in some degree submit to
it. But whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know
that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and in-
considerate men. The patience of Job is proverbial. After
some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he
submitted himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even
so, I do not find him blamed for reprehending, and with a
considerable degree of verbal asperity, those ill-natured
neighbours of his, who visited his dunghill to read moral,
political, and economical lectures on his misery. I am alone.
I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my
Lord, I greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would
give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and
honour in the world. This is the appetite but of a few. It
is a luxury, it is a privilege, it is an indulgence for those

428 EDMUND BURKE

who are at their ease. But we are all of us made to shun
disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain, and poverty,
and disease. It is an instinct; and under the direction of
reason, instinct is always in the right. I live in an inverted
order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone be-
fore me. They who should have been to me a posterity are
in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation
(which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety,
which he would have performed to me; I owe it to him to
show that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford
would have it, from an unworthy parent.

The Crown has considered me after long service: the
Crown has paid the Duke of Bedford by advance. He has
had a long credit for any service which he may perform
hereafter. He is secure, and long may he be secure, in his
advance, whether he performs any services or not. But let
him take care how he endangers the safety of that constitu-
tion which secures his own utility or his own insignificance;
or how he discourages those, who take up, even puny arms,
to defend an order of things, which, like the sun of heaven,
shines alike on the useful and the worthless. His grants
are ingrafted on the public law of Europe, covered with the
awful hoar of innumerable ages. They are guarded by the
sacred rules of prescription, found in that full treasury of
jurisprudence from which the jejuneness and penury of our
municipal law has, by degrees, been enriched and strength-
ened. This prescription I had my share (a very full share)
in bringing to its perfection. 1 The Duke of Bedford will
stand as long as prescriptive law endures: as long as the
great stable laws of property, common to us with all civilized
nations, are kept in their integrity, and without the small-
est intermixture of laws, maxims, principles, or precedents
of the grand Revolution. They are secure against all
changes but one. The whole revolutionary system, institutes,
digest, code, novels, text, gloss, comment are, not only not
the same, but they are the very reverse, and the reverse
fundamentally, of all the laws, on which civil life has hith-
erto been upheld in all the governments of the world. The
learned professors of the rights of man regard prescription,

1 Sir George Savile's Act called The Nullum Tempus Act.

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 429

not as a title to bar all claim, set up against all possession —
but they look on prescription as itself a bar against the pos-
sessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession
to be no more than a long-continued, and therefore an ag-
gravated injustice.

Such are their ideas; such their religion, and such their
law. But as to our country and our race, as long as the
well-compacted structure of our church and state, the sanc-
tuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by
reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a
temple, 1 shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion
— as long as the British monarchy, not more limited than
fenced by the orders of the state, shall, like the proud Keep
of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt
with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long
as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected
land — so long the mounds and dykes of the low, fat Bedford
level will have nothing to fear from the pickaxes of all
the levellers of France. As long as our sovereign lord the
king, and his faithful subjects, the Lords and Commons of
this realm, — the triple cord, which no man can break; the
solemn, sworn, constitutional frank-pledge of this nation;
the firm guarantees of each other's being, and each other's
rights; the joint and several securities, each in its place and
order, for every kind and every quality, of property and of
dignity; — as long as these endure, so long the Duke of Bed-
ford is safe: and we are all safe together — the high from
the blights of envy and the spoliations of rapacity ; the low
from the iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of
contempt. Amen ! and so be it : and so it will be,

Dum domus Mnea Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet ; imperiumque pater Romanus habebit. —

But if the rude inroad of Gallic tumult, with its sophis-
tical rights of man, to falsify the account, and its sword as
a make-weight to throw into the scale, shall be introduced
into our city by a misguided populace, set on by proud great
men, themselves blinded and intoxicated by a frantic ambi-
tion, we shall, all of us, perish and be overwhelmed in a

1 Templum in modum arcis. Tacitus, of the Temple of Jerusalem.

430 EDMUND BURKE

common ruin. If a great storm blow on our coast, it vrill

cast the whales on the strand as well as the periwinkle*.
His Grace will not survive the poor grantee he despises, no,
not for a twelvemonth. If the great look for safety in the
services they render to this Gallic cause, it is to be foolish,
even above the weight of privilege allowed to wealth. If his
Grace be one of these whom they endeavour to proselytize,
he ought to be aware of the character of the sect, whose doc-
trines he is invited to embrace. With them insurrection is
the most sacred of revolutionary duties to the state. In-
gratitude to benefactors is the first of revolutionary virtues.
Ingratitude is indeed their four cardinal virtues compacted
and amalgamated into one; and he will find it in everything
that has happened since the commencement of the philo-
sophic Revolution to this hour. If he pleads the merit of
having performed the duty of insurrection against the
order he lives, (God forbid he ever should,) the merit of
others will be to perform the duty of insurrection against
him. If he pleads (again God forbid he should, and I do
not suspect he will) his ingratitude to the Crown for its
creation of his family, others will plead their right and duty
to pay him in kind. They will laugh, indeed they will laugh,
at his parchment and his wax. His deeds will be drawn out
with the rest of the lumber of his evidence room, and burnt
to the tune of ga ira in the courts of Bedford (then Equality)
house.

Am I to blame, if I attempt to pay his Grace's hostile
reproaches to me with a friendly admonition to himself?
Can I be blamed, for pointing out to him in what manner he
is likely to be affected, if the sect of the cannibal philoso-
phers of France should proselytize any considerable part of
this people, and by their joint proselytizing arms, should
conquer that government, to which his Grace does not seem
to me to give all the support his own security demands?
/ Surely it is proper, that he, and that others like him, should
know the true genius of this sect; what their opinions are,
what they have done; and to whom; and what (if a prog-
nostic is to be formed from the dispositions and actions of
men) it is certain they will do hereafter. He ought to know,
that they have sworn assistance, the only engagement they

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 431

ever will keep, to all in this country, who bear a resemblance
to themselves, and who think as such, that The whole duty
of man consists in destruction. They are a misallied and
disparaged branch of the house of Nimrod. They are the
Duke of Bedford's natural hunters; and he is their natural
game. Because he is not very profoundly reflecting, he
sleeps in profound security : they, on the contrary, are always
vigilant, active, enterprising, and, though far removed from
any knowledge which makes men estimable or useful, in all
the instruments and resources of evil, their leaders are not
meanly instructed, or insufficiently furnished. In the French
Revolution everything is new; and, from want of prepara-
tion to meet so unlooked-for an evil, everything is dangerous.
Never, before this time, was a set of literary men converted
into a gang of robbers and assassins. Never before did a
den of bravoes and banditti assume the garb and tone of an
academy of philosophers.

Let me tell his Grace, that an union of such characters,
monstrous as it seems, is not made for producing despicable
enemies. But if they are formidable as foes, as friends
they are dreadful indeed. The men of property in France
confiding in a force, which seemed to be irresistible, because
it had never been tried, neglected to prepare for a conflict
with their enemies at their own weapons. They were found
in such a situation as the Mexicans were, when they were
attacked by the dogs, the cavalry, the iron, and the gun-
powder, of a handful of bearded men, whom they did not
know to exist in nature. This is a comparison that some, I
think, have made; and it is just. In France they had their
enemies within their houses. They were even in the bosoms
of many of them. But they had not sagacity to discern their
savage character. They seemed tame, and even caressing.
They had nothing but douce humanite in their mouth. They
could not bear the punishment of the mildest laws on the
greatest criminals. The slightest severity of justice made
their flesh creep. The very idea that war existed in the
world disturbed their repose. Military glory was no more,
with them, than a splendid infamy. Hardly would they
hear of self-defence, which they reduced within such bounds,
as to leave it no defence at all. All this while they medi-

432 EDMUND BURKE

tated the confiscations and massacres we have seen. Had
any one told these unfortunate noblemen and gentlemen,
how, and by whom, the grand fabric of the French mon-
archy under which they flourished would be subverted, they
would not have pitied him as a visionary, but would have
turned from him as what they call a mauvais plaisant. Yet
we have seen what has happened. The persons who have
suffered from the cannibal philosophy of France, are so like
the Duke of Bedford, that nothing but his Grace's probably
not speaking quite so good French could enable us to find
out any difference. A great many of them had as pompous
titles as he, and were of full as illustrious a race : some few
of them had fortunes as ample: several of them, without
meaning the least disparagement to the Duke of Bedford,
were as wise, and as virtuous, and as valiant, and as well
educated, and as complete in all the lineaments of men of
honour, as he is : and to all this they had added the powerful
out-guard of a military profession, which, in its nature,
renders men somewhat more cautious than those, who have
nothing to attend to but the lazy enjoyment of undisturbed
possessions. But security was their ruin. They had dashed
to pieces in the storm, and our shores are covered with the
wrecks. If they had been aware that such a thing might
happen, such a thing never could have happened.

I assure his Grace, that if I state to him the designs of
his enemies, in a manner which may appear to him ludicrous
and impossible, I tell him nothing that has not exactly hap-
pened, point by point, but twenty-four miles from our own
shore. I assure him that the Frenchified faction, more en-
couraged, than others are warned, by what has happened
in France, look at him and his landed possessions as an
object at once of curiosity and rapacity. He is made for
them in every part of their double character. As robbers, to
them he is a noble booty ; as speculatists, he is a glorious sub-
ject for their experimental philosophy. He affords matter
for an extensive analysis, in all the branches of their science,
geometrical, physical, civil, and political. These philosophers
are fanatics; independent of any interest, which if it oper-
ated alone would make them much more tractable, they are
carried with such a headlong rage towards every desperate

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 433

trial, that they would sacrifice the whole human race to the
slightest of their experiments. I am better able to enter
into the character of this description of men than the noble
Duke can be. I have lived long and variously in the world.
Without any considerable pretensions to literature in myself,
I have aspired to the love of letters. I have lived for a
great many years in habitudes with those who professed
them. I can form a tolerable estimate of what is likely to
happen from a character, chiefly dependent for fame and for-
tune on knowledge and talent, as well in its morbid and
perverted state, as in that which is sound and natural.
Naturally men so formed and finished are the first gifts of
Providence to the world. But when they have once thrown
off the fear of God, which was in all ages too often the case,
and the fear of man, which is now the case, and when in that
state they come to understand one another, and to act in
corps, a more dreadful calamity cannot arise out of hell to
scourge mankind. Nothing can be conceived more hard than
the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer
to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty
and passion of a man. It is like that of the principle of evil
himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated
evil. It is no easy operation to eradicate humanity from the
human breast. What Shakspeare calls " the compunctious
visitings of nature " will sometimes knock at their hearts, and
protest against their murderous speculations. But they have
a means of compounding with their nature. Their humanity
is not dissolved. They only give it a long prorogation.
They are ready to declare, that they do not think two thou-
sand years too long a period for the good that they pursue.
It is remarkable, that they never see any way to their pro-
jected good but by the road of some evil. Their imagination
is not fatigued with the contemplation of human suffering
through the wild waste of centuries added to centuries of
misery and desolation. Their humanity is at their horizon
— and, like the horizon, it always flies before them. The
geometricians, and the chemists, bring, the one from the dry
bones of their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their
furnaces, dispositions that make them worse than indifferent
about those feelings and habitudes, which are the support of

434 EDMUND BURKE

the moral world. Ambition is come upon them suddenly;
they are intoxicated with it, and it has rendered them fear-
less of the danger, which may from thence arise to others or
to themselves. These philosophers consider men in their
experiments, no more than they do mice in an air pump, or
in a recipient of mephitic gas. Whatever his Grace may
think of himself, they look upon him, and everything that
belongs to him, with no more regard than they do upon the
whiskers of that little long-tailed animal that has been long
the game of the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed,
velvet-pawed, green-eyed philosophers, whether going upon
two legs, or upon four.

His Grace's landed possessions are irresistibly inviting to
an agrarian experiment. They are a downright insult upon
the rights of man. They are more extensive than the terri-
tory of many of the Grecian republics ; and they are without
comparison more fertile than most of them. There are now
republics in Italy, in Germany, and in Switzerland, which do
not possess anything like so fair and ample a domain. There
is scope for seven philosophers to proceed in their analyt-
ical experiments, upon Harrington's seven different forms of
republics, in the acres of this one duke. Hitherto they have
been wholly unproductive to speculation; fitted for nothing
but to fatten bullocks, and to produce grain for beer, still
more to stupify the dull English understanding. Abbe
Sieves has whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutions
ready made, ticketed, sorted, and numbered; suited to every
person and every fancy ; some with the top of the pattern at
the bottom, and some with the bottom at the top; some
plain, some flowered ; some distinguished for their simplicity,
others for their complexity; some of blood colour; some of
bond de Paris; some with directories, others without a direc-
tion; some with councils of elders, and councils of young-
sters; some without any council at all. Some where the
electors choose the representatives; others, where the repre-
sentatives choose the electors. Some in long coats, and
some in short cloaks; some with pantaloons; some without
breeches. Some with five-shilling qualifications ; some totally
unqualified. So that no constitution-fancier may go un-
suited from his shop, provided he loves a pattern of pillage,

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 435

oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation, exile, revo-
lutionary judgment, and legalized premeditated murder, in
any shapes into which they can be put. What a pity it is,
that the progress of experimental philosophy should be
checked by his Grace's monopoly ! Such are their senti-
ments, I assure him ; such is their language, when they dare
to speak; and such are their proceedings, when they have
the means to act.

Their geographers and geometricians have been some time
out of practice. It is some time since they have divided
their own country into squares. That figure has lost the
charms of its novelty. They want new lands for new trials.
It is not only the geometricians of the republic that find him
a good subject, the chemists have bespoken him after the
geometricians have done with him. As the first set have an
eye on his Grace's lands, the chemists are not less taken with
his buildings. They consider mortar as a very anti-revolu-
tionary invention in its present state; but properly employed,
an admirable material for overturning all establishments.
They have found that the gunpowder of ruins is far the fittest
for making other ruins, and so ad infinitum. They have cal-
culated what quantity of matter convertible into nitre is to
be found in Bedford House, in Woburn Abbey, and in what
his Grace and his trustees have still suffered to stand of that
foolish royalist Inigo Jones, in Covent Garden. Churches,
play-houses, coffee-houses, all alike are destined to be mingled,
and equalized, and blended into one common rubbish; and,
well sifted and lixiviated, to crystallize into true, demo-
cratic, explosive, insurrectionary nitre. Their academy del
Cimento (per antiphrasin) with Morveau and Hassenfrats
at its head, have computed that the brave sans culottes
may make war on all the aristocracy of Europe for a
twelve-month, out of the rubbish of the Duke of Bedford's
buildings. 1

1 There is nothing, on which the leaders of the republic, one and in-
divisible, value themselves, more than on the chemical operations, by
which, through science, they convert the pride of aristocracy to an instru-
ment of its own destruction — on the operations by which they reduce the
magnificent, ancient country seats of the nobility, decorated with the
feudal titles of Duke, Marquis, or Earl, into magazines of what they call
revolutionary gunpowder. They tell us, that hitherto things " had not yet
been properly and in a revolutionary manner explored." — " The strong
chateaus, those feudal fortresses that were ordered to be demolished, at-

436 EDMUND BURKE

While the Morveaux and Priestleys are proceeding with
these experiments upon the Duke of Bedford's houses, the
Sieyes, and the rest of the analytical legislators, and con-
stitution-vendors, are quite as busy in their trade of decom-
posing organization, in forming his Grace's vassals into
primary assemblies, national guards, first, second, and third
requisitioners, committees of research, conductors of the
travelling guillotine, judges of revolutionary tribunals, legis-
lative hangmen, supervisors of domiciliary visitation, exactors
of forced loans, and assessors of the maximum.

The din of all this smithery may some time or other pos-
sibly wake this noble Duke, and push him to an endeavour to
save some little matter from their experimental philosophy.
If he pleads his grants from the Crown, he is ruined at the
outset. If he pleads he has received them from the pillage
of superstitious corporations, this indeed will stagger them a
little, because they are enemies to all corporations, and to
all religion. However, they will soon recover themselves,
and will tell his Grace, or his learned council, that all such
property belongs to the nation; and that it would be more
wise for him if he wishes to live the natural term of a citi-
zen, (that is, according to Condorcet's calculation, six months
on an average,) not to pass for an usurper upon the national
property. This is what the Serjeants at law of the rights of
man will say to the puny apprentices of the common law of
England.

Is the genius of philosophy not yet known? You may
as well think the garden of the Tuileries was well protected
with the cords of ribbon insultingly stretched by the National
Assembly to keep the sovereign canaille from intruding on
the retirement of the poor king of the French, as that such
flimsy cobwebs will stand between the savages of the Revo-
lution and their natural prey. Deep philosophers are no

tracted next the attention of your committee. Nature there had secretly
regained her rights, and had produced saltpetre for the purpose, as it
should seem, of facilitating the execution of your decree by preparing the
means of destruction. From these ruins, which still frown on the liberties
of the republic, we have extracted the means of producing good; and thosfl
piles, which have hitherto glutted the pride of despots, and covered the
plots of La Vendee, will soon furnish wherewithal to tame the traitors, and
to overwhelm the disaffected." — "The rebellious cities, also, have afforded
a large quantity of saltpetre, Commune Affranchie, (that is, the noble city
of Lyons reduced in many parts to a heap of ruins,) and Toulon, will pay
a second tribute to our artillery." Report, ist February, 1794.

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 437

triflers; brave sans-culottes are no formalists. They will
no more regard a Marquis of Tavistock than an Abbot of
Tavistock ; the Lord of Woburn will not be more respectable
in their eyes than the Prior of Woburn; they will make no
difference between the superior of a Covent Garden of nuns,
and of a Covent Garden of another description. They will
not care a rush whether his coat is long or short; whether
the colour b* purple or blue and buff. They will not trouble
their heac^, with what part of his head his hair is cut from ;
and they will look with equal respect on a tonsure and a
crop. Their only question will be that of their Legendre, or
some other of their legislative butchers, how he cuts up?
how he tallows in the) cawl, or on the kidneys?

Is it not a singular phenomenon, that whilst the sans-
culotte carcass-butchers, and the philosophers of the sham-
bles, are pricking their dotted lines upon his hide, and, like
the print of the poor ox that we see in the shop-windows at
Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking no harm in the
world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and briskets,
into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and stewing,
that all the while they are measuring him, his Grace is
measuring me; is invidiously comparing the bounty of the
Crown with the deserts of the defender of his order, and in
the same moment fawning on those who have the knife half
out of the sheath — poor innocent !

" Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."

No man lives too long, who lives to do with spirit, and
suffer with resignation, what Providence pleases to com-
mand, or inflict; but indeed they are sharp incommodities
which beset old age. It was but the other day, that, on put-
ting in order some things which had been brought here on
my taking leave of London for ever, I looked over a number
of fine portraits, most of them of persons now dead, but
whose society, in my better days, made this a proud and
happy place. Amongst these was the picture of Lord Keppel.
It was painted by an artist worthy of the subject, the ex-
cellent friend of that excellent man from their earliest
youth, and a common friend of us both, with whom we lived

438 EDMUND BURKE

for many years without a moment of coldness, of peevish-
ness, of jealousy, or of jar, to the day of our final separation.

I ever looked on Lord Keppel as one of the greatest and
best men of his age; and I loved and cultivated him ac-
cordingly. He was much in my heart, and I believe I was in
his to the very last beat. It was after his trial at Portsmouth
that he gave me this picture. With what zeal and anxious
affection I attended him through that his agony of glory,
what part my son took in the early flush and enthusiasm of
his virtue, and the pious passion with which he attached
himself to all my connexions, with what prodigality we both
squandered ourselves in courting almost every sort of enmity
for his sake, I believe he felt, just as I should have felt such
friendship on such an occasion. I partook indeed of this
honour, with several of the first, and best, and ablest in the
kingdom, but I was behindhand with none of them; and I am
sure, that if to the eternal disgrace of this nation, and to the
total annihilation of every trace of honour and virtue in it,
things had taken a different turn from what they did, I
should have attended him to the quarter-deck with no less
good will and more pride, though with far other feelings,
than I partook of the general flow of national joy that at-
tended the justice that was done to his virtue.

Pardon, my Lord, the feeble garrulity of age, which loves
to diffuse itself in discourse of the departed great. At my
years we live in retrospect alone; and, wholly unfitted for
the society of vigorous life, we enjoy the best balm to all
wounds, the consolation of friendship, in those only whom
we have lost for ever. Feeling the loss of Lord Keppel at
?11 \fcimes, at no time did I feel it so much as on the first day
when I was attacked in the House of Lords.

Had he lived, that reverend form would have risen in its
place, and, with a mild, parental reprehension to his nephew
the Duke of Bedford, he would have told him that the
favour of that gracious Prince, who had honoured his vir-
tues with the government of the navy of Great Britain, and
with a seat in the hereditary great council of his kingdom,
was not undeservedly shown to the friend of the best por-
tion of his life, and his faithful companion and counsellor
under his rudest trials. He would have told him, that to

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 439

whomever else these reproaches might be becoming, they
were not decorous in his near kindred. He would have told
him, that when men in that rank lose decorum they lose
everything.

On that day I had a loss in Lord Keppel ; but the public loss
of him in this awful crisis — ! I speak from much knowl-
edge of the person, he never would have listened to any
compromise with the rabble rout of this sans-culotterie of
France. His goodness of heart, his reason, his taste, his
public duty, his principles, his prejudices, would have re-
pelled him for ever from all connexion with that horrid
medley of madness, vice, impiety, and crime.

Lord Keppel had two countries; one of descent, and one
of birth. Their interest and their glory are the same; and
his mind was capacious of both. His family was noble, and
it was Dutch: that is, he was of the oldest and purest no-
bility that Europe can boast, among a people renowned
above all others for love of their native land. Though it
was never shown in insult to any human being, Lord Keppel
was something high. It was a wild stock of pride, on which
the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the milder virtues.
He valued ancient nobility; and he was not disinclined to
augment it with new honours. He valued the old nobility
and the new, not as an excuse for inglorious sloth, but as an
incitement to virtuous activity. He considered it as a sort
of cure for selfishness and a narrow mind ; conceiving that a
man born in an elevated place in himself was nothing, but
everything in what went before and what was to come after
him. Without much speculation, but by the sure instinct of
ingenuous feelings, and by the dictates of plain unsophisti-
cated, natural understanding, he felt, that no great common-
wealth could by any possibility long subsist, without a body
of some kind or other of nobility, decorated with honour,
and fortified by privilege. This nobility forms the chain
that connects the ages of a nation, which otherwise (with
Mr. Paine) would soon be taught that no one generation can
bind another. He felt that no political fabric could be well
made without some such order of things as might, through a
series of time, afford a rational hope of securing unity, co-
herence, consistency, and stability to the state. He felt that

440 EDMUND BURKE

nothing else can protect it against the levity of courts, and
the greater levity .of the multitude. That to talk of hered-
itary monarchy, without anything else of hereditary rever-
ence in the commonwealth, was a low-minded absurdity, fit
only for those detestable " fools aspiring to be knaves," who
began to forge in 1789 the false money of the French con-
stitution — That it is one fatal objection to all new fancied
and new fabricated republics, (among a people, who, once
possessing such an advantage, have wickedly and insolently
rejected it,) that the prejudice of an old nobility is a thing
that cannot be made. It may be improved, it may be cor-
rected, it may be replenished : men may be taken from it or
aggregated to it, but the thing itself is matter of inveterate
opinion, and therefore cannot be matter of mere positive in-
stitution. He felt that this nobility in fact does not exist
in wrong of other orders of the state, but by them, and for
them.

I knew the man I speak of: and, if we can divine the
future, out of what we collect from the past, no person liv-
ing would look with more scorn and horror on the impious
parricide committed on all their ancestry, and on the des-
perate attainder passed on all their posterity, by the Orleans,
and the Rochefoucaulds, and the Fayettes, and the Vicomtes
de Noailles, and the false Perigords, and the long et ccetera
of the perfidious sans-culottes of the court, who like demo-
niacs, possessed with a spirit of fallen pride, and inverted
ambition, abdicated their dignities, disowned their families,
betrayed the most sacred of all trusts, and, by breaking to
pieces a great link of society and all the cramps and holdings
of the state, brought eternal confusion and desolation on
their country. For the fate of the miscreant parricides
themselves he would have had no pity. Compassion for the
myriads of men, of whom the world was not worthy, who
by their means have perished in prisons, or on scaffolds, or
are pining in beggary and exile, would leave no room in
his, or in any well-informed mind, for any such sensation.
We are not made at once to pity the oppressor and the
oppressed.

Looking to his Batavian descent, how could he bear to be-
hold his kindred, the descendants of the brave nobility of

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 441

Holland, whose blood, prodigally poured out, had, more than
all the canals, meres, and inundations of their country, pro-
tected their independence, to behold them bowed in the
basest servitude to the basest and vilest of the human race;
in servitude to those who in no respect were superior in
dignity, or could aspire to a better place than that of hang-
man to the tyrants, to whose sceptred pride they had op-
posed an elevation of soul, that surmounted, and overpow-
ered, the loftiness of Castile, the haughtiness of Austria, and
the overbearing arrogance of France?

Could he with patience bear, that the children of that
nobility, who would have deluged their country and given it
to the sea, rather than submit to Louis XIV., who was then
in his meridian glory, when his arms were conducted by the
Turennes, by the Luxembourgs, by the Boufflers; when his
councils were directed by the Colberts, and the Louvois;
when his tribunals were filled by the Lamoignons and the
Daguessaus — that these should be given up to the cruel
sport of the Pichegrus, the Jourdans, the Santerres, under
the Rolands, the Brissots, and Gorfas, and Robespierres, the
Reubels, the Carnots, and Talliens, and Dantons, and the
whole tribe of regicides, robbers, and revolutionary judges,
that, from the rotten carcass of their own murdered coun-
try, have poured out innumerable swarms of the lowest, and
at once the most destructive, of the classes of animated
nature, which, like columns of locusts, have laid waste the
fairest part of the world?

Would Keppel have borne to see the ruin of the virtuous
patricians, that happy union of the noble and the burgher,
who, with signal prudence and integrity, had long governed
the cities of the confederate republic, the cherishing fathers
of their country, who, denying commerce to themselves,
made it flourish in a manner unexampled under their pro-
tection ? Could Keppel have borne that a vile faction should
totally destroy this harmonious construction, in favour of a
robbing democracy, founded on the spurious rights of man?

He was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well versed
in the interests of Europe, and he could not have heard with
patience, that the country of Grotius, the cradle of the law
of nations, and one of the richest repositories of all law,

442 EDMUND BURKE

should be taught a new code by the ignorant flippancy of
Thomas Paine, the presumptuous foppery of La Fayette,
with his stolen rights of man in his hand, the wild, profligate
intrigue, and turbulency, of Marat, and the impious sophis-
try of Condorcet, in his insolent addresses to the Batavian
republic.

Could Keppel, who idolized the house of Nassau, who was
himself given to England along with the blessings of the
British and Dutch revolutions; with revolutions of stability;
with revolutions which consolidated and married the liber-
ties and the interests of the two nations for ever, could he
see the fountain of British liberty itself in servitude to
France? Could he see with patience a Prince of Orange
expelled as a sort of diminutive despot, with every kind of
contumely, from the country, which that family of deliv-
erers had so often rescued from slavery, and obliged to live
in exile in another country, which owes its liberty to his
house?

Would Keppel have heard with patience, that the conduct
to be held on such occasions was to become short by the
knees to the faction of the homicides, to entreat them
quietly to retire? or, if the fortune of war should drive them
from their first wicked and unprovoked invasion, that no se-
curity should be taken, no arrangement made, no barrier
formed, no alliance entered into for the security of that,
which under a foreign name is the most precious part of
England? What would he have said, if it was even pro-
posed that the Austrian Netherlands (which ought to be a
barrier to Holland, and the tie of an alliance, to protect her
against any species of rule that might be erected, or even be
restored in France) should be formed into a republic under
her influence, and dependent upon her power?

But above all, what would he have said, if he had heard it
made a matter of accusation against me, by his nephew the
Duke of Bedford, that I was the author of the war? Had I
a mind to keep that high distinction to myself, as from pride
I might, but from justice I dare not, he would have snatched
his share of it from my hand, and held it with the grasp of a
dying convulsion to his end.

It would be a most arrogant presumption in me to assume

A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 443

to myself the glory of what belongs to his Majesty, and to
his ministers, and to his parliament, and to the far greater
majority of his faithful people: but had I stood alone to
counsel, and that all were determined to be guided by my
advice, and to follow it implicitly — then I should have been
the sole author of a war. But it should have been a war on
my ideas and my principles. However, let his Grace think
as he may of my demerits with regard to the war with regi-
cide, he will find my guilt confined to that alone. He never
shall, with the smallest colour of reason, accuse me of being
the author of a peace with regicide. But that is high mat-
ter; and ought not to be mixed with anything of so little
moment, as what may belong to me, or even to the Duke
of Bedford.

I have the honour to be, &c.

Edmund Burke.

Planned and Designed
at the Collier Press

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DATE DUE

DEC 2 f ^

SEP 4 1981

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DEMCO 38-29

Vol 24: The Classics - Part 2