Burke, Edmund

Edmund (1729-1797), a British statesman. He was a native of Ireland, and was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He was prepared for the study of the law, but took up politics. At the age of thirty-five he entered Parliament, where he formed one of a group of orators. Chatham, Fox, Erskine, Pitt, Sheridan, Grattan, and Burke--they have not been equaled before or since, and, at the present distance, it is but fair to say that Burke was the greatest of them all.

He deprecated the course of Parliament in offending and alienating the American colonies. He was possessed of profound views of justice and fairness to all men. He told the members of Parliament that fair treatment,--such as in the twentieth century is accorded Canada and Australia,--would be satisfactory to the Americans and that they were entitled to simple justice. If Burke's views had prevailed with Parliament, the American Revolution would have been deferred; quite possibly it might not have occurred; we might have extinguished slavery without a civil war and be yet a member of the British Empire. Burke did not deny the right of Parliament to tax the colonies. He opposed various acts of Parliament as inexpedient. Burke's attitude may be seen from passages from his Conciliation:

I do not mean to commend either the spirit in this excess or the moral causes which produce it. Perhaps a more smooth and accommodating spirit of freedom in them would be more acceptable to us. Perhaps ideas of liberty might be desired more reconcilable with an arbitrary and boundless authority. Perhaps we might wish the colonists to be persuaded that their liberty is more secure when held in trust for them by us, as their guardians during a perpetual minority, than with any part of it in their own hands. The question is not whether their spirit deserves praise or blame, but what, in the name of God, shall we do with it?. . . I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people. . . . The colonies complain that they have not the characteristic mark and seal of British freedom. They complain that they are taxed in a Parliament in which they are not represented. If you mean to satisfy them at all, you must satisfy them with regard to this complaint. If you mean to please any people, you must give them the boon which they ask,--not what you may think better for them, but of a kind totally different. Such an act may be a wise regulation, but it is no concession; whereas our present theme is the mode of giving satisfaction. . . . My idea, therefore, without considering whether we yield as matter of right of grant as matter of favor, is to admit the people of our colonies into an interest in the Constitution.

Burke saw farther into the American further than the majority of his fellow members. He opposed the war with the American colonies as unwise, unnecessary, and suicidal. The American reader is likely to think that the mind of Edmund Burke was engrossed with American affairs. His interest in the colonies was indeed intense, but it was an interest in the effect that a false colonial policy might have on England herself. In his treatment of American topics Burke was farseeing and democratic beyond his day. He understood Americans because they were Englishmen. He understood the colonists because he conceived them to be like himself. He understood the people of the colonies because he understood the people of Chester, of Wales, of Scotland, and of Ireland.

In his treatment of French problems, however, Burke failed to understand that democracy is democracy in France as well as in England. Burke had opportunity to study the French Revolution close at hand. London was full of refugees. He had every chance to understand what was going on across the English Channel, and yet in Reflections on the French Revolution, written in 1790, he failed to interpret the spirit of democracy that moved the people of France. He denounced the wrongdoings of Hastings, the autocratic ruler of India, but he failed to get hold of the French situation. He attacked the French Revolution, he assailed its leaders, and he expressed a profound conviction that a flood of evils could not fail to flow from the adoption of the democratic and leveling ideas of the French popular leaders. Burke's early attitude was helpful to the cause of the common people; his later influence was exerted and was felt, too, in the opposite direction. The following sketch is taken from J. R. Green:

Burke had come to London in 1750 as a poor and unknown Irish adventurer. The learning which at once won him the friendship of Johnson, and the imaginative power which enabled him to give his learning a living shape, promised him a philosophical and literary career: but instinct drew Burke to politics; he became secretary to Lord Rockingham, and in 1765 entered Parliament under his patronage. His speeches on the Stamp Acts at once lifted him into fame. The heavy Quaker-like figure, the scratch wig, the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll of paper which loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a great orator and less of the characteristics of his oratory--its passion-ate ardour, its poetic fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources; the dazzling succession in which irony, pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant word-pictures, the coolest argument followed each other. It was an eloquence indeed of a wholly new order in English experience.

Burke's speech On Conciliation with America, and on American Taxation are read in American schools as specimens of British eloquence and for their historical value. Other works of importance are an Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful, and the French Revolution. His greatest oratorical effort was the Impeachment of Warren Hastings. See Hastings