ABSTRACT
… I wished to give every advantage to the Opinions [of Rousseau and the French revolutionaries], which I deemed it of importance to confute. It is bad policy to represent a political System as having no charm but for Robbers and Assassins, and no natural origin but in the brains of Fools or Madmen, when Experience has proved, that the great danger of the System consists in the peculiar fascination, it is calculated to exert on noble and imaginative Spirits; on all those, who in the amiable intoxication of youthful Benevolence, are apt to mistake their own best Virtues and choicest Powers for the average qualities and Attributes of the human Character. The very Minds, which a good man would most wish to preserve or disentangle from the Snare, are by these angry misrepresentations rather lured into it. Is it wonderful, that a Man should reject the arguments unheard, when his own Heart proves the falsehood of the Assumptions by which they are prefaced? or that he should retaliate on the Aggressors their own evil Thoughts? I am well aware, that the provocation was great, the temptation almost inevitable; yet still I cannot repel the conviction from my mind, that in part to this Error and in part to a certain inconsistency in his fundamental Principles, we are to attribute the small number of Converts made by Burke during his life time. Let me not be misunderstood. I do not mean, that this great Man supported different Principles at different ffiras of his political Life. On the contrary, no Man was ever more like himself! From his first published Speech on the American Colonies to his last posthumous Tracts, we see the same Man, the same Doctrines, the same uniform Wisdom of practical Councils, the same Reasoning 4and the same Prejudices against all abstract grounds, against all deduction of Practice from Theory. The inconsistency to which I allude, is of a different kind: it is the want of congruity in the Principles appealed to in different parts of the same Work, it is an apparent versatility of the Principle with the Occasion. If his Opponents are Theorists, then every thing is to be founded on Prudence, on mere calculations of Expediency: and every Man is represented as acting according to the state of his own immediate self interest. Are his Opponents Calculators? Then Calculation itself is represented as a sort of crime. God has given us Feelings, and we are to obey them! and the most absurd Prejudices become venerable, to which these Feelings have given Consecration. I have not forgotten, that Burke himself defended these half contradictions, on the pretext of balancing the too much on the one side by a too much on the other. But never can I believe, but that the straight line must needs be the nearest; and that where there is the most, and the most unalloyed Truth, there will be the greatest and most permanent power of persuasion. But the fact was, that Burke in his most public Character found himself, as it were, in a Noah’s Ark, with a very few Men and a great many Beasts! he felt how much his immediate Power was lessened by the very circumstance of his measureless Superiority to those about him: he acted, therefore, under a perpetual System of Compromise—a Compromise of Greatness with Meanness; a Compromise of Comprehension with Narrowness; a Compromise of the Philosopher (who armed with the twofold knowledge of History and the Laws of Spirit, as with a Telescope, looked far around and into the far Distance) with the mere Men of Business, or with yet coarser Intellects, who handled a Truth, which they were required to receive, as they would handle an Ox, which they were desired to purchase. But why need I repeat what has been already said in so happy a manner by Goldsmith, of this great Man: “Who, born for the universe narrow’d his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind. Tho’ fraught with all learning, yet straining his throat, To persuade Tommy Townshend to give him a vote; Who too deep for his hearers, still went on refining, And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining.” 1
