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Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790) When I see the spirit of liberty
in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I
can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose:
but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a
little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something
deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface. I must be
tolerably sure, before venture publicly to congratulate men on a blessing,
that they have really received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and
the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.
I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France,
until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public
force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with the
solidity for property; with peace in order; with civil and social manners.
All these (in their way) are good things too; and, without them, liberty is
not a benefit while it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect
of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to
see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may
soon be turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of
separate insulated private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is
power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the
use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new
power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions, they
have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the
most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers. . . . ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. The age of chivalry is gone. --
That of sophisters, economists, and calculators,
has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never
more, shall we behold a generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud
submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which
kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, achieved defensive nations, the
nurse of the manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that
sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a
wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled
whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by
losing all its grossness. . . . But now all is to be changed. All
the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which
harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland the simulation,
incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private
society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and
reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the
super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which
the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the
defects of her naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own
estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. On this scheme of things, a king
is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal
not of the highest order. . . . On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy,
which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is
as void of solid wisdom, as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws
are to be supported only by their terrors, and by the concern, which each
individual may find in them, from his own private speculations, or even spare
to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at
the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. . . . When the old
feudal and chivalrous spirit of Fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear,
freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be
extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by
preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and
bloody maxims, which form the political code of all power, not standing on
its own honor, and the honor of those who are to obey it. Kings will be
tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle. . . . 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; and only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free
government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty
and restraints in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep
reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind. This identifying to
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, and the construction of the state, will be of no service. They
will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, 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 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 traders; 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. The improvements of the National
Assembly are superficial, their errors are fundamental. [Source: Edmund Burke, Reflections
on the Revolution in France, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 2 (London: Henry G.
Bohn, 1864), pp. 515-516. There is also a hypertext version of Burke's Reflections.] |
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