them plunging into all kinds of perils and of crimes, and dying content because they expire on a heap of gold! "And then do you not smile when they preach liberty, felicity for the whole world, believing themselves invested with the divine mission of propagating civilization all over the earth? But let us leave it to Divine Providence to make retribution for the good and the evil, which every one has wrought in this life."

THOS. HUGHES, S.J.

IN

SOME REFLECTIONS ON EDMUND BURKE'S
CENTENARY.

N striking a balance against Ireland recently, some critic discovered that that afflicted island never produced a Shakespeare. It is as true of England to say that she never produced a Burke. And in looking around for some equal for Burke, after his death, a critic of some note places him, as regards imaginative powers, on a level with Shakespeare. Dr. Johnson, who was his uncompromising foe in politics, entertained as high an opinion of his oratory. One of his acquaintances asked him if Burke did not remind him of Tullius Cicero. "No, sir," was the great man's reply, "but Cicero reminds me of Burke."

This year is the centenary of Edmund Burke's demise, and the event is commemorated in Ireland in a public fashion. It is time to reverse the judgment of Goldsmith's epigram. Though Edmund Burke belongs to Ireland by nativity and genius, he belongs to mankind by such ties as sympathy with aspirations of enlightened liberty and profound political wisdom always furnish. His arraignment of adventurer rule in India is a legacy to freedom for all time and all peoples. For Americans his plea for Conciliation constitutes a claim which nothing can ever cancel. And for Catholicism his memory must always be held in reverence because of his disinterested and priceless services.

Brute courage is the property of the million; how very few know what extraordinary strength of soul is demanded of the man who feels impelled by duty to stand up alone in an age of bitter prejudice and speak in behalf of justice and moderation to the

1 Biblioteca Nacional y Extranjera, "Historia de la Antigua ó Baja California, del Padre F. J. Clavijero," etc. Mejico: 1852. Editor's Preface.

powerless and those whom oppression has stung into resistance! It is most difficult for us, living in a more tolerant day, to form even an approximate notion of the enmities which Burke aroused, when he dared to speak in defence of the American colonists' action, or rather in apology for their presumption, and at another time in favor of a relaxation of the Draconic legislation which made a man's religion the test of his freedom or his legal outlawry. In Burke's day, to be a Catholic in England was synonymous with being a Jacobite, and being a Jacobite with something like a son of Belial. An Irish Papist especially was an object of aversion as much as a Fiji cannibal. It was only a couple of generations, indeed, from the time when it was a matter of serious belief in England that Irishmen belonged to an inferior natural order of which the caudal appendage of the ape was a distinguishing sign.

Not as yet, it should be remembered, had any lesson of adversity taught Great Britain that there was any distinction between colonists and slaves. Hitherto her rule over her colonies had been unquestioned despotism. Not for a moment was it supposed that the provisions of Magna Charta or the Act of Settlement had any force or application to the condition of the colonies, or that those offshoots existed for anything but the glory and benefit of the mother country. As for the feeling toward Papists in general, it may be to some extent estimated by such fanatical outbreaks as the No-Popery riots linked with the name of Lord George Gordon. Burke himself was in some danger from the violence of the fanatical rioters, and his house was placed under military protection. And it is useful to remember that the constituency which he for some time represented, the city of Bristol, has long borne an evil reputation as a hotbed of religious bigotry as well as narrow commercial jealousy. It is not quite half a century since it was showing an example to the Know-nothings of the United States by burning down convents and sacking churches, as well as shooting men and women for the crime of being Papists. It was little wonder that such a constituency failed to relish the action of its representative when he ventured to advocate a relaxation of the commercial fetters which English jealousy had coiled around the limbs of Irish trade. Bristol and Liverpool were in those days the two ports which reflected the commercial spirit of the England of the day. The crushing out of commercial rivalry by fair means or foul, and the development of the slave trade, were the two principles by which they lived and moved and had their being. Slavery and smuggling were the methods by which their merchants in time became millionaires.

By writers of the present day Edmund Burke is classified as a

Conservative. The term will not fit. He was a foe to innovation in constitutional methods, certainly, but he was no less a foe to what was unconstitutional in governmental methods and departmental procedure. This is not the spirit of latter-day Conservatism. To perpetuate every abuse and shield every official guilty of despotism or corruption is conceived to be the duty of a Conservative statesman or loyal party-man of the present generation. This is the spirit in which the affairs of Ireland and India have been administered by every Conservative government within living memory.

The truth about Burke's politics seems to be that he experienced during his public life that unconscious metamorphosis in opinion which frequently results from contact with the realities instead of the theories of the struggle of social development. His principles might have been always the same; the mistakes he made during the vicissitudes of politics seem to have arisen in the endeavor to make them apply to different peoples. The temperaments of races, the prejudices, the habits of thought, the traditions of government, and a host of other considerations have to be taken into account by the philosopher who would strive to lay down an ethical code for a country foreign to his own.

Inconsistency in the advocacy of political reform has been the most serious charge advanced against this great philosopher. That large-minded policy which he advised for the treatment of the revolting American colonies never once entered into his views when his mental vision was turned toward insurgent France. He had no tears of compassion for the miseries of the French people; his monarchical sympathies were so ebullient that they completely blurred his vision, on all other subjects usually so keen and clear. This is one of the almost unaccountable aberrations of a divinelygifted intellect. In the American quarrel all his aspirations lay on the side of the struggling democracy; in the long and splendid crusade against adventurer rule in India it was the sufferings of the people which seemed to him as the woes of Hecuba. Hence his insensibility and obtuseness to the wretchedness of a peasantry only a few hours' sail from his own shore, and whose condition was perfectly familiar to many of his most intimate friends, if not to himself, cannot but fill us with amazement. But what amazes us still more is the gift of prescience which seemed to have been his about the final outcome of the downward trend of France. His direful forebodings were fulfilled almost to the letter. If he had the prophet's foresight, it is astonishing that his fulminations were always addressed to the side which was powerless for anything save the awakening of that fatal sympathy whose force at length created a brood of sanguinary monsters, and, with the fury

of a liberated flood, swept throne and altar and immemorial institutions away in one awful wrack.

But it is not to estimate the failings, or the apparent failings, of any great man that people celebrate his centenary. We have to bear in mind the limitations of human nature, and, when dealing especially with characters like that of Burke, we must remember that if principle be their guiding star, as it undoubtedly was in his case, it might be pleaded that they did not really err, since error lies in intent rather than in the consequences of mistake. We see in his attitude toward the electors of Bristol that Burke preferred the dictates of his own judgment and conscience to the selfish wishes of any constituency, and so set up a model for parliamentary conduct which unhappily but too few have been found independent enough to follow. We must give him credit not only for integrity, but for enlightenment, in the profound and generous policy which he had the courage to advocate toward the American colonies as well as toward the Irish Roman Catholics. The bitter hostility which such sentiments evoked cannot at this distance of time be easily estimated. It is when we consider what course he adopted in regard to these, the most vital questions of his time, that we find the unfairness of the general estimate of his character. Expediency, the critics say, was his guiding star; whatever had been found practicable and useful in the past ought not to be departed from in the present. On the contrary, Goldsmith's verdict, that he was "too fond of the right to pursue the expedient" is found to be far nearer to the truth.

One of the main arguments against Burke's consistency is the different attitude he assumed toward Irish Catholics and English Dissenters. At an early period of his parliamentary career he had pleaded for a relaxation of the statutes which pressed hard on this large body; later on he stubbornly and strenuously opposed any such concession. The reason for this change of mind is to be found in the growth of radical ideas among the Dissenters themselves. In 1772, when they had his support, they sought from parliament relief merely as a passive and suffering element; in 1787, when he antagonized their demand for relief from the grievance of the Test Act, they were an aggressive organization, with a plan of action against the regular Church Establishment. Burke was a reverent supporter of that estate of the realm, for such the Establishment, secured as it was by the terms of the Act of Settlement, was in the most unqualified sense. Anything that savored of a design against the Constitution or the established order of things in England, which to his mind was the true ideal of orderly government, he looked upon with horror. It was the avowed intention of the Dissenters to play Guy Fawkes (according to the

panic-myth) with the English Church fabric. One of their ablest pamphleteers, Dr. Priestley, declared in a public print that they were "wisely placing, as it were, grain by grain, a train of gunpowder, to which the match would one day be laid to blow up the fabric of error, which could never again be raised upon the same foundation." John Morley, who dwells with astonishment upon this apparent case of political tergiversation in Burke's life, and as a thing inexplicable, seems to have overlooked these important facts. He makes no mention of Priestley's pamphlet, and says nothing of the aggressive designs of the Dissenters. On the other hand, he magnifies Burke's "aberration,” as he terms it, by recalling how it was at Burke's own suggestion that Fox brought forward the bill for the relief of the Dissenters as a means of strengthening his (Fox's) position. The appearance of Priestley's pamphlet (and Priestley was a personal friend of Burke's, and one on whose statements he relied) would certainly go far to explain this sudden volteface.

It is much more astonishing that Burke, with all the knowledge he possessed of the true position of affairs, did not insist that no relief should be granted the Dissenters in which the Irish Catholics did not share. Herein he would have found a true vantage-ground and placed the odium of refusing relief upon the shoulders of both political parties. His position as secretary to the Irish Chief Secretary under Lord Halifax's Viceroyalty, the personage known in history as "single-speech Hamilton," gave him an official intimacy with the social and political condition of the country which could not be otherwise obtained. In addition to the transaction of governmental business by correspondence with those connected with its administration, he had the advantage of personal observation while travelling through many districts of the island, and the interchange of views and experiences with men of position in many places. For the two years which he remained in this office he did much with voice and pen to dispel the cloud of rancor which hung over the English mind with regard to Ireland, as well as to thwart the truculent designs of those whose only panacea for the intolerable grievances of the Catholic population was the policy of "more stick." Any attempt to establish a parallel between the plight of the Irish Catholics in the eighteenth century and the position of the English Nonconformists would, except in point of common obnoxiousness to the English majority, be something analogous to a comparison between Dives and Lazarus.

It was Dr. Johnson, an English Tory of the Tories, who remarked that the cruelty meted out to the Irish population by his countrymen, once they got the upper hand in Ireland, was worse than the ten great persecutions of the Roman Empire. He was a